Random Nuclear Strikes

On this upcoming Sunday, the Superbowl will be played between the Chicago Bears and the Indianapolis Colts.

So, who do you want to win?

If you’re a good leftist, you absolutely must root for Chicago

Indianopolis Colts Coach Tony Dungy’s Anti-Gay Agenda

To all you Colts fans out there, know that your team’s head coach is on board with the radical anti-homosexual agenda. Atrios links to the AOL Sports Blog, which reports that Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy will headline an event for the Indiana Family Institute, an anti-gay pack of homo-hatin’ hoosiers.

Gooooooooooooooooo Bears!

They are entirely serious. Hit the link if you don’t believe me.

That is the basic message in this LA Times editorial by David A. Bell

Imagine that on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.

It also raises several questions. Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?

Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies’ objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.

Yet a great many Americans, particularly on the right, have failed to make this distinction. For them, the “Islamo-fascist” enemy has inherited not just Adolf Hitler’s implacable hatreds but his capacity to destroy. The conservative author Norman Podhoretz has gone so far as to say that we are fighting World War IV (No. III being the Cold War).

But it is no disrespect to the victims of 9/11, or to the men and women of our armed forces, to say that, by the standards of past wars, the war against terrorism has so far inflicted a very small human cost on the United States. As an instance of mass murder, the attacks were unspeakable, but they still pale in comparison with any number of military assaults on civilian targets of the recent past, from Hiroshima on down.

Poor Mr. Bell forgets that Hiroshima was not a “civilian target”. Neither was Nagasaki.

And I do wonder if a guy who is asking, nay, DEMANDING, that more than 3000 Americans be killed before we next respond militarily would be willing to include himself or any of his family members or any of his friends in that next, larger number?

For some reason, I doubt that.