The most oft-quoted line of Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo of the 50s and 60s is “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Given that the liberal media has so clearly become cheerleaders for America’s defeat in Iraq, it is only appropriate that To The Point refer from now on to them as the Pogo Press.

Perhaps such a label will help the Bush White House to realize that the Pogo Press has become so suffused with Bush-hatred that it has become America’s Number One Enemy in the War on Terrorism. That is, the Pogos understand that America cannot be defeated militarily in Iraq, just as we couldn’t in Vietnam, and can only be defeated politically, which we were in Vietnam.

Thus they are determined to engineer a Vietnam-like political defeat in Iraq no matter how catastrophic the loss of Iraqi lives in a resultant civil war or the future of freedom for the entire Middle East or America’s capacity to defend itself against Al Qaeda terrorism - that’s all worth it in order to ensure George Bush’s defeat in November.

Playwright and socialism-advocate George Bernard Shaw famously declared a century ago that “We’re all socialists now” - meaning that socialist ideas had so permeated English society they were advocated however disguised even by their opponents.

The current hysteria over the “abuse” of Iraqi prisoners is evidence that American society has become so infected with envy-appeasing liberalism that “We’re all liberals now.”

Chinese are fond of compressing a social, political, or economic issue into a set of bullet points designated by the number of them. One of the most famous was “The Three Rounds,” encapsulating Chinese material dreams as they began emerging from the horror of Mao Tse Tung.

You were wealthy in post-Mao China if you possessed a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine -- the three “rounds.”

That was a quarter-century ago. Comparing the dream of having The Three Rounds to China’s economy today gives you an idea of how amazingly far China has traveled in that period. China has been speeding along a highway of wealth creation that has few parallels in history - yet now it looks like it is going to drive right off a cliff.

What is transforming the Chinese economy from a dream to a nightmare are The Three No’s: No Water, No Wives, and No Banks.

Cortez and his Spanish soldiers who conquered the Aztecs are known to history as “Conquistadors.” That label of “Conquerors” was applied to them by their contemporaries -- but it originated a generation earlier. It was first used to describe the Spaniards who liberated their own country from Islam.

Arab invaders had swept across Spain in the early 700s, and it took centuries for the Spanish to kick them out. Cortez was not yet 10 years old when they were finally ejected from their last stronghold in Grenada in 1492. When Cortez first looked upon the pyramid temples of the Aztec gods, he called them mezquitas -- mosques.

Cortez saw himself as a liberator -- just as his fathers had liberated Spain from the Islamic yoke, so he would liberate “New Spain” from the Aztec yoke. Yet he had little idea of how deep were the political-religious parallels between the Arabs and the Aztecs.

The parallels go beyond the death worship of Aztec warriors and Arab suicide-bombers. One of the latter responsible for the train bombings in Madrid declared in a letter: “You (Christians) love life -- we (Moslems) love death.” Compare this Aztec poem:

There is nothing like death in war
Nothing like the flowery death
So precious to the gods who give us life
Far off I see it! My heart yearns for it!

The deeper parallel is this: both the Arabs and the Aztecs invented a Religion of Jihad as a rationale to justify their imperialist empires.

At a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico this week, George Bush assured America: “I know what I’m doing” regarding winning the war against Moslem terrorists in Iraq and threatening our country. Although the Pogo Press is doing its best to prevent voters from figuring it out, GW is right. He is conducting a full court press right now, and rolling the terrorists up in a ball.

Let’s start with Afghanistan. The Taliban is breaking apart. About one-third of the Taliban remnants still fighting in Afghanistan have broken away from Taliban leader Mohammed Omar, who has now lost control of a number of his senior commanders. The pressure of 18,000 American and NATO soldiers relentlessly hunting them down and killing them has precipitated the dissolution of the Taliban.

Then there are all the contract guys across the border in Pakistan.

To update you on the Freedom Research Foundation delegation to Croatia with Congressman George Radonovich, June 26-July 3:

The delegation,led by me and accompanied by Congressman George Radonovich, will be focusing on investment opportunities in real estate, tourism, construction companies, and investment banking.

As I mentioned last week (“The Pro-America VIP Investment European Vacation,” now posted in the Classics section), we’ll be meeting with Prime Minister Ivo Senader, government officials, business leaders and bankers.

The liberal Alphabet Media is once again doing its best to snatch American defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq. This time, however, there is a very big difference:

The State Department is causing most of the problems in the War in Iraq today. Squishiness is endemic to Foggy Bottom. There’s something that oozes out of Foggy Bottom that emasculates people. Richard Armitage, for example, is a powerfully built weightlifter who intimidated a lot of folks when he was at the Pentagon. Once he became a State bureaucrat, he’s just another sissified pinstripe whimpering about how the Mullah Dictatorship in Iran is really a special kind of democracy.