MARK STEYN IS ALL OVER THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION in a fashion that you’d think the Democrats would be emulating:

For over a year now, nothing has been asked of Muslims, at home or abroad: you can be equivocal about bin Laden and an apologist for suicide bombers, and still get a photo-op with Dubya; you can be a member of a regime whose state TV stations and government-owned newspapers call for Muslims to kill all Jews and Christians, and you’ll still get to kick your shoes off with George and Laura at the Crawford ranch.

This is not just wrong but self-defeating. As long as Dubya and Colin Powell and the rest are willing to prance around doing a month-long Islamic minstrel-show routine for the amusement of the A-list Arabs, Muslims will rightly see it for what it is: a sign of profound cultural weakness. Healthy relationships require at least some token reciprocity.

This is Bush’s Achilles’ heel, but the Democrats are ideologically unable to exploit it. Otherwise they’d be making noise about everything from the stealthy evacuation of bin Laden’s relatives just after 9/11 to this account of Saudi funding for the 9/11 attackers.