Some acronyms are internal to a specific community. RMP is the commenter Retired Military Patriot here on Glenn's blog.

OT in most instances simply means the commenter is going off topic. I take it to have two meanings: one, you can skip past if you like, two, as a form of apology for including something in the conversation that is not specifically related to the subject of the blogger's post.

I've found http://www.urbandictionary.com/ particularly helpful. Sometimes, just putting an acronym into Google will kick up its colloquial meaning.

Good.

I think of the psychological process of the neo-cons you're describing, as well as all compulsive evil-see-ers, as the kind of projection where they hate themselves and therefore see an evil enemy out there trying to kill us all.

Not that there aren't plenty of other crazy conclusions we jump to in our self-hate.

Best -

(More, for free: search "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston")

Great post, Glenn! I'd never looked at it that way before but it makes sense to me. As someone who served in the military during Vietnam, I've had a hard time understanding the mentality of these faux warriors.

These people have never served but they're so full of bluster and ferocity, just itching for a fight. I can't imagine any of these hollow people actually putting their bodies and lives at risk in support of their "ideals." They're like Dungeon and Dragons or video game addicts who never really grew up but just took their child-like fantasies into the real world (lots of posturing but no real action). Certainly, no grownup or adult logic seems to faze them at all.

What's worse is that these people are so useful to a cynical (or delusional - take your pick) bunch of corrupt rulers like the current administration. Maybe it's just a sad commentary on how self-absorbed and detached from reality our society is becoming.

The Republican Party is saying, in essence, that there is no statute of limitations on the "war on terror."

This is a phrase first articulated by George W. Bush. It is the linguistic construct on which recent military action has rested; but neither the construct nor the action rest on a formal, legal, declaration of war.

As we all know, there has not been a declaration of war since 1941.

In any case, while the president has command authority to use the armed forces, and this presidient has Congressional authorization to do what he's doing, there is no declaration of war in effect.

Regardless, the American people are not bound, ever, by "war declarations" emanating from a political party.

I do wish we could get a hold of Rhett Butler to help us out of this thicket.

Let's not forget that many of the armchair civilization warriors come from social/economic classes where they don't have much otherwise to fear--i.e. their material needs are largely met, they are not likely to go bankrupt from healthcare costs, get laid off, or have their personal security breached--so what's left in terms of self-definition is the highly theoretical psychic threat to "civilization" to give meaning to their otherwise directionless lives.

Absolutely brilliant. The crusader mindset described in the article reminded me of 2 things I read lately - news from newly independent Kosovo, where everybody has exactly the same hysteria towards the greatest nightmarish evil-doers of all time - the Serbs. And a description of the quasi-official citizens committees in the US during WWI, when the US Main Street was hysterical about the greatest nightmarish evil-doer of all time - the Kaiser. Humans are wacky, but somebody's got to point out the wackiness du jour. Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for trying.

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/?storyID=14041

"In order for America not to beat Russia we will need to be as cruel and aggressive as the Americans."

- - Aleksandr Dugin

Watch how all the trolls will totally ignore your excellent post. I could add many more domestic abuses due to the political creation of faux enemies: political prisoners from a politicized, abusive drug policy; giving lip service to rehabilitation over retribution that only breeds smarter criminals; abusing our schools and teachers by forcing them to learn and teach to the test; coercing abstinence that produces more not less teenage mothers; gaining publicity for abuse of steroids over abuse of civil liberties; promoting the right to carry guns so we get a president who could care less about how the guns are used; selling tax cuts that fill the pockets of fat cats and increase our national debt; privatizing our military so mercenaries can abuse at will in Iraq and ill serve our wounded back home.

Meanwhile, the trolls and faux warriors, blithely ignore any suffering or hypocritical, faux solutions as long as they can keep feeding their egos and rationalizations by eating up internal fears through trumpeting fear of everyone who believes in being true to yourself and the truth.

Setting aside Mr. Greenwald's amusing ad-hominems against his opponents, complete with snide insinuations of cowardice and impotence (I especially liked "tragically small and shrinking" remark), his blithe dismissal of any threat of Islamism is at least equal in party-line ignorance to the overreactions of our administration.

As a longtime fan of the Bill of Rights, and a person who comes pretty damn close to being a First Amendment absolutist, I agree that the actions of our administration and its most vocal supporters have been, in a word, tragic. In many cases, I believe them unconstitutional and in some cases (such as the Iraq war) criminal. But I also believe that they are an overreaction to a correctly perceived threat.

When someone like Omar Ahmad of the Council of American Islamic Relations claims that "the Koran . . . should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth," I believe he means what he says, just as I believe Imam Zaid Shakir, former chaplain at Yale University, when he says that "Muslims cannot accept the legitimacy of the existing American order, since it is against the orders and commandments of Allah." Having read the Koran and the hadith, I see the foundation of their statements in the Koran and the example of the Muslim warlord prophet, just as I see those same foundations in the statements and murderous actions of Islamists around the world. Ah, if only those Islamists would play "board and video games" or "dress up on the weekend in camouflage costumes," instead of remote-exploding mentally disabled women in markets filled with children as they work for their Caliphate.

But Mr. Greenwald apparently sees no threat, only paranoia, because "it doesn't happen here." It happens to other people, other places, other people's children. Because bombs do not go off in our malls or coffeeshops, because there are only a few unpleasant indications of Muslim honor-killings of teenage girls here (as opposed, say, to the hundreds in Britain -- assisted, even the Brits claim, by the Muslim "community" there-- or the murders of thousands of other faceless women yearly around the Muslim world), because journalists and writers and human rights activists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali are not actually beheaded here even though American imams threaten them with death for their anti-Islamic words and demand restrictions on the First Amendment to save the feelings of their thousand-years-dead leader, because mobs do not boil from our mosques after Friday khutbas to burn cars and assault passersby in rage over cartoons, Mr. Greenwald believes there is no threat.

Oddly, even Muslim organizations in the U.S. and Canada disagree with him: groups like the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, or Muslims against Sharia, or the American Islamic Forum for Democracy do see a threat against us, here, posed by Islamism. They, and Mr. Steyn, are noticing that the neighbor's house is on fire, and that there is plenty of dry brush between our house and his. Mr. Greenwald, though, knows better. It hasn't happened here (well, perhaps with the exception of those disobediently un-hijabbed girls), so it can't happen here. He is more concerned, he has written, about "roving gangs targeting Muslims" scouring our streets, presumably after every Sunday Mass.

But I'm just a 100-pound middle-aged female, hardly a candidate for the Army, so I'm comfortably ensconced in my armchair reading the Koran, the hadith, and the reasoned Islamic judgments of clerics like Qaradawi, Khomeini, Al-Hilali, Al-Azhar University, and the like. I'm sure Mr. Greenwald can come up with some suitably insulting physical insinuations given this armament (personally, Glenn, I'd go with "shriveled" and "shrill"), and I'm looking forward to reading them.