If this is "Democracy", No Thanks.

I swear, you can't make this shit up.

Afghanistan started out being the Main Event in the War on Terra^tm, but then the Real Target (Iraq) was engaged, and it became nothing more than an inconvenient sideshow.

Nevertheless we were fed the pablum that great strides were being made, the people are so much better off now than they were under the oppressive fundamentalism of the Taliban, democracy is on the rise, blah blah blah.

So what are we to make, then, of the news out of Kabul that an Afghan citizen, one Abdul Rahman, is about to be executed for -- get this -- converting to Christianity!!!???

Yeah, we're bringing some of that good old fashioned American democracy to the Middle East all right -- the democracy of the late 19th Century when women didn't have the right to vote, it was legal to lynch black people, and monopolistic corporations trampled the rights of workers under their heavy boots.

If this is democracy, we'd better stop. The world can't afford it. We can't afford it.

Meanwhile, Abdul is on the Afghani equivalent of death row, ready to walk The Green Mile rather than give up his faith, and the Religious Right in this country is now up in arms. Over this? Where the fuck were they when the US-installed governments of Afghanistan (including the Taliban) were torturing their own people and suppressing their women, and now, with this new bunch of warlords, reinvigorating the agrarian economy with the major Afghan cash crop, the opium poppy?

And the US response? We are "requesting" that he not be put to death. Whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean. Like we couldn't just tell Karzai, Our Boy in Kabul, to back down. Like we would have to go hat in hand to our puppet regime to ask nicely for them to please not do that. Bullshit.

Bottom line, I think the Religious Right -- the American Taliban -- is secretly jealous of their fundo brethren in the Middle East, and they would gladly reinstitute the death penalty here for a wide variety of "crimes", including anti-fundo-Xian apostasy, if they thought they could get away with it.

Give them a few more years, two more stolen elections, and then we'll see what they can do. It isn't a pretty sight to contemplate.