Kindergarten Nation

It's the Marriage from Hell. Glenn Greenwald, guest-blogging at digby this last week, nails the 9/11 Republicans, so called, for capitulating to Bush/Cheney fear-mongering; nothing so fierce as an angry bedwetter. "You made me pee, you Islamofascist!" They're around every corner, underneath every bed, inside every closet, on the other end of every cellphone call, commanding weapons as mundane as blowtorches, as lethal as a nuke (carried around in a handbag, like a misplaced baby, in plain sight), and, no doubt, wicked evil viruses and bugs that will make all New York City and DC (especially Sally Quinn) break out in boils and froth at the mouth and go all George Romero zombie on us. Not like they don't deserve it (per Pat Robertson - let him speak for himself), but there's not a soul on earth that Rev Pat couldn't scourge for disagreeing with him (anyone see 12 Monkeys lately?).

I'm rather sorry that SZ's poll for Ultimate Wingnut dropped Midge Decter before the finals. She's not as voluble as Malkin or Coulter, or as easy to dismiss - she's a signatory to the PNAC agenda, after all, and she's no bedwetter. Rather, she trains the vulnerable to pee the sheets - fills the troop quotas. Because we are at War - we are always at War, and always have been. Used to be the Soviets, and then they crumbled (for which she can take credit, deserved or not), and now it's the creeping Islamic Horde, which, without our eternal vigilence, will girdle the globe in a 1K Caliphate - nicely done out of crummy Hamburg flats and Florida motels. And you know what? We will have deserved it, not for the Rev Robertson's reasons (G-d hates us), but - to borrow a phrase from Garth - because we are Unworthy. Not Manly/Womanly enough, insufficently belligerant, overly tolerant of anyone (blacks, fags, Euros...) who questions our intellectual and moral leadership, and who might find us constricted and reactionary and dessicated and sour (we used to be in the radical vanguard ourselves, right?).

Why, asks Midge, do I not LEAD? The "New Class" (her term) ignores her warnings and wisdom, at their peril. Mark Steyn is her fellow-traveller, warning (thanks, TBogg!) against 3rd (or other-) worldly fecundity, the soft underbelly of Happy Western Kultur, unprepared and snoozing for the kampf to come. We are always in a decadent death-spiral to these scolds and alarmists; Decter worships Donald Rumsfeld, wrote a hagiography, sucks his fucking balls. The notion that he might be nuts (or merely pathologically evasive and thoughtless on defense policy and military strategy) seems never to have occurred to her - he has the foot Mercurial, the Martial thigh, and that's good enough.

The posture of strength is all - and when everyone stops listening (or, worse, laughs and runs away), you climb to the top of the Empire State (or in the 70's version, the WTC...), and roar and swat and beg for annihilation. Because, as Greenwald intuits, it's really defeat and destruction that the Lords of Fear court - the threat from under the bed, the silent closet, the dust bunnies. The truly lethal threats are too subtle for these people, and getting all grandiose is going to make them miss the real and truly threatening story - a story they are writing today in their own incompetence. And unless they wise up, quick, we are all gonna get fucked. As if we haven't been already, but, whatever - midterms are still in November.