WOULD YOU LIKE HAVARTI

With Those Freedom Fries? by Choire Sicha

Embassies have been torched, several people have died, ignorance flows from all corners—all for a few cartoons less intelligible than your average “Cathy” strip. Welcome to the new medievalism.
And then the Vatican weighed in on the Danish cartoon freakshow that is now literally burning up Eurasia. “The right to freedom of thought and expression,” said the little city-state that could, “cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers.”

Cannot? Really? Uh, screw you, New Pope!

Who’d have thought World War III, the war between secular societies and theocratic ones, would have come to a roiling boil over a dinky Danish newspaper?

But last week, bat-shit crazy theists of all stripes, international policy suckjobbers, NGO lifers, and European and American publicist-trained politicians and their dumb-eyed lackeys together hit a wall with the international incident.

Instead of blaming imams who toured the Arab world with inflammatory material of unknown origin, instead of say, keeping their mouths shut, the only way politicos could find to weasel out of their troubles was by trashing the international free press.

(Certain disclaimers should apply here: Is the international free press really free? Anyone who’s worked for a newspaper publisher would have a good chuckle over that. Yet still.)

Because there is a war on, Western politicians—undoubtedly because of animalistic impulses from their reptile brains—began to replicate the sort of thinking that motivated the Sedition Act of 1918. Except, somehow, this time, it’s in reverse.

Now no one must speak badly of his enemy.

This is pretty funny in America, for sure, where a majority of the citizenry doesn’t particularly want to even be at war with an enemy.

People have revealed themselves to be, in varying degrees, psychotic, venal, petty, superstitious, medieval, opportunistic, and very, very stupid.Even the rah-rah-kill Bush administration, the Bush administration of the Axis of Evil, the pro-torture Bush, the Let’s Roll! Action Figure Bush and the Mission Accomplished, No Really! Bush, seemed to morph into the wussy-handholding (yet secretly bomb-friendly!) Clinton administration—and not at all in a good way. Before President Bush’s extremely odd borrowing of the classically liberal verbiage of “addiction to oil,” and his pledge of Best Friends Forever with Iran in his fifth annual talking points run-down, or State of the Union, as it was once called, the State Department took a wacky we-feel-your-pain stance on the Danish cartoon fracas currently burning up Europe.

THEMORNINGNEWS