Demagogue

The Bush administration did a masterful job of connecting Saddam Hussein with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, even though Saddam's Iraq had no confirmed connection to the al Qaeda terrorist who perpetrated these attacks.

But I'm not quite sure what Michael Barone's motive is in this column as he tries to connect Muslim terrorism with a proposed increase in the U.S. minimum wage and the Kyoto accord.

Referring to British officials' arrest of 23 Muslims suspected of a plot to detonate bombs on transatlantic airline flights, Barone writes:

The arrests were a reminder that there still are lots of people in the world -- and quite possibly in this country, too -- who are trying to kill as many of us as they can and to destroy our way of life.

They are not unhappy because we haven't raised the minimum wage lately or because Bush rejected the Kyoto Treaty or even because we're in Iraq.

Actually, al Qaeda is very unhappy that we're in Iraq. Osama bin Laden sounded pretty pissed in April when he called the U.S. presence in Iraq a "Zionist crusade against Muslims." Shouldn't someone like Barone, a Fox News commentator and a senior writer at US News & World Report, be aware of this?

Perhaps Barone considers his phrase to be a clever way of dissing the minimum wage and the Kyoto accord -- i.e., Muslim terrorists don't care about those issues so why should we?

This line of argument is not only stupid -- it also works both ways. I doubt that Muslim extremists are unhappy with America because the federal income tax was cut a few years ago. But so what? Is this knowledge supposed to tell us that tax cuts are good or bad?

Are the reasons why Muslim terrorists are unhappy some sort of basis for assessing America's domestic policy agenda? Or is this sentence just a strange literary hiccup that Barone couldn't suppress?