A Sinful Soapbox: The Local Root Cause

---- PREFACE ----

From Glenn quoting a reader today: "Blogs are the letter to the editor that the editor does not want to print."

OK, this one finally popped my patience bubble with the Fort Collins' Coloradoan. Here's my current Soapbox submission (a long letter to the editor format) that they don't seem to have space to print. I wonder why? God-awful, incoherent writing?

Or do you suppose it doesn't fit the MSM story line?

A little more context to understand the Soapbox: To be fair, the Coloradoan used to post everything I sent them and this year they have increased their local columnists and decreased their Soapbox space. I did enter a contest they had to select a new set of local columnists at the start of the year and lost out. And I made no bones about having a foreign policy focus to my writing rather than local interest -- so if that's the reason it's certainly fair enough.

UPDATE: I would be negligent if I didn't mention that part of my columnist proposal was for a simultaneous blog. Needless to say, my work at prototyping "We The Free" as part of my columnist submission has become what you're reading now...

Finally, the last Soapbox of mine they did publish cast some rather negative light on the French -- keep that in mind as you read on...

---- SOAPBOX ON ----

The Local Root Cause

As I was slowing for the stoplight, I noticed that the car in front of me had a “Defend Freedom, Defeat Bush” bumper sticker from MoveOn.org sloppily taped to the inside of the back window. Ah yes, it’s almost election time and the swing voters might remember leftists in a negative light this November if “Bush = Hitler” bumper stickers keep proliferating. Time to fake center.

After all, leftists have such appreciation for the mental acuity of the rest of us.

Speaking of mental acuity, I remembered my drive home from dinner the night before with the boys noticing the slightly scruffy van ahead plastered with an impressively large assortment of unusually smallish bumper stickers. I realized it would cause me to take out a skinny tree or three if I was going to try to read them all -- I love the boys dearly so I passed. But in largest type popped “FREE TIBET”. I agree with that one by the way.

Now -– guilty as confessed -- I couldn’t read them all but idled to speculate that I could also probably find an “ISRAELI NAZIS SHOULD TEAR DOWN THEIR ILLEGAL WALL” in there somewhere if I faltered into in an unsafe enough mood to really gander.

Why this errant thought? Because I recalled that the recent travesty of a ruling by the “international tribunal” at the Hague against the Israeli defensive wall was issued by the President of the court, a Mr. Shi Jiuyong. Did I mention yet that it’s the Chinese that have their iron boot on the throat of Tibet?

To be fair there’s at least, oh, a 10% chance that the van’s driver is a supporter of the Israeli wall – by the way one of the few ideas that all ends of the political spectrum in Israel are agreed on. Did I mention that Israel is an actual democracy?

By this point you’re thinking, “What’s happened to Gronlund? Why is he now after the Chinese instead of the French? And why all the local observations?” No worries, you’ll yet be rewarded.

It turns out that local Colorado events are far more important than you thought. In fact, a key “root cause” of “why they hate us” is actually local. Amazingly, it’s located just up the road in Greeley!

Wha-Huh?

That “wha-huh?” would be the six-month visit Egyptian Islamist writer Sayid Qtub – one of Osama’s and Hezbollah’s key spiritual godfathers – made a little over 50 years ago to what’s now UNC Greeley. He suffered the grievous injury during his visit of attending a church dance where upon the playing of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” he famously (well, to radical Islamists anyway) wrote “The room became a confusion of feet and legs: arms twisted around hips; lips met lips; chests pressed together.”

It was just too much for his tiny, misogyny-soaked brain -- he vowed to devote his life to Islamic fundamentalism. Interestingly, W had barely been born at the time.

Luckily, Qtub wasn’t visiting Las Vegas instead of our local 50’s “Church Lady” crowd or the Jihad may have acquired an even more frenetic pace. Did I forget to mention Paris?

Will the left address the Islamo-fascist’s real “root causes” by slamming suffocating black sacks over our wives and little girls? Who’ll then be exposed as the real Hitlers? (No scare quotes required.)

So it’s time for me to order up some bumper stickers. On the left goes “W”. On the right goes “FREE TIBET”. In the middle I’ll place my own: “actually will”.

And another below: “Greeley, Colorado: Sinfully Fun”.

Bob Gronlund
Fort Collins
bob_wtf@comcast.net

---- SOAPBOX OFF ----

Oh, yes. I've just de-anonymized the blog, haven't I?