You know how it goes. You do something stupid. Say you drunk drove your car into a ditch and broke your nose or you got caught fucking a guy's husband and the dude broke your nose or you lost your job because you stole a ream of paper and on the way out you broke your nose on the door. Stupid shit that you didn't have to do, but you did it anyways, and now you've got no car, no job, no fuckmate, and a broken goddamn nose. Everyone has a right to call you an asshole because, well, hell, man, you are. It sucks hard donkey dick, but there is one thing that can set the world right. That's if the very people who call you an asshole do something as bad or worse. So if Jennifer two cubicles over who pointed out what a douche you are ends up driving her car into a telephone pole one night after an office party, that shit's gold. If Johnny fucks Jimmy's wife and gets caught? Or if Jasper gets fired for scanning his balls and sending a PDF of them to the boss? Oh, sweet Jesus, that's what you need. All of a sudden, you're not the asshole because, if everyone's an asshole, then the ground has been leveled and someone has to do something new to become the new total asshole.
Maybe you could belong to a political party whose president led the country into a disastrous, useless war. Maybe you're someone who supported that war even long, long after most people had realized it was a clusterfuck on top of a shitstorm. If that's you, then you are down on your goddamn knees, begging God or Christ or Allah or whoever or no one that tonight, Barack Obama will announce that he's going in big on defeating the Islamic State, ISIS, ISIL, you know, the beheading fuckers. You are willing to blow whoever needs to be blown, eat out whoever needs to be eaten out, whatever it takes because you, dear Republican, need Obama to monumentally fuck-up. And you need Obama to monumentally fuck-up in Iraq. Because, see, if that happens, then you can use his failure to wipe the shit stains of Bush and Cheney off you. Hey, we all fucked-up on Iraq now. Sucks for all the dead people, but groovy for us.
That desperate need to get Obama tied up in a new quagmire has been driving the right-wing hysteria over the Islamic State, and they've made sure that the hysterics have spread to the mainstream media. On CNN's New Day, big-toothed forehead, Chris Cuomo, informed us that "a new poll shows Americans are terrified about the threat of ISIS attacks here at home."
We're fuckin' terrified, man. Cover your heads, women. Grow your beards, men. Buy more guns. Shoot more dark people. Fuck a chicken for Jesus. Whatever you need to do because we're "terrified."
The Rude Pundit just wants to get this right: You mean the terrorist group is terrifying us? Because, you know, that's exactly what they want. You don't have to be a fancy etymologist to know that "terrorist" and "terrify" both come from the same root. And if they do terrify us into doing dumb things that only terrified people do, then they win, no? Goal accomplished.
Yeah, it's fuckin' scary when you see someone dressed like a desert ninja cut the head off an American. It's violent and awful, but, to an extent, it's a big act put on precisely to make us behave irrationally. And, as Glenn Greenwald (yeah, him. So?) points out, we do a pretty good job of terrifying the shit out of people in that region with our doom missiles.
Just to get this right: Our fucking about in the Middle East and North Africa gave rise to al-Qaeda, which lashed out with the 9/11 attacks, so we went to war and then moved on to drone murder, causing more people to join the jihadi movement, which led to the rise of ISIL and its attacks, and so there are some who think the best strategy is for the United States to bomb the shit out of them and use ground troops because that's worked so well.
And that's not because ISIL did anything to the United States. They killed a couple of us, yeah, but they did that overseas. They haven't even Benghazied anything. They sure haven't attacked us. And we're shitting ourselves. We have learned nothing.
Hopefully, Obama's message tonight will include some measure of "Chill the fuck out" along with how bomby we're gonna get.
And then Republicans can ream him for not getting bomby enough and for being a pussy because if there's one thing Americans do well, it's get fooled - by the terrorists and by the warmongers.
