Finally, we agree

Well, Bush, I'm excited. I've finally found something we can agree on. I absolutely approve your very public decision not to meet with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams at the White House tomorrow, on St. Patrick's Day. I'm glad that you'[ve chosen instead to honor those sisters of an innocent victim of the IRA.

I've actually been appalled for years by the sentimental American attachment to all things they consider Irish, including a bunch of thugs who find nothing better to do in pursuit of supposedly political goals than to murder their fellow countrymen. It pleases me no end to see the IRA humbled, in the past couple of weeks, by a group of women with guts enough to stand up to them following the despicable, cynically public murder of their brother and its subsequent cover-up by their usual tactic of brutal intimidation. Gerry Adams's belated statement of condemntation was fatally undermined by his need to add, in the end, a sop to the IRA in the form of his absurd insistence on the IRA's right to resort to terrorist violence in pursuit of "legitimate" political goals.

What political goals are legitimate enough, Bush, to warrant the slaughter of innocent people? You're right to take a firm public stance.

It has angered me for years, too, that much of the financial support for this outrageous behavior comes from the United States, which has supplied arms and money to this terrorist organization for, I have to suppose again, purely sentimental reasons. I must say that I have never fully understood that attachment of Americans of Irish heritage to their country of origin. Well, to the country, perhaps, and its cultural heritage. That I understand, being something of an exile myself. But not their adherence to a political ideology which has long since overstepped all bounds of reason into terrorist fanaticism. It's no longer honest to claim that this is about defending the country from oppressive British rule.

And, while we're at it, the excessive celebration of St. Patrick's Day itself seems to me a curious anomoly. Green beer? Parades? It seems to me--excuse the Puritan attitude, Bush--nothing more than the pretext for wild parties whose participants include for the most part people who don't have an ounce of Irish blood in their veins, let alone a belief in the Catholic saint whose day in the ecclesiastical calendar they purport to celebrate. The whole thing seems to me absurd.

I'm sure I'll stand accused of English prejudice on this score. So be it. But my cause for celebration, Bush, is that you can I can actually agree, one this one day at least. Chalk that one up as a major achievement for the IRA.