Maher ought to be in Trey Parker and Matt Stone's next "Team America" spoof along with Sean Penn, Timothy Robbins, Matt Damon, Alec Baldwin and the rest of those who believe their celebrity rates them a high place to pronounce platitudes and sound bites about sweeping phenomena like "religion."

With no understanding of the interior life or belief systems of those religions he does not practice, he will only succeed in what many other celebrities have accomplished: betraying his ignorance and sharing it with a market of like-minded persons, hence perpetuating and expanding ignorance in the name of dispelling it.

Apparently many celebrities assume that their own secular religious heritage or culture is somehow superior to the little people whose religion their religious heritage disdains, a.k.a. in this case, principally, religions which believe God is a real being.

I'll never forget or cease to respect the quality of portrayal of Judaism the faith in God (not the secular cultural hate movement including Maher) in Chaim Potok's "The Chosen." Robby Benson's performance in it was outstanding, and the view of the faith had depth, not a flippant foolishness. There is respect, not ridicule for the conscience based Judaism of reality among Christians struggling to keep their own faith and who see their faith in the Judaic context.

Those disdaining God believing faiths undermine the subjects of one civil right, religious free exercise, using another, speech. Their effect: to render religious rights meaningless by reducing popular respect for religions.

Maher, a political commentator as much as comedian, has merged his politics with his anti-religion and uses his profession as a sort of 527 lobby against religions that believe in God. History shows that those groups who become the ridiculed class in a nation's popular culture and politics are often set-up for persecution or oppression. In 1930's Vienna that was certainly true.

It can happen to any religion or group, and has. Maher, ignorantly or not, discriminates with his ridicule against those who have faith in God as a Personal Being.

Amitai Etzioni has wisely reminded us that Afghanistan is a guerilla insurgency in which guerilla tactics, such as blending with civilians, is used in the name of liberating those civilians.

If the famed al-Qaeda transmission that cautioned al-Zarqawi against killing so many Muslims in Iraqi truly came from OBL and al-Zawahari, one would think that the same counsel has reached the Taliban. Or, if OBL is caput, perhaps Russian advisors are now returning the CIA's favor of the late 1970s.

And maybe the Taliban have caught onto the Viet Cong example. Rather than blow up huge gatherings of fellow Afghans or Muslims, a la Iraq, the Taliban has figured out that all they need to do is provoke the Americans to fire on them among many civilians. And every news report will talk about the children; always the children who suffer most from war. It will be all true, yet that truth will have been engineered via guerilla tactics so nasty that we could in no way maintain civilization on Earth if they were universally applied.

After which the sympathetic Taliban fighters heroically enter town and declare jihad against the atrocities of the evil, uncivilized Americans who only talk a good game about civilized life.

Obviously, Pakistan is a safe haven for the Taliban, yet increasingly unsafe as US drones and special operations units make it so. Cambodia.

With such nastiness developing in Afghanistan-Pakistan, the Iraq occupation appears more and more the hole of the giant ant lion.

There comes a time in Iraq when victory must be defined, and the definition cannot require a utopia, must include self-determination and has to have a finish line.

Otherwise, if American troops are going to stay there indefinitely, it will likely first become a larger Lebanon complete with refugees and an Iran-backed militias, Sunni militias, persecuted Christians, or, to prevent that, an imperial colony of the United States ruled with imperial ruthlessness and efficiency. And 4 billion dollars a month.

This was the first bailout, and Afghanistan will come after Wall Street.