After listening to both Republican and Democrat debates, and being unsatisfied with their answers on the budget, the deficit and government spending, I’d like to urge an embrace of Islam.

Most Americans are suspicious of Islam in general and Muslims in particular, giving them wide berth on the streets and evacuating planes in a jiffy when two or three of them enter the jet’s cabin en masse.

But if used wisely, Muslims could lower our spiraling budget crisis, which is why they should be encouraged to run for public office at all levels and then elected.

Many items in our budget are nothing but what is called pork. Muslims hate pork. It’s against their religion to eat it, touch it or smell it. They can’t even see the “Porkys” movies. If they were in Congress they couldn’t introduce a bill that contained pork, nor could they vote for it. They probably wouldn’t be allowed to touch the paper it was printed on. Such a bill would be unclean and having anything to do with it precludes Paradise.

It stands to reason that if enough Muslims were in office, they could defeat pork the way a teenager defeats complete sentences.

Think about it. Pork would be banished because voting for a bill containing pork would violate their religious beliefs. It’d be like eating barbecued ribs or a BLT. The more militant elected Muslims might even declare a jihad against pork spending and send terrorists out to destroy pork projects already in the works from previous bills.

The savings would be substantial. Take for just one example the the 286 billion transportation bill, which contains close to $24 billion in pork, most notable being “The Don Young CauseWay,” a $231 million dollar bridge from Anchorage to an island populated by fifty people. I hope they build it strong since the wear and tear from all the expected traffic will be substantial. Incidentally, it’s called a Causeway because when Young was asked why he wanted this thing built, he replied, “Because.”

Alaska Representative Don Young, who’s related to the bridge by ego, is responsible for introducing it in the pork section of the bill. Unlike real pork, the kind you can eat, the pork section of any congressional bill is inedible and even if it were, they would be empty calories, making the bill fat without any corresponding nutritional benefits. Alaska’s pork wouldn’t be there if Anchorage had elected, say, Mossaff Al Bada to Congress.

I doubt that the weather in Alaska would attract many Muslims, but the state is a good place to start. Between Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens, pork is rolling uphill to our northernmost state. It looks like those ice road truckers will be working triple time to get those projects done.

Senator Ted is porking up the state with $25,360,000 for rural and native villages; $1,300,000 for berry research; $1,099,000 for alternative salmon products; $500,000 for fruit and berry crop trials for rural villages; $443,000 for new crop opportunities; $331,000 for food preparation and marketing research; $300,000 for commercialization of native plant materials; $250,000 for ethnobotany research; $166,000 for salmon quality standards; and my personal favorite, $75,000 for seafood waste research.

A couple of good Muslim representatives would cut that out completely.

So go out and find a Muslim neighbor. After checking him out for explosives, invite him to meet some influential party bigwigs and elect him to public office. When enough of them are in office, all Americans will be praising Allah.