A False God

Wolcott:

"What we're hearing from pundits, bloggers, and likeminded belligerents this August is a baying to a false God, a nostalgic need for motivational clarity and a macho yearning for deliverance that the facts on the ground will deny them. Their commando belts tied up in knots, their umbrellas unfolded, they can turn on Bush, or on Condi Rice (as Richard Perle has done), but who can they turn to? Nobody. That's why they're egging each other on, flexing their biceps, and clinging to Mark Steyn for warmth. It's the only way to hold on to their fading relevance."

I've been saying this for awhile. The kind of war the War Party wants doesn't exist anymore and can't be conjured up absent both a mass mobilization for war and mass carnage, neither of which people or markets will stand for.

The problem with the war vitriolicism is that it's anger will not easily be dissipated, meaning that it will ultimately have to find another outlet, and that most likely outlet will be the War Party's domestic antagonists--meaning us, pointy-headed university intellectuals, liberals, secular humanism, modernity, tolerance, gays, abortionists, freedom of thought, freedom itself.