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The New York Times this morning has a particularly lush installment of one of the American media's most favored, reliable, and self-affirming rituals -- it's time to mock and pity Those Crazy, Primitive, Irrational, Propagandized Muslims and their Wild Conspiracy Theories, which their reckless media and extremists maliciously disseminate in order to generate unfair and unfounded hostility toward the U.S.:

A spate of horrific civilian killings by NATO in Afghanistan has led Afghan President Hamid Karzai to demand that NATO cease all air attacks on homes.  That is likely to be exactly as significant as you think it would be, as The Los Angeles Times makes clear: "This should be the last attack on people's houses," the president told a news conference in Kabul. "Such attacks will no longer be allowed." Karzai's call was viewed as mainly symbolic. Western military officials cited existing cooperation with Afghan authorities and pledged to continue consultations, but said privately that presidential authority does not include veto power over specific targeting decisions made in the heat of battle. So we're in Afghanistan to bring Freedom and Democracy to the Afghan People, but the President of the country has no power whatsoever to tell us to stop bombing Afghan homes.  His decrees are simply requests, merely "symbolic." Karzai, of course, is speaking not only for himself, but even more so for (and under pressure from) the Afghan People: the ones we're there to liberate, but who -- due to their strange, primitive, inscrutable culture and religion -- are bizarrely angry about being continuously liberated from their lives: "Karzai's statements . . . underscored widespread anger among Afghans over the deaths of noncombatants at the hands of foreign forces."