[sarcasm] Now, now, Noah... those guys shooting pregnant women and toddlers in the backs of their heads are just like George Washington, you know? [/sarcasm]
Point of fact, the terrorists do share one thing with the Father of Our Country - wooden body parts. In Washington's case, though, it was just his teeth; for the Islamists, it's the entire head.
The real problem was stated very clearly by James Lileks last Wednesday ([url=http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/04/0504/051204.html]http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/04/0504/051204.html[/url]). When faced with something like the crime which sparked the Fallujah uprising, or Nicholas Berg's murder (or Daniel Pearl's before him), there are five possible reactions: rejection, denial, indifference, endorsement, or participation; and of these, four of them aid the enemy's cause. The net result of Mr. Usher's verbal contortions is to try to blur those five distinctions, which leads me to consider a sixth reaction, peculiar to self-loathing Westerners: Toadying. It must amaze the jihadi to see someone so completely in their pockets without taking any actual bribe money - not that certain Toadies haven't done that as well.