First, please direct your attention to the left, where, in the "LINKS" section, you will see a new repository for the distinctive blend of impotent political posturing in which I occassionally engage.  It is entitled "Clown Central Station".  Bookmark it, read it, send me money for it.

Does this mean that there will be no more political writing here, or on my Livejournal (marked above, as "Skullbucket")?  Most certainly not!  I have enough venom to ink a thousand blogs.

Now:  Doomsday.

 ***

One of the most common cavils directed at war critics by the chattering classes of the fightin' right is that they want the war to go badly.  So determined are the left to see us fail in Iraq that they are willing to see American soldiers die to be proven right; so powerful is the combination of their hate for President Bush and their love of liberalism that they will protect the rights of terrorists abroad, leading to the ultimate extinguishing of freedom at home.

The argument, of course, is nonsense; to begin with, it ignores the fact that the liberal wing of American politics didn't want to go to war in the first place, which sort of undercuts the argument that they're anxious to see American soldiers die.  If your friend decides, against your wishes, to run headfirst into a wall, your fondest desire is not that the resultant trauma is excessively damaging; it's that he doesn't do it in the first place, and if he does, that he suffers little and learns his lesson.  Second, the left has no real need to root for things to go south in Iraq; events are conspiring all on their own to make that a to turn the whole situation into a rat-trap.  And third, when has wishing an end to war ever been unpatriotic?  Every soldier on every battlefield, no matter how heroic, has always wished for an end to war.  Every patriot in every nation has always wanted war to end, even if it's a vital war of national defense, let alone a pointless war of economic imperialism.  It is a madman, not a patriot, who wishes for wars to continue on forever.

But speaking of madness, what is this dreanged bloodlust for the American people manifested by so many on the right?  Reading contemporary accounts, one would think that it's not the jihadists of the world who want to see American cities consumed in nuclear flames, but keyboard-clatterering American conservatives, self-described patriots one and all.  It's they who spin the most murderous scenarios, it's they who as much as lust openly after the horrible demise of millions of their fellow countrymen, all so the liberals can be show just how wrong they are about the Global War on Terror.  It's playing their game to suggest they'd actually be happy if Denver or Seattle went up in a mushroom cloud, but if it's not something they actually want, they sure do talk about it a lot.  Hardly a day goes by without one of the rightist blogs featuring a doomsday scenario involving the loss of a second-tier major metropolital statistical area at the hands of Islamist devil-dogs.

When, on the popular terrorist-thriller 24, shadowy Mohametans set off a suitcase nuke in Valencia, CA, the squeals of delight from the 101st Fighting Keyboardists set off car alarms blocks away.  At last, they had a cause they could fight for!  A major populated area had gone up in dust and smoke, on national television no less -- right there in full view of all the namby-pamby, terror-coddling liberals, on the highest-rated show on television!  The fact that it was all fiction didn't seem to make any difference to the chickenhawks; the very next day, regulars on the National Review's web log, The Corner, were spouting "Remember Valencia!" as a slogan to spur on our brave boys and girls in uniform, just as if it was something that really happened instead of CGI with even less reality than the Cottingley Fairies.  Finally, they had a nice juicy mass slaughter of Americans the loony liberals could chew on, even if they'd had to make it up.

The latest atrocity committed by the blood-drunk legions of Mohammed took place in the pages of Town Hall, the leading rightist bloviatory -- not quite as prestige an address as that of prime time on the FOX network, but one gets the message out where one can.  It came in the form of a bit of speculative fiction from Kevin McCullough, a third-tier typing head who one must respect, despite his Neanderthal politics and his under-the-refrigerator prose style, for the courage to call his blog "The Musclehead Revolution", thus reclaiming for Republican pride a word that for too long was synonymous with 'moron'.  In McCullough's fantasy, the butchering sons of Allah let loose with an amazing eight multi-megaton nuclear attacks, immediately after the 2008 presidential elections, no less!  As Washington, Dallas, Boston, and other cities decay under molten mounds of radiactive rubble, the Musclehead deploys his best prose style, whcih turns out to be about as good as the one featured by that metalhead kid who sat next to you in 11th grade and was really into Mack Bolan novels, to show us what horrors await us if we are foolish enough to elect Barack Obama to high office.  (McCullough likewise kills off Dick Cheney, but can't bring himself to murder the president, who is allowed to escape with a trip to intensive care.)

Civility is a thing said long lost in political discourse, and many -- who apparently slept through the Clinton presidency -- like to blame it on the Democrats, who, it is claimed, are so blinded by their hatred of Bush that they make him a Hitler when all he is is a Napoleon.  What, though, to make of the fact that the left -- who, at the very worst, are now doing nothing more than point out that the war is going exactly as bad as they said it was going to -- are accused of reveling in the deaths of Americans because it proves them right?  Even if if were true -- even if one leading liberal had ever wished for the slaughter of a single American soldier, which naturally has not taken place and will never take place, at least they'd be building their opposition on the very real corpses of very real heroes.  The right-wing bloodlust is far more exansive:  they won't be happy, it seems, until they can prop up their ludicrous arguments against a massive, millions-high midden of massacred civilians.

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"Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process." (Karl Jaspers)