In any case, Hastert’s office basically just laughed it off at the time

In any case, Hastert’s office basically just laughed it off at the time, but now 5 months later, for

some strange reason, they have decided to defend themselves – in a quite pathetic manner.

BradBlog has the letter from Hastert’s attorney (including David Rose’s response) and Sibel’s

complete demolition of of their too little too late defense of his actions.

Matt opines that Flemming Rose, the provocateur who commissioned the Muhammed-is-a-terrorist cartoons,

can’t be accused of double-standards because he’s reprinting cartoons “satirizing” the Holocaust.

Not so fast, Matt: wait until he decides to visit David Irving in jail, perhaps with a file hidden

inside a cake.

The point is that this issue has absolutely nothing to do with “free speech,” since the Danish

government never tried to censor the cartoons. What it’s all about is hate, pure and simple — the

kind of hate that precedes a war. With Rose bloviating about a “culture war” and a “clash of

civilizations,” there isn’t any doubt about his intentions. The extremes, in this case, feed on each

other. Somewhere, Osama bin Laden is smiling …