“USEFUL IDIOTS” — Mark Steyn comments on the risible Archibishop of Canterbury and his fellow churchmen. Excerpt:

How naive do you have to be to swallow that baloney? The Wise Men were Herod’s patsies, his useful idiots. Now who does that sound like? Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld? Or Dr Williams, Sean Penn and George Galloway, to name just three of the legions of “wise men” who insist that their appeasement of Saddam demonstrates their superior insight and intelligence?

Penn and Galloway are just following their America-is-always-wrong instincts. By contrast, in tortuously bending the Gospels to his political needs, Dr Williams distorts his faith at least as much as (according to “Muslim moderates”) al-Qa’eda does Islam. It’s hard not to conclude that the archbishop’s secular beliefs have seduced his spiritual ones. He was, of course, wrong on Afghanistan, and – speaking of the slaughter of innocents – utterly silent on this year’s vast mound of Christian corpses, culminating in the murder of three small girls in a Pakistani church on Christmas Day. That’s “moral surrender”.

Catching the eye of godless Britain is an unenviable task, but there’s no future for the Church playing catch-up with the Lib Dems. “Tony Blair’s – appointment of Rowan Williams as archbishop is his most exciting act of patronage so far,” gushed Simon Jenkins in The Times. “Mr Blair has dealt us a wild card, a risk.” Hardly. The archbishop offers only the certainty of decline, the final death-spiral into secular liberal irrelevance. No wonder Islam is Britain’s fastest-growing religion.

Indeed. And, speaking of the prolific Steyn, he’s also critical of Bush on the war, and even cites Bill Quick, in another column:

The endless postponement of the Iraqi D-Day, now as routinely rolled over as those Soviet five-year plans, is all part of some cunning Bush ”rope-a-dope” strategy. So is Colin Powell’s recent statement that the administration isn’t looking for regime change in Baghdad. So is the ongoing mantra of ”the Saudis are our friends, no matter how many of us they kill.”

It’s true that lulling the enemy into a false sense of security can be very cunning. But only if the sense of security does, indeed, turn out to be false. Otherwise, as the Internet commentator William Quick puts it, how much longer can Bush dine out on Afghanistan? And a lot of what the Bushies do barely falls into the lulling category. When Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudis’ Washington ambassador, was revealed to have funneled money, unwittingly or otherwise, to the 9/11 killers, why did Alma Powell and Barbara Bush rush to phone her to commiserate? The connection between Saudi ”charitable giving” and terrorism is well-known. The most benign explanation is that the princess is an idiot, and Americans are dead because of her idiocy. The wife of the secretary of state and the mother of the president have no business comforting a stooge of their country’s enemies.

Indeed, again.