The message we should be sending.

This post illustrates the genius of the Colonel in giving effect to the famous Latin aphorism, "Ex parvum extrapilatamus veritas."

Cox and Forkum, as usual, articulate the correct approach to Islamic terrorists:

Disarm or Die.
Cassandra call your office!

The only country with any sense of realism about the Islamic threat is Australia. Its treasurer, Peter Costello, made this statement to Australian Muslims:

If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you.

Do Hillary Rodham, Howard Dean, John Murtha, John Kerry, or Albert Gore have the political will or insight to make a similar statement? Let alone conduct a real war against our enemy? Not anytime soon, is our immediate reaction to the question.

Alas, such are the prominent leaders of the "alternative" to what we have now. The alternative, generally speaking, that the voters will have presented to them in just a few days.

They're sorry.

It's sad.

Mr. Bush has waged almost the real war needed, God bless him. (Our quarrel with him is only that he has imperfectly located of the fulcrum for our military force.) But how will even he deal with Iran's arming itself with nuclear weapons?

Assuming -- as is likely -- the Iranians' ability to game the U.N. and the infidels long enough to field an operational nuclear weapon or two, will the U.S. government, say vintage January 2009, have the backbone to say to Iran, "Disarm or die!"?

Here's an important point. Both questions are legitimate but tend to obscure the complete and total responsibility American voters have to make a definitive judgment about Islam and communicate that judgment to their officials.

In all our focus on Mr. Bush, we are forgetting how much time he has to spend trying to wake up a slumbering electorate and deal with scurrilous attacks on his motives. There are immensely important decisions to be made by American voters and they are yet acting like coy debutantes waiting to be courted. "Mr. President, please just tell us one more time why we should run away with you and fight those enemies you say we have."

The voters are not going to wake up this time until something much worse than 9/11 happens. Pearl Harbor times 10.

Americans should spend 30 minutes remembering all those poor people on September 11, 2001, whose last moment on earth was reduced to choosing between jumping to their death or being burned to death, between dying immediately in an airline crash or a few minutes later in an airliner crash. Then they should study the ever growing list of victims of murderous Islam since 9/11 -- today at 5,721.

If they did only this -- and gave up their foolish hope that American would forever remain as impregnable as she was in 1945 -- Mr. Bush would have no problem in making his case for a foreign policy that would safeguard Americans and the West for the next 100 year.

"Militant Message." Cox & Forkum Editorial Cartoons, 8/27/06.