This is just perfect. Don't criticize them; they might get angry:

An effort by the American military to discredit the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi by showing video outtakes of him fumbling with a machine gun — suggesting that he lacks real fighting skill — was questioned yesterday by retired and active American military officers...

"I see a guy who is getting a lot of groceries and local support," said Nick Pratt, a Marine Corps veteran and professor of terrorism studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany. "You cannot say he is a bad operator." He added, "People should be careful who they poke fun at."

I'm guessing we could find pragmatic "retired officers" to recommend we sell our daughters, buy prayer rugs and start speaking Arabic.

"An effort to discredit" al-Zarqawi, the modern Che Guevara, is undoubtedly a major transgression in the progressive value system.

This is what I've gathered: Progressives think the answer to the problems of the day is to make sure we don't inflame the Muslims. Like a hornets nest on your front porch, which you cannot remove and dare not disturb, "Muslims" in modern society are an ever-present danger akin to a federally protected pack of wolves who must be allowed to roam the playground where our children live.

Oh - sorry!: I should have prefaced the word "Muslims" with the word "radical". It's only "radical" Muslims we need to be concerned about.

But you know what? I'm starting to realize that we at the Alpaca Burger Forum are probably a bit over-taxed in the typing department. Too many damn keystrokes. Almost inhumane conditions, in fact.

Therefore, I think the only humane solution is to allow our writers to avoid injury and save seven keystrokes: Henceforth, we will have to leave off "radical" and the new formulation will be simply "Muslims."

I hope everyone can be happy with that.

To continue, then: I propose the biggest problem in Western civilization today is the tendency of progressives to suck up to Muslims. The second biggest problem is the tendency of progressives to forget Western civilization and the fact there would be no progressives if not for Western civilization.

It's a conundrum, all right: The well-educated, turtleneck-clad, urban chic, mainstream-media-bottle-fed progressives live in constant fear that someone, somewhere, might be bothering the Muslim hornets nest. But the Muslim hornets are virulently anti-progressive!

AND THE PROGRESSIVES DON'T CARE! They will muffle their pro-abortion agenda and their pro-homosexual agenda and everything else they purport to stand for: They just want to suck up to the Muslims.

Here's my prediction: Remember those Deadheads and hippies? They're going to reappear in Muslim garb. The Left is going to become Muslim.

Why? Because the Muslims are willing to kill everyone who dissents. The Deadheads and other progressives are not. The motivating force behind political correctness is to get along. This means, sucking up to those who want to kill you.

I wonder how many of the major ideological problems of the day - so many of which are caused by the progressives who think the war against Islam (oh, sorry: radical Islam) is a farce - would be solved immediately if more progressives simply took a moment to read the Koran.

Really. Just read the damn book. Then tell me if you want to continue to suck up to them.