No wonder Republicans sometimes feel like we are fighting an uphill battle for the hearts and minds of America.

It's hard not to feel that way when some of our own are actually honoring the very people on the left who seek to defeat us.

Witness this dispatch from today's Ithaca Journal:

ITHACA -- State Senator John R. Kuhl Jr., R-53rd District, recognized three women, including two from Tompkins County, in the New York State Senate's sixth annual "Women of Distinction" program at an awards ceremony in Albany.

This year's honorees [included] Asma Barlas ...of Ithaca.

Barlas is the associate professor and chair of the department of politics and the former director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity at Ithaca College.

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Barlas is virulantly Anti-Republican, Anti-American and appears to be an Anti-Semite.

Shortly after September 11, Barlas penned a column for the Ithaca College Alumni magazine in which she proclaimed that people like Osama bin Laden, as well as all sorts of "moderates" hate America because America's foreign policy since World War II has been one that "seeks control over the entire world by any means necessary." Furthermore, Barlas said, "people everywhere are sick and tired" of our "political economy based on their systematic abuse, exploitation, expropriation, and degradation."

Responding to a study that found Ithaca college "plagued by liberal bias," Barlas accused Republicans of trying to "stamp out diversity in the name of diversity" and made derogatory comments towards "conservative white male[s]."

In addition, she accused the Bush administration of conducting "unilateral, unprovoked, and unlawful act of aggression" against Iraq, and surely delighted anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists everywhere by parroting the lie that war against Iraq was "promoted 'by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals ... people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history'."

To be blunt, Kuhl might have better honored one of the Dixie Chicks, or even Susan Sarandon.

His recognition of this venonmous toad of a woman as a "woman of distinction" demonstrates his complete incompetence as a Republican Senator and his total inability to represent the views of his conservative Upstate New York Constituency.

He should step down immediately.