"HAMA HAMA HAMA HAMAS"--RALPH KRAMDON

Welcome one and all to Paranoia Playhouse, where our motto is "What was that noise?" In today's production, we ask our faithful patrons to slip on their triple-layer double-cushioned Depends, because it's time to SHIT A BRICK.

The scenario: Hamas has nailed down either 53 percent (CNN), 64 percent (NBC), or 312,168 percent (Fox News) of the vote in the Palestinian election. Woe betide us. Woe particularly betide Israel, and whatever fragments of the Mideast peace process may still exist.

On the other hand...Bah.

I'd like to seethe with rage and impatience and frustration over what seems to be just one more awful and self-perpetuating turn of events in the eternal death dance of the Semites, but..

1) Neither I nor a number of actual experts think this would be such a terrible thing long-term (see History Of Co-Opting, 2005 edition, Encyclopedia de Bob) if it sucked some or the more unprincipled or fanatic or simply deranged but nevertheless ambitious fringe elements into politics where they belong,

2) It makes things tougher for Bush, and I have gotten to the point where I would condone the barbecuing of kittens if it accomplished that end, and,

3) Is it just me, or isn't there something odd, something off-kilter, something that simply doesn't ring true about a so-called "strict Islamist" group, a "hard-line fundamentalist Muslim" organization, whose name begins with HAM? As in popular pork entree?

Somebody is pulling the western world's leg here. I mean, come on. HAMas? What--was "Allah's Bacon Brigade" already spoken for? I'm sorry, but I simply cannot take a pack of so symbolically ambiguous renegades seriously.

And why have our ever-vigilant Republican overseers been so silent on this angle? Are we to believe that such a glaring ideological self-contradiction could just go blithely unnoticed by the Defense and State Departments and the White House?

Then again, perhaps that's exactly what we should expect from a purportedly anti-porn and pro-abstinence BUSH administration.

Dear God, am I the only one who sees the pattern here?