If I ask you to think of India, the image that most likely appears in your minds eye would be the Taj Mahal. Arguably the most famous building in the world and considered by many to be the most beautiful structure mankind has ever created, it was completed in 1648 by the ruler of India, Shah Jehan, to immortally entomb his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal.There is a painful problem with this image, however, for the great majority of folks in India: the Taj Mahal isnt an Indian building. Its Moslem, and thus for Indians a symbol of Islamic imperialism.

Bill Safire is normally the only thing worth reading in the New York Times, and he proved it with his latest column (datelined 12/8/03), which is devoted to completely messing up the mind of every Bush-hating Democrat in America.

It is a commonplace in a story or article about the Arab-Israeli conflict that mentions Jerusalem to repeat the Moslem mantra that “Jerusalem is the third holiest city in all Islam, next to Mecca and Medina.” You’ve heard this innumerable times -- but how come? Just why is Jerusalem so important to not just Jews and Christians but Moslems as well?

This is a black day, a day for anyone associated with the Republican Party to be ashamed and embarrassed. Piling a new trillion-dollar Medi-Pander entitlement to appease geezer-beggars on top of all the others that the Republicans should be busy eliminating is way, way beyond scandalous. Why, then, has the Republican Party from President Bush on down become determined to betray its basic principles?

Let’s play fill-in-the-blanks. In general, Americans and Europeans are Christians. Arabs are Moslems. Indians are Hindus. Chinese are _________? If you have trouble filling in the last blank, it’s because the answer is blank. From time immemorial, the Chinese have been the least religious of any of history’s major civilizations. Daoism, Confucianism, Chinese Buddhism are rationalistic quasi-religions lacking any personal relationship with a transcendent deity or deities. The ancestor- and spirit-worship of Chinese folk religion is individualized to families only.

A year from now you and I will be celebrating George W. Bush’s re-election. It’s in the bag, and the reason why is deeper than the economy or Iraq. It’s because GW figured out Bill Clinton’s secret while the Dems forgot it.

I love the way President Bush mispronounces the Iraqi dictator’s name:  SAH-dum, not sah-DAM.  Whereas the latter pronunciation in Arabic means “One Who Confronts,” the former means “Barefoot Beggar.”  Be assured that when GW says SAH-dum in his speeches broadcast to the Arabic world, he is doing it on purpose.

The Barefoot Beggar has finally agreed to let in UN inspectors because he is confident he can hide his WMD — weapons of mass destruction — from them.  But if GW tells Dick Cheney to give his former colleagues at Halliburton a call about utilizing oil field discovery technology, that

Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?  It's the Left -- liberals, left-wingers, socialists, commies, pinkos, the Noam Chomskys and Alec Baldwins and Barbra Streisands -- that hates America.  But the Right -- good old flag-waving patriotic God Bless America conservatives?  How could they possibly be anti-American?  It sounds ridiculous.Yet whatever sense or nonsense it makes, Anti-Americanism is seeping into the entire conservative movement and is threatening to splinter it into pieces.