There’s not time for a long blog entry this morning. (Please, stop! The cheering hurts my ears.)

President Bush, who promised that he was going to be a “uniter, not a divider,” is succeeding at this beyond my wildest dreams. So far, he has nearly united the Muslims of the world in their desire to see the United States destroyed. In fact, as near as I can tell, we now rank above Israel in our ability to inspire terrorists to give up their lives to destroy us.

But that wasn’t enough. The Bush Administration has shown that it will not rest until the entire world is united. Spain, once an ally, is increasingly showing not the apathy for which conservatives (wrongly) love to vilify them, but energetic anger against the United States.

Conservatives, of course, don’t just claim that the Spaniards are wimps for refusing to foment hatred and war in the Middle East and for putting citizens at risk for war we shouldn’t even have begun. Let’s remember, we were and are the Aggressors; Iraq did not attack the U.S., al Queda did. I have no doubts that Al Queda is very active in Iraq right now, but there was no evidence that they were before — or whatever evidence there was was buried under all the evidence for the Weapons of Mass Destruction.

But, as I said, it’s not just the Spaniards that conservatives, driven by the Great Uniter, go after. In the United States, anyone who disagrees with the U.S. government’s approach is labeled “unpatriotic.”

These labels and the name-calling do not solve the very real problems that exist. They only deflect us from taking a long hard look in the mirror and resolving to fix what the rest of the world already sees. When I was young, my father used to say,

If someone tells you you’re a duck, feel free to disregard them. If someone else calls you a duck, you might chalk it up to coincidence. About the fifth or sixth time someone calls you a duck, you’d darn well better check yourself for feathers.

It’s high time Americans pulled their heads out of the conservative kiss-fest. The Shi’is and the Sunnis are uniting. The rest of the world is uniting. Heck, even large numbers of Americans (liberals!) are uniting! The President’s plan to unite is working too well. The problem is, it’s uniting everyone against us.

I think it’s time we started checking ourselves for feathers.