Osama Bin Laden = George Washington?

If you listen to talk radio, you've heard everyone hash over this one. Ohio Representative Marcy Kaptur (Democrat; Toledo) made remarks to the religion editor of the Toledo Blade last Saturday that have stirred a hornet's nest. Sadly, as with the remarks of Washington's Senator Patty Murray, these comments aren't getting wider play, beyond some of the usual television shout-fests.

Two things you can count on from the Big Three networks: outrageous comments by the Left are ignored and pro-war rallies are too.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, here's the important parts:

"If you think back to our founding as a country, we are a country of revolution," Miss Kaptur said in an interview this week....

"One could say that Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped to cast off the British crown," Miss Kaptur said.

In Iraq and other Arab nations where revolutions are potentially brewing, religious fervor will play a vital role in shaping political events, she said, and the United States must be careful "not to get caught in the crossfire."

"I think that one thing that people of faith understand about the world of Islam is that the kind of insurgency we see occurring in many of these countries is an act of hope that life will be better using Islam as the only reed that they have to lean on.

"I think that people of faith understand that for many of the terrorists, their actions are acts of sacred piety to the point of losing their lives. And I think that people of faith understand that there is a heavy religious overtone to the opposition."

If the United States ousts Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and seizes the land, it would not resolve the underlying problems leading to political and social upheaval, she said.

"Even if we take the ground, we do not share the culture," she said, "and in the end we have to learn to coexist in a world with religious states that we may not agree with and find ways to cooperate...."

"Our tradition is to exhaust all reasonable means before one goes to war because our family, like so many others in our area, knows the price of war," she said.

The standards of the "Just War Theory," developed by Saint Augustine in the 4th Century, are not clearly defined in the present U.S.-Iraq showdown, Miss Kaptur said.

"I think that’s why there is so much angst and division over this because we’re in the gray area here," she said. "People of religious tradition are making their voices be heard very loudly on this one. I think there’s sort of an instinctual sense that something isn’t right here, and while they know there is a problem they are not sure that war is the solution."

This is where the political correctness movement leads to: moral equivalence that supercedes common sense.

Yes, I rememer being taught in school how Thomas Jefferson walked into a saloon full of British and shot the place up, killing dozens. Or how Samuel Adams fired cannons point-blank into passing carriages to shake off British rule. How Americans lined up by the dozens to sail off to Britain to sacrifice themselves in suicide attacks in London.

The Founding Fathers fought to shake off a repressive, non-representative government that was working against their personal and religious freedoms. The Islamofascists seeks to institute a Taliban-style theocracy that stifles and punishes freedoms, especially religious freedoms.

America's experiment in representative republican democracy has managed to welcome nearly every nation, race, ethnicity, politics and religion in the world. Sure, there are bumps, but they don't stop us.

Contrast that with any Muslim Arabic nation, and especially the ones that are most theocratic and Talibanesque. How anyone can draw meaningful parallels between us and them, in all seriousness, astonishes me.

Kaptur deserves every whack she's going to get.