Almost every day, al Qaeda suspects or affiliated terrorists are arrested somewhere in the world. Islamic fascists blow up Israelis, behead Nepalese, murder Russians children in schools and on the street, and kidnap French journalists (so much for appeasement). They want to destroy trains in New York as they did in Madrid. They seek to ruin democracy in Kabul and Baghdad and take down Russian airliners. Nearly each week they are caught forming cells in Europe and the United States — all akin in their desire for theocracy, incoherent demands, partiality for barbarous methods of killing civilians, and hatred of Western-style liberalism and freedom.

Now we learn that they may well turn their attention to targeted assassinations here at home — in the manner in which Osama bin Laden took out General Massoud of the Northern Alliance on the eve of the September 11 attacks, and like the various efforts to incinerate General Musharraf in Pakistan. The problem is not only that such efforts would be aimed at short-circuiting the nerve center of the United States, but also that previous reckless talk on the part of some cultural elites at home would only accentuate the turmoil.

The 2002 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Nicholson Baker, is due out with Checkpoint — an extended dialogue on killing (in a variety of strange ways) George Bush. Last year, comedian Rick Hall played to full houses in the U.K., performing his newest composition, "Let's Get Together and Kill George Bush." A so-called pacifist group announced its sponsorship of a rather violent-sounding off-Broadway "guerilla comedy" entitled, I'm Gonna Kill the President.

This is stupid — and dangerous. Al Qaeda has announced its intentions play on perceptions of Western decadence and nihilism. Should the terrorists strike at our leaders, there will be a national accounting over the failure of those on the left to condemn such extremism. Alfred A. Knopf, for example, is promoting Baker's book as a cris du coeur — "in response to the powerless seething fury many Americans felt when President Bush decided to take the nation to war."

"Seething"? The radical Left is courting disaster and threatens to destroy the credibility of liberals who are apparently fearful of condemning the madness in their midst — this "cry of the heart" to save Saddam Hussein from the wrath of an imperialistic and bullying United States. When upscale protestors swear at delegates and parade obscene signs in New York while John Kerry goes windsurfing in shades and racing gloves, you have a recipe for disaster for wannabe populists.