US Dept. of Defense photo

Earlier Cynthia was musing about two different flavors of “conservative” stupid: the citizenship-stripping Liebermongery, and solemn pronouncements that Miranda warnings have magic powers. Both are indeed as dumb as they are dogmatic. Citizen-stripping and ending Miranda warnings for arrested terrorists would be utterly pointless as far as coping with terrorism goes, but both are deeply-held tenets of wingnut fundamentalism nonetheless. As is the perhaps even more absurd but devoutly held article of goobery right-wing faith that unless everyone screams out OMIGOD TEH MUSLIMS ARE COMING TO KILL US every time some geek with a grievance fails to properly set his underpants on fire, America is doomed, or, rather, Dooooooooomed. Hi there, Stephen Hayes, you spectacularly incompetent paranoid hack.

So, three attacks in six months, by attackers with connections to the global jihadist network—connections that administration officials have gone out of their way to diminish.

The most striking thing about all three attacks is not what we heard, but what we haven’t heard. There has been very little talk about the global war that the Obama administration sometimes acknowledges we are fighting and virtually nothing about what motivates our enemy: radical Islam.

Holy shit!

It is not enough for the president to recognize that we’re at war. He has to lead us in the fight.

If only Obama were to say, “what is good in life: to crush radical Islam, to see radical Islamists driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the radical Islamist women,” why, that would spell the end of half-assed bombing attempts in Times Square carried out by sad, addled, easily-led, maladjusted incompetents.

Such people are dangerous, no doubt. And the Taliban are mad bastards. But are we really at war with these clowns?

I should say not. To say so seems to me to gravely overstate the threat, which is serious, but in no way existential, and to create a bizarre false equivalence.

But I guess if your whole paid gig involves hysteria in the service of ill-advised wars, you gotta keep churning out crap like this. It’s a living! For you, at least, for others, it involves a whole lot of dying…