A farrago of claptrap

WSJ calls for more war, again

Blah, blah, blah.

War, war, war.

The war-party right, and by no means just in WSJ, is screaming this morning about the existential threat posed to Western Civilization by ISIS and calling for - dare I say it? - a new Crusade to subjugate if not eliminate at least Jihader Islam if not Islam sans phrase.

Rudy has gone well over the top and plainly intends to stay there.

The Paranoid Style of Rudy Giuliani

Rudy Giuliani's disgusting attack on Barack Obama

He has done us the great disservice of focusing the morning's nonsense on the wholly unhelpful and silly question, does O love America?

Some days more than others, I'll wager.

And most likely some days - maybe most days, I don't know - not so much, as I have myself noted in other posts.

All the same, though his approach to the question of how far Islam is implicated in, uh, the Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic violence of Islamic Jihaders and terrorists all over the world is sometimes just too preciously PC not to be annoying, it is not clear there is anything to be gained by a shift in rhetoric and there does seem to be much to lose.

And the most immediate losers are apt to be those who have far more to lose than we, the Muslim leaders and states opposed to the Jihaders and their ideology, and so in varying degrees actively on the same side as we are.

And leaving talk about talk aside, recall that in truth America does not need to fight a war against ISIS at all and has much, much less reason for concern about the rise of Muslim neo-medievalism than those same anti-medievalist governments I just mentioned and, after them, non-Muslim states or regions right on the borders of Muslim lands.

Rudy is right

Kevin Williamson takes the opportunity of Rudy's remarks to walk right around both Rudy's topic - O the foreigner - and the more relevant and more American problem of black alienation in order to excoriate contemporary progressivism, the progressivism of the children of Zinn, among the more moderate of whom O seems pretty clearly to be found.

And what he says of them is more caricature than characterization.

I don't recall Holden Caulfield being a child of Zinn, but it's been a long time since I read Catcher in the Rye.