Last Friday I heard the most pellucid bit of stupidity ever to issue from a radio blatherskite.

Yes, the inimitable microphone stylings of...Sean Hannity. The Seanster was justifying our Fearless Leader's incursion into Iraq - this is news?- and uttered the following. This is a paraphrase, as I cannot properly Hannitisetm -his trademark use of the Rule of Three, wherein he uses a word, then uses two synonyms in succession to hammer home the point.

"We are a free country. Therefore, we should export that freedom to the rest of the world. That's why we are doing this."

Ummm, Sean. This is not the playground, where you are forced to share your Pop Tarts with some unfortunate child because it's fair. Freedom does NOT work like that. Freedom does not get shared around because it is NICE to do. Freedom is not a commodity to be parceled out like cans of beans on a shelf.

Freedom has a context.

In the US, our freedom has the context of Western Civilisation, rooted in Christian thought and mores. It is debatable that our nation was ever "Christian" in the Falwell/Robertson/Dobson/D.J. Kennedy sense.
It CERTAINLY grew from a "Christian Consensus", a culture rooted in Biblical understanding and ethics.
Francis Schaeffer ably defends this position in his works.

The politics of Europe, the art, the literature, for all their imperfections, still sprang from a Biblical understanding. Much of English common law sprang from the Scriptures, as Leda from the forehead of Zeus. (Sorry....I could not resist.) Given this context, which provided the basis for the concepts of Freedom, Dignity, and Rights Inherent, how can we expect to transplant "Freedom" alone into a culture that denies liberty to vast swaths of its citizenry, and denies human value to same?

It will not work. It CANNOT work.

Hannity is a sock puppet.