Deference to Saudi Arabia.

I ran across this comment by Holger Dansker at Jihad Watch. It touches on the issue of our baffling failure to confront Saudi Arabia and I offer it here without endorsement (or, more accurately, without understanding):

Ask yourself why so many Saudis were whisked out of the country after 9/11. Ask yourself why they are allowed to proselytize their religion and get treated with kid gloves. Why representatives of the American Government keep harping on about our friendship with Saudi. Ask yourselfs why American women soldiers in Saudi had to walk around in a Black bag, Why Saudi terrorists are allowed to enter Iraq and hardly a word is said. Ask your selfs why we allow ourself to be humiliated. The answer is that the american dollar is backed by Saudi Oil.

I'm reading Forbidden Truth. U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasqué and am only beginning to try to understand the financial underpinnings of U.S. relations with China, Saudi Arabia and anyone else.

While I'm on the topic of The Inexplicable, Mr. Bush's and large numbers of U.S. Senators also have a baffling inability to appreciate the fact that illegal immigration is, if nothing else, a profound attack on U.S. sovereignty. These senior national politicians are quite tra la la about it, seemingly to have had surgically excised the most basic instinct for protection of the hearthstone against unmistakable alien invasion. The "Don't Tread on Me" gene is unaccountably missing from these jokers and one is left then to speculate that either intelligent men have been administered surreptitious testosterone suppression drugs or they are normal men whose natural instincts are overborne by either greed on an intergalactic scale or an appreciation of how little power is left in the American economic system to enable basic protective measures to be implemented.

This latter is exactly what Holger Dansker is saying has happened vis-a-vis the Saudis.

All of which is not to ignore the depressing inadequacies of liberalism expounded upon at length by Lawrence Auster, Dr. Sanity, and the other warriors.

Comment in "Bush in $20 billion arms deal with Saudis; Saudis threatening dollar collapse." By Robert Spencer, Jihad Watch, 9/20/07.