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These are some sobering and important essays to read as we launch into the primary season to nominate our next president. A couple in American Thinker take a look at Pakistan and what is happening around the globe in Islamic jihad and Jed Babbin looks at attempts by islamists to stifle free speech in the West.
Andrew Walden in TaT

Clouded by illusions that words like "democracy" and "president" mean similar things everywhere, and by the inevitable martyrdom that accompanies a brutal assassination, Americans are rather ill-prepared to understand the unvarnished truth of the problem Pakistan now poses.
"I am what the terrorists most fear" says Benazir Bhutto in an interview to be published now posthumously in the January 6 Parade Magazine. Sounds good to American ears.
But she was grasping and self-interested, a beneficiary of Saddam's Oil for Food scam. Parade, in the kind of unvarnished look only possible before the assassination quotes Bhutto's own niece saying, "She has no legacy of her own except for corruption and violence."

Walid Phares in TaT

The conflict we call the War on Terror still continues at the end of 2007 and all indications are that its battlefields are expected to spread further, and escalate, in the upcoming year.
The following is a global assessment of the confrontation that has taken place since 2001, though the systematic war waged by the Jihadi forces against democracies and the free world began at least a decade before 9/11. This evaluation isn't comprehensive or definitive, but a collection of observations related to major benchmarks, directions and projections.

Jed Babbin in Human Events

Under assault by Muslims and multiculturalists, free speech and freedom of the press are dead in Britain. The same sorts of people who killed them in Britain are killing them in Canada. They and their allies are using the British and Canadian courts and tribunals to bury our First Amendment rights in America.
Muslims -- individually and in pressure groups -- are using British libel laws and Canadian “human rights” laws to limit what is said about Islam, terrorists and the people in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere who are funding groups such as al-Queda. The cases of Rachel Ehrenfeld and Mark Steyn prove the point.

Read all three essays and take them into consideration before you cast your vote, Mitt, Rudy, John and Fred get it, Mike is lost in a cornfield somewhere.