Conservatives of different stripes

It's the calendar, people. I haven't read Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home, the conservative's argument that the American Left was partly responsible for the attacks on 9/11 and the general animosity from radical Muslims across the globe. I have the reviews, though -- mostly negative and many of them from the Right. Even a few National Review columnists have come out and said that this book is a bit much. Good for them.

One thought does come up when you read the first fiery chapter on the author's web site. He claims that although he would rather go to a baseball game with Michael Moore than a radical Muslim cleric, he probably has more in common with the radical imam. What bunk. The radical Muslim wing that attacked us five years ago and that we drove out of Afghanistan and loathes us on the web today are not cultural conservatives like D'Souza. They may both hate bikinis, Britney Spears and MTV, but there is a big diffeences. Cultural conservatives like D'Souza want to turn the calendar back to 1950. Bin Laden and his crew want the calendar back to 950.

One must admit that a thousand years will make a difference in the way the two groups interact.

This almost echoes a thought I had in the days after 9/11 when American Talib John Walker Lindh was captured at al Al Queda training camp. Most conservative pundits claimed that Lindh was a product of his Marin County upbringing. Actually, he was resonding to his parents' divorce and the fact that his father reportedly left his wife for another man. The poor sap -- a confused teenager who drifted from hip hop to radical Islam -- clearly wanted a 1950s America where mother and father build a home to raise a family. Unfortunately, with that dream shattered, Lindh turned to a radicalism that offered destructive absolutes.

And those came from an even more fare away time than the time of Father Knows Best.