Sharia and the Single Girl; Matchmaking for Mo

Since we`ve been on the subject of the Blue Fairie, my brother, after reading MoDo`s Feb. 7 column, decided to play cupid, and help poor Maureen with her faltering love-life.

She wrote:

DON`T TAKE ALL THAT CONSERVATION TALK TOO SERIOUSLY


The Saudi ambassador summoned me to the embassy last Thursday, across the street from the Watergate. He wanted to know if Americans were still addicted to oil. I assured him we were.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, the charming new envoy from the royal family, was confused about W.`s suddenly morphing into Ozone Man, as Poppy Bush called Al Gore in `92. At the State of the Union address at the Capitol Tuesday night, the prince watched with chagrin as the ex-Texas oilman urged breaking our dependence by replacing most Mideast oil imports with wood chips and ethanol, a word usually heard only quadrennially when pols pander during the Iowa caucuses.

The prince, dressed in long white robe and checkered headdress, explained that last fall, when Condi Rice was in Jiddah, the Saudis and the U.S. launched a ``strategic dialogue,``which included a promise by the Saudis to pump more oil. Now the President promises that the U.S. will need less oil.

Which way are the desert winds blowing?

I told the prince it was politics. W. is just mouthing conservation arguments to offset Americans` disgust at gas prices, teh obscene profits of Exxon Mobil and Halliburton and a conflict in Iraq that Rummy now gallingly dubs ``the long war.`` Shouldn`t it be ``the wrong war``?

Bush presidents, I told Prince Turki, sometimes say things without realizing that they are expected to acto on their words. I expressed some doubt that Cheney, the Duke of Halliburton who dismissed conservation as a ``personal virute``, would let W. go all ``Earth in the Balance.`` It`s not easy being green with smoggy Dick keeping a gimlet eye on you. The Saudi ambassador says he likes the vice-president.
After some Turkish coffee, some reminiscences about the time the religious police in Saudi Arabia almost threw me in a dungeon, some chat about Iraq-there are two possible outcomes, one good, one awful-and some mutual puzzlement about the administration`s lack of zeal in going after Osama bin-Laden, we parted.

I need no coat or sweater. It`s so warm this winter, we`ll soon have palm trees (the Saudi insignia) on the Potomac. A recent Washington Post story warned that global warming was progressing so fast that within decades, humans ``may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.`` Sounds like a plot for a thriller with Cheney as an enviro-villain, especially if you throw in that the Bush administration has been trying to gag NASA`s top climate scientist from issuing Cassandra bleats about global warming.

Conservatives were so gob-smacked by W.`s promise to have the government drum up nonpetroleum energy options-Robert Novak huffed that it not only violated GOP free-market philosophy, but it also had ``a lengthy pedigree of failure``-that the vice president had to swiftly lumber onto conservative radio shows to praise drilling and gas guzzling.

Asked by Rush Limbaugh if drilling in Alaska was now out, Cheney said:``no, it`s not off the table by any means. We`ll keep pushing it because we think it makes eminent good sense.``

Asked by Laura Ingraham if he agreed with Tom Friedman that the administration should impart pain with a gas tax, Cheney demurred, ``Well, I don`t agree with that.``

He said he and W. are ``big believers`` in the market and letting the market work, and that people ``make decisions for themselves in terms of what kind of vehicle they want to drive, and how often they want to fill up the tank, and from the perspective of individual American citizens, this notion that we have to `impose pain`, some kind of government mandate, I think we would resist.``

W.`s energy secretary, Samuel Bodman, clarified that the president`s words shouldn`t be taken literally. He said the aim of replacing 75 percent of Middle East oil imports with alternative fuels was ``purely an example`` of an action that could be taken.

Back in the Ford White House, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller pushed a plan to have the government help develope alternative energy sources and reduce our dependence on oil and Saudi Arabia. Dick Cheney helped scuttle it.

If he hadn`t, we would no longer be oil addicts. And Dick Cheney wouldn`t have to go to the trouble of scuttling a new plan to have the government help develop alternative sources of energy and reduce our dependence on oil and Saudi Arabia.


I would like to point out that this, like all of the Blue Fairie`s columns, was long on wind and empty of content. She tries to dazzle us with her own importance, since a ``prince`` has solicited her counsel. Isn`t our darling important! She moves on to Global Warming, and shows that she has no clue about what it is, how it works, or what the causes are. (I suppose she thinks using alcohol in automobile engines will solve the problem.) She then launches a diatribe against Bush and Cheney, without a sliver of fact in the entire assault.

Somebody, please explain how such a vacuous person has risen to such a place of prominence?

This from my brother:


Dear Maureen,
I sense from your column of February 7,2006 that you and the Saudi ambassador, Prince Turki al-Faisal, hit it off famously when you met for the first time. I dare say that your column fairly reeked of romance and a woman with a crush on the Arab Turkey! Given your now famous lament that you can't find a husband because you are so intelligent, so successful, so sophisticated and so humble, I believe that this chance meeting offers unlimited possibilities. Imagine, if you will: A man who is much wealthier that you ever thought you could be, a man nearly as successful as your self, certainly an intelligent man and a cosmopolite who is as sophisticated as you are! What are you waiting for? Yes, Muslim men do sometimes seem rather sexist and chauvanistic, but if you put that behind you and try to make this thing work, the two of you might be very happy together...if not...well that business about Muslims cutting off the heads of those who have displeased them is a lot of vast right wing conspiracy scare-mongering...isn't it?

With Kindest Regards,
Brian E. Birdnow


He is, of course, absolutely correct; The Blue Fairie would quickly change her tune if she were forced under Sharia Law. The fact is, women are PROPERTY under Islamic Law, and an uppity woman like Mo would find herself on the fast track to an ear-to-ear haircut. That such a woman as Maureen Dowd attacks the very policies which keep her from being buried under a Burkha (or under the good earth) illustrates the insanity which has gripped the entire Left. Their hatred of George W. Bush and company leads them to support the very people who would crush their freedoms. If they think Ashcroft was a religious zealot...

This is symptomatic of the modern era; liberals have lived in a society which has been so kind to them, so tolerant of any crackpot idea, that they can`t believe in real enemies, in the uncomfortable fact that there are people who are deadly serious about killing them. The only enemies most liberals see are political opponents. This is a sure sign of societal decay; we can`t pull together against a common enemy in time of war.

Great societies aren`t conquered from without but collapse from within. Maureen Dowd is a bellweather of this decay in modern America.