Just what does a Muslim democracy entail?

I appreciate that the Muslim Brotherhood claims it represents a third option, neither secular democracy nor authoritarian theocracy.

But, what does that mean? We still don't know in Iraq. In Afghanistan, the Taliban would win elections today; it won acclamations or whatever in the past. We had a brief Muslim democracy in Algeria in the past.

I mean, I'm not Faux News paranoid about the Muslim Brotherhood, or even close to it. But, I'm not buying that it's all sweetness and light, either; there's a PR line that's being told to us.

Let's put it this way: If I said "Christian democracy" I could go one of two ways. Were I in Europe, I'd be thinking Angela Merkel. Were I in the U.S., I'd be thinking Sarah Palin.

While I don't think the Muslim Brotherhood is Sarah Palin, I don't think it's Angela Merkel either. And, it's at least as close to Palin as it is to Merkel, I'm guessing.

How to misrepresent European politics, 101

The WSJ editorial page, in discussing the possibility of Mike Huckabee remaking the GOP into an American version of a Christian Democrat party, blames European Christian Democrats for everything this side of the plague and crack cocaine.

Among the predictable canards is blaming Christian Democrats for a “high” unemployment rate, without even explaining that Europe calculates unemployment far differently than we do, and that, it doesn’t lock up a bumch of drug-related criminals; that, combined with the drug-war infrastructure here, has a definite effect on U.S. unemployment numbers, too.

In short, if we compared apples to apples, the unemployment rate difference would be cut in half.

The WSJ also fails to mention 4-5 weeks of paid vacation, national health care and other things that we just don’t enjoy here.

As usual, they’re not reading their own news pages, of course.