2:34 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Buchanan on Blasphemy: I always thought Pat Buchanan was crazy. But I didn't know he was that crazy:

When Bush speaks of freedom as God's gift to humanity, does he mean the First Amendment freedom of Larry Flynt to produce pornography and of Salman Rushdie to publish The Satanic Verses, a book considered blasphemous to the Islamic faith? If the Islamic world rejects this notion of freedom, why is it our duty to change their thinking? Why are they wrong?

Michael Totten comments:

Now that is just astonishing. A tyrannical fascist regime in Iran orders the execution of a novelist in Britain. Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini sent death squads after a man who had never even been to Iran. And Pat Buchanan wants to know why that's wrong.

It seems to me it ought to be self-evident to a man who writes books that it's not cool if you're executed by a foreign government because it doesn't like what you've written. But I guess it isn't self-evident if you're a religious nutjob who can't get past the word blasphemy.

I'm still astonished that this man ever won New Hampshire. Whatever happened to "Live Free or Die"?