Mickey Mouse With a Machine Gun

The day of reckoning has finally arrived. While the whole world looked on, we screwed up so badly that it may take decades before the American people can walk down the sidewalk of world opinion without having our former friends and neighbors cross to the other side of the street.

To say that we have lost the moral high ground in the wake of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal is an understatement of epic proportions. What we have done, in our knee-jerk, post-9/11 effort to 'achieve victory in the war on terror at any cost,' is expose to the world just how sick and darkly twisted our culture has become. And make no mistake about it: The export of American culture is vital to our already trembling economy.

In the eyes of the world, Mickey Mouse now carries an M-16 and an electrified cattle prod. Indiana Jones is a grave robbing ghoul who disrespects the Arab cultures from which he plunders and purloins. International action star Arnold Schwarzenegger is . . . well, he's governor of the state of California .

Are you starting to get the point?

President Bush wants everyone to believe that the abuses at Abu Ghriab prison in Iraq represent 'the wrongdoing of a few'. The insurgents and terrorists, he postulates, 'hate us because we're free.'

Fast food. Cell phones. Road rage. What's not to love and envy?

As I write this piece, tearing my eyes away from the myriad of stories on the wire services about the prisoner abuse scandal, I see the following breaking news stories here in the U.S. :

In a Philadelphia suburb, two teens rob and beat a nun at her convent door before making off with the sister's cell phone and purse containing twenty dollars.

In Brownsville , Texas , 24-year old Angela Camacho has been declared competent to stand trial in the suffocation, stabbing, and beheading deaths of her three infants.

They hate Americans, Mr. Bush, because we are barbaric animals and now they have the proof. Like a private eye working for a cuckolded husband, they have the snapshot evidence of an infidel in bare naked action. They know we behead our children and beat our nuns senseless on the home front but now we're in their countries, their cultures, on a G.I. Joe campaign to bring them the fruits of democracy.

Is it any wonder they are resisting with such violent abhorrence?