Reason #134,572 to Burn Your Republican Party Voter Registration Card: I am admittedly a glutton for punishment, as one can readily discern from the fact that I am even aware of the article to which I refer in this missive. The king of “Don’t Bother Me With The Facts” and the flag bearer for unthinking, non-intellectual, lemming-esque conservatism, Rush Limbaugh, has determined in his infinite lack of wisdom that the attempts to hammer out a peace deal in the mid-east are merely an attempt to form a “Palestinian Terrorist State.” This apparently assumes that all Palestinians (by birth?) are terrorists. Nevermind that the Jewish state was more or less carved out and planted there by western powers not so very long ago. Furthermore, while I have the deepest sympathy for the families and loved ones of the Israelis killed in any and all of the terrorists acts committed over there, I fail to see how carrying the battle to the average Palestinian in the street is going to solve anything, or even how we can morally condone Israeli military action against Palestinian civilians. In his article, Limbaugh has the audacity to mention Hitler, and the fact that he had his own state and was still basically a big weenie on a global scale, but he fails to note the other similarities to Nazi Germany, like the rounding up of members of specific ethnic and/or religious groups into camps, based on nothing other than such membership. Instead of the Nazis, now we have the Israeli military, and the ethnic group is now Palestinians, not Jews. One would think that the Israelis would have a heightened sensitivity to such things. And while I understand the whole “well, if we give them what they want, they’ll think terror worked” argument, I’m a little sketchy on the whole “keep them oppressed and shoot at them, and they’ll stop being so darn mean” approach. That approach has been the status quo, and it doesn’t seem to be working; maybe it’s time to start treating the Palestinians as humans, and deal with the terrorists as they pop up...call me crazy, but if you work to eliminate the source of the problem, maybe you could at least stem or stop the tide of generation upon generation of pissed-off Palestinians who become involved in terrorist groups...take away their cause, and eventually they’ll die. Back this out a notch, and from a global perspective, we should think really hard about strong-arming the world to take our position on terrorism, or be considered terrorists. At what point will using force be too expensive, in lives, weapons, etc.? I abhor terrorism, too, but to be totally pragmatic, when your opponent WANTS to die for the cause, and doesn’t care who or how many go with them, it may be time to rethink the standard “shoot the bad guy” approach.