Mr. Know-it-all

This morning, Zbigniew Brzezinski insisted volubly and angrily on Morning Joe that “we” “have to” reconsider the First Amendment and allow for prosecution at least of people whose speech offends Muslims with the intention of provoking violence.

Of course, he referred with contempt and fury to that Koran-burning pastor and the Israeli-American who produced the You-Tube video the organizers of the current wave of “spontaneous Muslim outrage” in Libya and Egypt – people tied, apparently, not only to al-Qaeda but also to organized Salafists in Libya and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – the ruling Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, whose president Obama will chat with in coming days – chose to cite as occasioning the wrath of innocent, ordinary Muslims-in-the-street to such a homicidal pitch.

It has been observed more than once that people beloved of the establishment who give horrifically bad advice never disappear.

They continue all their lives giving horrifically bad advice, and the media continue all their lives to treat them with the enormous respect and deference that is due to establishment-certified wise men, no matter what arrogant, self-important boobs they may obviously be.

Unless they want to wear their cowardice as a badge of honor on their suit coats, right next to those little American flags, American lawmakers will make no attempt to outlaw mockery – with intent to blah, blah, blah – specifically and only of Islam.

If they move at all, they will move to outlaw mockery (with intent, blah, blah) of anybody’s religion.

And then it will be enforced pretty much exclusively against people whose public mockery of Islam has the dubious honor of being cited by organizers of violent Muslim outrage as unendurably offensive to the Prophet and his Holy Faith.

To the kid who runs the Jesus and Mo blog on the net: when will it be your turn?

Jesus and Mo

As for Zbig, I am reminded that some conservatives have lately begun to openly entertain the notion that the American plutocracy running the county’s domestic politics may not actually have the good of America at heart so much as the profit to be made from running the place into the ground like some colonized, Third World territory not their own.

Nobody has quite explicitly drawn a similar lesson in connection with American globalismo and the endless neocon wars, yet.

And nobody has drawn the lesson in connection with the parade of foreign-born, foreign-raised, and foreign-educated policy advisers who have, with the reliability of gravity, counseled our presidents for going on 50 years to war, war, and more war, even in the most faraway and unlikely places, if not to save America from one “existential threat” after another then at least to save all humanity.

But be patient.

They may get there.

Update, 9/14.

Since yesterday, additional mainstream Democrats and liberals have gone on record endorsing immediate US adoption of what is in fact the view of free speech insisted on by Muslims, worldwide, including most governments of Muslim countries, the Muslim Brotherhood, most Islamist parties, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Muslim nations at the UN.

That guy who made the video and the pastor who wanted to burn Korans ought, they angrily demand, to be prosecuted and the law ought to criminalize if not denigration of religion in general - anyone's religion - then certainly denigration of Islam.

Profiles in courage, these liberals are.

So far, venues of conservative opinion have been staunch defenders of free speech, blaming the Muslim violence on the Muslims and insisting no ground be given up on what speech the First Amendment protects.

But that has been secular and Jewish conservative opinion.

Pat Robertson?

John Hagee?

Gomer over at Fox News?

The Catholic clergy who toyed, before 9/11, with the idea of a global alliance with Islam to oppose abortion, contraception, pornography and cultural acceptance of sex, and secularization in general?

We'll see.