I hope conservatives are reading this article with great care. I hope they are dimly starting to realize why liberals are embracing Bush's "crusade" so warmly. I don't think they will--but one can always hope...

?

If we want Bin-Laden's opinions, we'll read it from his entrails!

Then, maybe the next trick can be figuring out why Adolf Hitler "selected" 6 million Jews to be gassed, or what suffering led Timothy McVeigh to blow up a building and kill 168 people, or what anguish led three racists to drag a black James Byrd Jr. behind a truck to his death, or why anti-abortion terrorists kill and maim.

Actually, these are all good questions. But they don't get asked, not being PC.

Were all Jews utterly innocent of wrongdoing between 1900 and 1939, or did the fact that many if not most prominent Communists, especially in Germany, were Jewish help turn otherwise non-anti-Semitic Germans against the whole people (unjustly, of course)?

Timothy McVeigh openly stated that Oklahoma City was revenge against the government for Waco. Does the fact that his revenge was evil automatically make the massacre at Waco okay?

All three killers of Mr. Byrd were ex-cons. Do things happen in prison, especially to young white men, that might induce an understandable, although unjustified, killing rage against all black men? Hint: think gang rape, repeated over and over for months or years on end. Blacks are commonly considered to be justified in their rage against whites, because of genuine injustice suffered by the group of blacks at the hand of whites. Why is the reverse not true for a white man who has suffered at the hands of blacks?

If a person truly believes that abortion is murder, then is he not justified in using deadly force to prevent it, as he would be for other types of murder?

If a person really believes in situational ethics, as most leftists claim to, on what basis can they reject any of these lines of reasoning?

Speaking theoretically, only.

Which is exactly why evil acts must be punished and motives mustn't be factored into it.

Agreed!

My point is that liberals make a great effort to "understand" the motivations behind certain (left-wing) evil acts and none whatsoever to discover those behind others (those they view as right-wing).

Surprise! Liberals are inconsistent and hypocritical.

From a purely theoretical point of view, there is nothing wrong with attacking the Pentagon. What's wrong is killing innocent civilians like Barbara Olsen, and, afterwards, hiding behind the skirts of women and little girls in Afghanistan.

Agreed... same with the USS Cole and the Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia... and I'm disgusted that we did nothing about those attacks against our heroes in uniform then.

Bush retracted the use of the word "crusade" on the day he said it. His shaky command of the English language is the only reason the term was used. I was watching when he said it. He was responding to a question posed by a reporter, and, after groping for a word for a few seconds, he came up with "crusade." He obviously meant to convey its common meaning only, i.e., a moral committment to a just cause. There was no pre-planning in its use, nor did he ever mean to suggest that we are engaged in a religious war against Islam.

Any American who uses that slip of the tongue against him is playing into the hands of the enemies of the United States.

As for your intimation that conservatives are too dumb to fully figure out why most liberals support this effort, don't make me laugh. Their rejection of the values held by Osama bin Laden simply indicate that with regard to many basic American principles huge swaths of the American people, liberal and conservative, are in fundamental agreement.

Thanks, Pokey

Good one, Debra Saunders !

why anti-abortion terrorists kill and maim

Should we not also ask: "Why pro-abortionists do the same", but to smaller people?