Yes. Yes it is, and you're helping.

Andrew C. McCarthy, in this overwrought Washington Examiner piece, is all atwitter that the "Islamists" are coming to get us with their sharias and their burkas and their furrin ways. Next we'll be drinking tooth-numbingly sweet tea and smoking tobacco in our water pipes! It's just not right!

He starts by asking a question that would be relevant to any such discussion, if the irony weren't so palpable:

Should we hold that people are no longer free to govern themselves, to make their own law irrespective of any religious code?

Should we abandon the republican democracy our Constitution guarantees in favor of a theocracy?

Let me guess, Andew, that the correct answer is "no." And I agree. But I would also say the answer would be no if you had ended your paragraphs with "Irrespective of any political philosophy" and "In favor of an oligarchy." Or "Irrespective of anything whatever," and just drop all the ambiguities inherent in the second para entirely. Still no. I've a feeling then we wouldn't agree.

I don't need some "Islamist" (and did you just make that word up?) shoving his religious law down my sovereign throat, and I wouldn't put up with it. But you know what, Andrew? Nobody's tried to do that lately and I don't see it on the horizon no matter how hard you monger that fear. But I had to move to the gorram freezing desert to get a minute's peace from your dictatorial friends in government, into whose arms you'd have me run for protection from some mythical "Islamists" who plot by night to make me kneel on a rug. I get very angry about that sometimes, Andrew. And that bunch of law-wavers is here now, not hiding in some cave, and it only seems to bother you when the wrong bunch of bastards is holding the hammer.

You did get one thing right, though. Right at the end, and I wish you'd looked at what you wrote more carefully. You said:

The Islamist promise to conquer America sounds far-fetched. We are not talking, though, about raging armies or terror cells. The threat is the steady erosion of our liberties and capacity to defend ourselves. That is only too real.

And you were dead right, Andrew. The problem is that you're so damned brainwashed about who's doing the eroding that you can't see what's plainly right in front of you.