Mitch revealed: "In the US, of course, we've been attacked on our own soil twice, with several more strikes overseas. Sad to say, it'll probably take a bunch more attacks before the US really takes this sort of thing seriously."

Interesting. I guess if you're not a member of the "pro-Saddam" crowd, you're cheering on terrorist attacks in the U.S. "Pro-bin Laden" I suppose you'd call yourself, eh Mitch?

angryclown: You weren't burdened with an overabundance of schooling, were you?

The problem with our current half-assed insistance on fighting this war by Marquis of Queensbury rules is that sooner or later the jihadis are going to do something that will cause retaliation on a massive scale. If Tel Aviv is attacked with a nuclear weapon, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Israel launched nuclear attacks on every major Arab capital, Tehran, and Mecca itself.

If New York City were turned into a radioactive desert, then we'd probably do the same (although more limited). After 9/11 there were only scattered incidents of violence against Muslims. If something worse happened, what would the effects be? The aftershocks would be catastrophic.

The whole point of war is that one applies a DECISIVE level of violence to prevent worse atrocities down the road. The left took their "ain't gonna study war no more" motto far too seriously, and they fail to understand that if we don't dismantle the Islamist movement now, the price we pay in blood later will be orders of magnitude greater.

Sadly, the left is clueless about war, believing such tropes as "violence never solved anything" and "attacking terrorists creates more terrorists" and other mealy-mouthed platitudes. The long and short of it is that those misconceptions will get a lot of innocent people killed, and those who pursue a naive "peace" will once again have blood on their hands.

So jay, please explain, how do you win a war of ideals with bullets? And all this left bashing about the War is a joke, considering that teh Right is in power across the federal level, how come we aren't doing anything about Saudi Arabia - a large sponsor of these groups and quite the oppressive regime? Its a funny thing how these extremist muslems don't like us isn't it?...could it be prehaps our cascade of mistakes from Iran, to Iraq to Saudi Arabia that created the likes of Bin-Ladin?

The U.S. legitimately advances its interests, and the interests of liberty and democracy, through ideas, economics, diplomacy, threat of force and, when appropriate, force. The problem is that the current administration isn't particularly competent on any of these fronts.

Jay Reding wondered: "angryclown: You weren't burdened with an overabundance of schooling, were you?"

Very perceptive, Jay. No, it wasn't a burden at all - I sailed right through Clown College and a graduate degree in Angry Clowning.

"So jay, please explain, how do you win a war of ideals with bullets?"

Our enemies certainly seem to be quite good at it.

The answer is simple: the same way we defeated the "idea" of German National Soc1alism or Imperial Japanese aggressions. We're not trying to defeat an "idea", we're trying to defeat those who would put that idea into practice. The "idea" of Naziism still exists, but the system which promulgated that idea to disastrous effect was ground into dust.

Our current strategy has been to use a mix of force and persuasion to get the Arab world to accept democracy as the better alternative - and that worked to a point. If that fails, sooner or later our only option will be to engage in a war that makes the current one in Iraq seem like a cakewalk.

Prof. Gingrich aside, we're not in a World War yet, but if we don't take this war seriously enough, we very well could end up there in a very short period of time.

"how come we aren't doing anything about Saudi Arabia - a large sponsor of these groups and quite the oppressive regime?"

Because the Saudis aren't the biggest problem. Remember that al-Qaeda HATES the Saudi royal family and regards them as apostates. Quietly, behind the scenes, the Saudi government has been very cooperative with us.

It doesn't make sense to kick an ally, even an erstwhile one. It would be like FDR telling Stalin to shove off at Malta. So long as the Saudis keep killing militants, it makes no sense to start a war on ANOTHER front. We may have a reckoning with the House of Saud in the future, but only a fool would open up yet another front in this war when it is unnecessary to do so.

"Its a funny thing how these extremist muslems don't like us isn't it?...could it be prehaps our cascade of mistakes from Iran, to Iraq to Saudi Arabia that created the likes of Bin-Ladin?"

Read "Milestones" by Sayyid Qutb. The saying that Islamists hate us because we're free is a simplistic way of putting it, but it's basically true. We are practice "jahiliyya" (paganism) by allowing women to be full members of our society, and refusing to submit to Islam.

Certainly we could appease radical Islam. We could either all become Muslim or consent to be ruled under strict Islamic law.

Clown... I gotta hand it to you, Clown College and the Angry Clowning degree struck me very funny.

Yes, and as long as the American left continues to be identified as a collection of "clueless," "disillusioned," and "naive" individuals --a circus of angry clowns, as it were-- no military or political victory will produce a lasting peace any more than it has in Korea, Vietnam, or the Middle East after WWII.

The Left, here and elsewhere, is not clueless, disillusioned, or naive. They are united. As in Lebanon, they are using the same useful idiots to fight the same war they've been fighting ever since Marx and Engels began to influence popular opinion. They know exactly what they are doing.

While Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah were training for jihad, while North Korea spun up its nukes, while Iran and Iraq were cutting arms deals with Russia and China all under the imprimatur of the Clinton Administration, we "right wing American kooks" were fighting second-hand smoke and interns in the Oval Office to no avail. To win without fighting through deceit and deception is the first principle of politics by other means, and our enemy has been extraordinarily effective in this regard.

The Leftist elite is not clueless about war; they have no "misconceptions" about it. Revolution is their reason for being and to the extent they can persuade the useful idiots to fight it, they will wage war until its time to kill them too. Ask Joe Lieberman.

Angry Clown is correct: "The U.S. legitimately advances its interests, and the interests of liberty and democracy, through ideas, economics, diplomacy, threat of force and, when appropriate, force. The problem is that the current administration isn't particularly competent on any of these fronts."

Exactly. There is no substitute for victory and victory cannot be achieved until the political will to fight is destroyed and/or the enemy is all dead. Compassion has nothing to do with it.

Eracus, you are certifiable.

You're not married to Scary Colleen, are you?

How disappointing, clown. You are so dim you don't even recognize your own argument, which proves only that you've never thought it through and so are, predictably enough, just another useful idiot in New York.

You voted for Hillary, right?

I recognized my own argument, quoted and misapplied, in a paranoid Oliver-Stone-Meets-John-Birch rant.

If I'm a useful idiot, Eracus, that at least means that one of us is useful.

You being a self-confessed idiot, I can see why you'd say that, clown. But useful to whom?

What you don't seem to grasp, being ignorant of history, is all you have to offer here are the same Leftist tropes New York intellectuals used to hammer FDR with as the Nazis marched into Poland. They were singin' your song 70 years ago, clown, and as Jay Reding points out above, the song remains the same. Just because you're the latest idiot singin' it doesn't make it any more true now than it was then. What matters is you don't realize that, which only makes it more a pity.

Tell us, clown, given that the last Leftist, liberal Democrat administration ignored the escalation of global violence by Islamic extremists, accelerated immigration for Saudi nationals into the U.S., embraced Yasser Arafat as a "peacemaker," shipped nuclear techonology to North Korea, provided missile guidance systems to China, shot a woman and child in the back at Ruby Ridge, incinerated the Davidians at Waco, and put a machinegun to the head of a 6-year-old Cuban boy in Miami really appreciates how useful you are? Of course they do.

You voted for Hillary. Right on cue, without a doubt.

A couple of observations if I may. The radical fundamentalists would be considered "Right wing extremists."
Patton's ideas of absolute victory in the most efficient and economical way often counter American ethics and result in errosion of public support. Making sustained operations (as in the long war on terror) problematic.
A 'Liberal (not as in the democratic party)/Idealist' approaches the spread of democracy and democratic principles as our ordained duty--eg. Hearts and minds, and does so via aid, globalization, etc.
A 'Realist' believes in the zero-sum game. States will opportunisticaly latch on to chances to gain national power (standing) at the cost of others/opponents. Which are you and how does that cloud your argument?

Real, reality probably lies somewhere in between, especially when dealing with non-state actors/organizations such as Hezbollah (or enter any international terrorist org). Killing them all certainly won't win us any 'hearts and minds' while negotiating with them weakens our national standing and resolve.

Just some trash from week one at AWC.

I see, New York liberals opposed the war. Not midwestern isolationists. Not the America First movement. Not antisemites and fascist sympathizers like yourself. Not Lindbergh.

Must have been conservatives in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade too, fighting the war against Hitler's fascist proxy in Spain in the '30s.

Christ, you are a moron, Eracus. In the future you can feel free to address your poorly written pseudohistorical ramblings to others. Maybe Doug? Fulcrum? They have more patience than Angryclown.

Angrclown's patience is exhausted. You no longer have the privilege of interacting with Angryclown, you dumb son of a toothless redneck. You are SHUNNED.

Does that mean no more selzer water in the face?

Thank you for proving once again, Angry Clown, in yet another temper tantrum defining the limits of your intellect, that you have no grasp of history beyond what you might have read on the back of a cereal box.

In the '30s, New York liberals, midwestern isolationists, the America First movement, and not just antisemites and fascist sympathizers but most liberal Jews themselves living in New York were all Marxists and proud of it. They fought Roosevelt tooth and nail for years having bankrolled his elections precisely to prevent American entry alongside Britain in the war to defeat Nazi Germany. Joe Kennedy led the charge as Chamberlain's lap dog, you may recall.

Before Pearl Harbor, which ended any further "debate," they argued throughout the academic and media institutions, just as they do today, that entry into the war against Germany would only result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism in the U.S., and that we Americans could best help the German people by fighting FDR's fascist policies here at home to preserve our own civil liberties. Sound familiar?

