Theocracy

I'm catching up on a backlog of subjects that have been gathering in my mind since I started thinking about joining the blogoverse. There's just too much to talk about these days.

Juan Cole has pretty much become the go-to guy for insight into the Middle East, but recently he had some interesting comparisons to make between Middle Eastern politics and recent events in the U.S. Congress.

"The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them. President George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders like Tom Delay have taken us one step closer to theocracy on the Muslim Brotherhood model."

A couple of weeks ago in a radio interview, Lt. Gen. John Vines in Iraq explained why some of the jihadists are antagonistic to democracy in that country. "They have the world view that man has no right to determine their own conditions, they have no right to make laws because all laws flow from God, and they think that democracy is anti-Islamic." Vines identifies this as an extremist view, but it's one that's finding a foothold in the U.S., as well, particularly in the calls for Jeb Bush to "storm the Bastille" and force Terri Schiavo's feeding tube to be reinserted from such sources as morality/slot machine czar William Bennett and perennial right-wing candidate and comic relief Alan Keyes. (Of course, when we later learned Jeb started to do just that but then backed down, the liberal media didn't exactly jump all over the story. The Miami Herald broke the story, and although they're usually subscription only, they seem to generously have made this article widely available--at least for the time being. But how many reports during the Schiavo circus did you see that even acknowledged that wrinkle in the story?)