As the right wing cheers the hanging of one of the Middle East's few secular leaders (dictator and all around asshole though he was) we have done little to stop the religious fanatic who actually attacked us and have opened Iraq up to more religious fanatics who had been kept at bay (often brutally, of course) by Hussein.

I have written about our failure and even enabling of a new regime of fanatical Islam many times including here, here and here. Even got on a BBC radio program because of my emphasis on these issues, though I don't think I got my point across well.

Problem is, our own government is becoming borderline Taliban in many ways. Recently the Parks Service has been told to stop talking about the geological age of the grand canyon because it contradicts fundamentalist views on the age of the earth and they have been told to carry a creationist book in their book store. We may not be beheading people yet, but we sure love our death penalty and torture and we are calling our wars "Crusades" and Republicans are opposed to people swearing their oaths of office over the Q'ran. We are on the road to the same kind of fanaticism that has gripped too much of the Muslim world.