Lileks Chews Up Car Batteries

Not much posting this evening but you've got to read James. Lileks seems to have sucked all the acid out of the Lileksmobile battery and spit it all over the keyboard:

And another thing: the idea of a summit with the Muslim world doesn’t particularly billow my sails, either. So Osama is using our invasion of Iraq to recruit new troops? First of all, you know this how? We have a tape of OBL holding up a copy of 2004 TV Guide Fall Season edition to verify the date, declaring a new and improved jihad? Second, do you think a summit in which the various satrapies of the Middle East and elsewhere convene for a marathon bitchfest about Gaza is going to make America beloved in Sadr City? They want us to extend a hand, yes, so they can lop it off. Ah, but what of the moderates. Those who have been turned against us because we threw out the Taliban and deposed Saddam – the relentlessly secular Saddam, as we’re often reminded. If it hasn’t occurred to these folks before, let me spell it out plainly: if you think there’s a war against Muslims now, you lack a certain sense of perspective. If tiptoeing around sacred sites and taking special care to pick off the snipers hiding in mosques so as not to disturb the plaster is a war against Islam, you will be looking for new terms when Putin drops a big bag of hammers somewhere someday. Surely the alienated moderates must be asking: the United States could destroy the madmen, completely. Yet they do not. Why?Good question, eh?So no, I’m not enthused about a summit, unless we get to set the agenda. Item one: get over the frickin’ Jews, people. They’re not going anywhere, and if they do they’re taking all of you with them. Item two: You poke the hornet’s nest one more time and the skies of Tehran and Riyahd will darken with 747s, which will disgorge a fleet of Jeeps. We will ride around with bullhorns and announce that all women are free to leave, with their children, so they can live in a society where they get to show some shin without having some gynophobic wanker whip them with sticks. Your choice! Madrassas and no women, or a live-and-let-live world with women, and cable TV and the odd cold beer now and then, if you like. Beer will not be mandatory. We’re not the sort of people who impose beer on the unwilling. But you know, on 9/111 we recognized the downside of coexisting with societies that want to hang people for having a Pabst after a hot day. Your choice. Item three: we’re going to play a video of the events of 9/11. And then we’ll have a discussion. We’re willing to entertain all sorts of commentary, with one proviso: the moment you use the word “but,” you’re escorted from the building and put back on a plane home. You can never come to the US again. Your nice condo in the new Trump building will be sold for five dollars to a nice Jewish lesbian couple we met the other day at parent’s night at our school in Park Slope. One’s an artist, the other’s a lawyer.

Amen, Brother.