I had a revelation this morning. I think I'm going to back John McCain if he runs for President in 2008.

Too many liberals are so blinded by their white hot hatred of President Bush that they simply can't see what's going on in the world around them. If we have a President that isn't the de facto cause of all the world's evils, perhaps these people can be brought slowly down the road back to sanity.

For example, in an article about an upcoming conference on Islam in Madison, the writer starts with this little gem:

Mustafa Gokcek isn't about to deny the obvious.

Thanks mostly to the policies of the Bush administration, the great rift between the Muslim and Western worlds clearly has widened in the last year, acknowledges the 29-year-old Turkish native and UW-Madison grad student.

And there's no better proof, he says, than the tens of thousands of angry protesters who greeted the president on his recent trip to India and Pakistan.

Here are four things that are so wrong about this statement and prove my thesis that one of the dangerous side effects of Bush Derangement Syndrome is a serious case of ignorance.

1. Since when did India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Sudan and Nigeria (among others) become part of the West? Either the Muslim world has a rift with everybody (including itself) or the West just got a whole lot less exclusive. I'm opting for the former.
2. How could the rift between the West and Muslims get any wider than when Muslim extremists killed 3,000 of us on our own soil and Muslims around the world cheered them on?
3. What policies of Bush's are making this rift even wider? Muslim terrorists have been trying to kill us for years. If Bush has made any real policy changes it's in his shocking decision to fight back when people try to kill us.
4. Hmm, so the best recent example of the rift between Muslims and the West are protests of Bush in India and Pakistan? Huh. I seem to remember Muslims protesting something all over the place recently. What could it be? Oh yeah, they were protesting against free speech. BDS sufferers like to ignore that.

Almost anyone could be President and the majority of the Muslim world is going to act exactly the same. But maybe if Bush is out of the way, more Americans can see the truth of what is happening. Muslim extremists don't hate Bush's policies. They hate America and the freedom she stands for. I think it's really important that we all realize that.

I've never been sold on McCain as a President, but he's respected by everyone. No one, other than some conservatives, hates him. He's been a firm backer of the War and he's a fiscal conservative. We could do worse than McCain. With a President McCain maybe more Americans will get on board the sanity train and stay away from the appeasement wagon.