Not too long ago, I discussed the fall of Mogadishu as another sign that Islamic extremists are winning and that the United States under Bush has failed to successfully combat al-Qaeda and it's related groups. One such diary on Political Cortex got attention from BBC Radio, which had me on one of their live call-in shows.

Some responses to my fears that Bush's failures are enabling a new, extremist Caliphate in the Muslim world criticized me for being too quick to judge Islam harshly. I take such criticism to heart because my beef is with religious extremists of all kinds and those fools, like Bush, who aid and abet their oppressive, terrorist agendas. I have no beef with any religion in particular or religion in general. It is extremism and terrorism that I object to.

I just had my 30 minutes of fame (or at least one of them) and, like most of us, found it more disorienting than expected.

About a month ago I first started talking about the failure of the Bush administration to deal with the actual people who attacked us: al-Qaeda. In every way Bush and the Republicans have dropped the ball and in some ways have been dropping the ball for years, ignoring and even enabling the rise of an international, Muslim fundamentalist movement that could form what I call the new Caliphate. One version of this piece, on Political Cortex was noticed by BBC news and I was asked to be on their "Have your Say" radio program.

Not long ago I wrote about the Bush Administration's renaming the War on Terrorism as the "Long War"...or, as I prefer to dub it, the "Forever War" after Joseph Haldeman's science fiction classic. The fact is that Bush has done practically NOTHING to actually fight al-Qaeda since he abandoned the fight in Tora Bora so he could invade Iraq. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda regroups worldwide, reasserting itself in Pakistan and Afghanistan, spreading to Iraq, and further establishing itself in Somalia.