This is, of course, exactly what the modern liberal Democratic Party is doing today, because despite all their posturing of goodness and light, of "fighting" for the little guy, etc., etc., they remain the Marxist component on the American political spectrum. This is the political party afterall, that denies children the right to be born, not as a matter of law but by a one vote majority judicial decree, and yet hypocritically insists mass murdering Islamic terrorists captured in battle enjoy the full protection of law under the Geneva Convention and the American Bill of Rights.

So don't you throw your bowl and spoon at me, little boy. You support an intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt political party that aligns not with American (or Israeli) sovereignty and independence, but with a murderous foreign ideology that demands our submission. And as much as you might believe that makes us all just a bunch of "right-wing kooks," at least we know whose side we're on in a war and what it means if we lose.

You apparently don't, which underscores Mitch's conclusion that it will probably take a "bunch more" attacks on our own soil before "useful idiots" like yourself begin to think seriously, if at all.

Well said, Eracus.
The ignorance on the left concerning the history of political ideas is abysmal. Both fascism and marxist-leninism were attempts to create a political state based on the hyper-materialist Marxist idea that all conflicts, between individuals as well as social classes, are economic conflicts. While Lenin put into practice the idea that a totalitarian state can eliminate social class, and so economic conflict, by regulating every aspect of the lives of its captive population, the fascists believed that forced equality was unworkable and contrary to human nature. They thought the better plan was to make all their citizens hold their first allegiance to the state rather than their social class. This was seen as a respectable and progressive view of politics until certain events in the late 1930's.
Until that time Soviet Russia and the fascist states of Europe appeared, to western intellectuals, to have solved the problem of social organization: their working class was fully employed and there was no labor unrest. The rest of the civilized world, including the US, was seen as being held back from progress by stodgy Victorian ideas about religion and the self reliant individual.
Orwell, in _Homage to Catalonia_, perfectly examples the politically active intellectual of the time: the future might be fascist or it might be leninist, but without a doubt it would be collectivist. And likely totalitarian.
It's astonishing that today's 'progressives' still believe in a collective economic security model that was fashioned in the 1920's and 30's by people whose ideas, when enacted, led to the deaths of millions of innocents.

Not exactly, Colleen. To be sure, Eracus does have a following among some of the lower-wattage commenters on this blog. You take his pseudo-history and philosophical posturing - expressed in rambling, 500-word posts full of big words that are just outside his command - for depth. Angryclown sees an older guy with time on his hands who's not used to being challenged. Responding to Eracus simply calls up more posts from him, each more fatuous than the one before. As much as Angryclown enjoys deflating pretentious wingnuts, insulting Eracus is never any fun. He's too dumb to get the insult.

" Angryclown...an older guy with...fatuous...nuts[.]. [I]nsulting...

Your problem, clown, is your comments so often reveal your complete ignorance of the material in question that even the lowest of "low-wattage" readers of this blog recognize the collosal stupidity behind them.

Meanwhile, it has become just as obvious to readers that your worldview is as distorted as your perception is now of who I am and what I do, as you have no evidence whatsoever for what you believe in either case, which pretty much identifies you as a complete fraud willing to accept without examination any suggestion that satisfies your still infantile impulse.

You bring a rubber knife to a gunfight and then whine and complain about "pseudo-history" and "philosophical posturing" because A) You don't know your history, and B) You have no philosophical foundation for whatever you believe. Accordingly, since you can't credibly argue your point, your only alternative is insult, which again only reveals your complete ignorance of the material in question and the collosal stupidity behind whatever point you might be trying to make.

The effect has been to increasingly expose the fact that your cherished Leftist agenda is based entirely on your own circular reasoning, which, being irrational and all but dried up, has left you with nothing else to chew on but the bitter weeds of hate and anger, which is everywhere in the content of your posts, and is the lodestar of modern liberalism today.

Good luck with that.

The rubber knife is all I need, perfesser. Your gun fires blanks.

The trouble with blogs is that you can't get away from some people...if it were a group of people in a crowd, (say a bar or a party) and one person was a fool, everyone could drift away and then stay away...the fool might keep going from group to group, but everyone would still have the chance to get the hell away from "that guy" until he got the hint. Not so here...angryclown just keeps hammering away. Sigh.

Do you have any friends in "real life" angry?

". . . even the lowest of "low-wattage" readers of this blog recognize the collosal stupidity behind them."

"Low wattage"? C'mon, Eracus, some of us didn't have the benefit of a fancy "high school education".

A peak into the mind of paste-eater:

Gun? Rubber knife? let's see . . . rubber, eraser, condom . . . no, that's not right. Hmm. Guns, rifles, revolvers, automatics, pistols, bullets, rubber bullets, blanks ... BLANKS! That's it. I like that! BLANKS! Got to lose the all-caps, though. Been using that too much lately. Oh weinerheads! What'll I do? I know. I'll write-

"The rubber knife is all I need, perfesser. Your gun fires blanks."

A peak into the mind of the glue-sniffer:

REUPduajkldgjdbfjksdlfffkjda432kjk2344hjkl...

Terrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr