President Bush, in his recent State of the Union address, identified “radical Islam” as Oceania’s – did I say Oceania? I meant America’s – latest mortal enemy. Given that prior to its annual marketing release a SOTU address has undergone more face lifts than Phyllis Diller, one would assume such a term was not chosen lightly.

The war on “radical Islam” is the latest fork in the meandering etymological road down which this country has been misled since September 11, 2001. What started as the war against terror, proclaimed by the president to Congress in the aftermath of the attacks, has undergone many a metamorphosis.

First was when the “war on terror” was admitted as misnamed by the President in the summer of 2004. “It ought to be the ‘struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try and shake the conscience of the free world.’” Later that summer, the President was roundly vilified for his refreshing candor when he stated that America could never actually “win” the “war on terror”, and that we should instead be satisfied in reducing terrorism to the level of “nuisance”.

Maybe we should be careful about making common cause with born-again free speech advocates who never showed any tolerance for it until it became a handy club for bashing Muslims.

Before the furor over the Danish cartoons caricaturing the prophet Muhammad cools into caricature itself - as in, "Remember when all those Muslims went nuts over a bunch of political cartoons?" - and becomes one more convenient example of the cultural superiority of the West, to be pulled out whenever the "clash of civilizations" needs stoking, I'd like to quote Ann Coulter.

I don't do this lightly, but, like Pat Robertson, she's helpful at making hidden agendas grotesquely explicit. I'd also like to note that I found the link to her column on the Web site of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which apparently believes the appropriate reaction to offensive material is to expose, not censor, it. The council also condemned violence and hosted a forum at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., titled "Religious and Political Perspectives on the Cartoon Controversy." Panel discussions on tolerance! How did that fail to make the headlines?

AUSTIN, Texas -- So, aside from the fact that it's politically idiotic and at least theoretically presents a national security risk, just what is wrong with the Dubai Ports deal?

As President George W. Bush actually said, "I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company. I'm trying to conduct foreign policy now by saying to the people of the world, we'll treat you fairly."

So, what's wrong with that? There's our only president standing up against discrimination and against tarring all Arabs with the same brush and all that good stuff. (The fact that it was Mr. Racial Profiling speaking, the man who has single-handedly created more Arab enemies for this country than anyone else ever dreamed of doing is just one of those ironies we regularly get whacked over the head with.)

The investigation into the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson is heating up. Evidence is mounting that senior officials in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney and the National Security Council conspired to unmask Plame Wilson's identity to reporters in an effort to stop her husband from publicly criticizing the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence, according to sources close to the two-year-old probe.

In recent weeks, investigators working for Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald have narrowed their focus to a specific group of officials who played a direct role in pushing the White House to cite bogus documents claiming that Iraq attempted to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger, which Plame Wilson's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had exposed as highly suspect.

Blaring its typical jarringly cacophonous morning radio jabber, the suddenly welcome sound of my alarm rescued me from the maelstrom of a nightmarish Neocon world spawned within my unconscious mind. As consciousness flooded my being, I had an epiphany. My breed of human being is a pariah in the American Empire. In the minds of the Regime's loyal foot soldiers (the Neo-Tories of the Twenty First Century) American society is waging a domestic war between those they define as liberals and those they qualify as conservatives. Since 9/11, Fox News and the Bush Regime have brain-washed them into believing that terrorists and their sympathizers are lurking around every corner, poised to infect them with a lethal virus, slice them with box cutters or obliterate them with a suicide bomb. In the black and white perspective of the Neo-Tories, you are with us or against us. If you do not fit into their narrow and misguided notion of conservatism, you must be a "liberal".