Is that why The Sims is so popular? I guess it must be our innate need to fight the Great Evil Enemy that compels us to... make our characters use the bathroom and go to work every day. Yuh. I know I am waiting for Nintendogs: Dog Fighting edition, to make my life complete.

In other news, I think the need to believe that you are fighting an evil enemy is much more important when you are actually doing the fighting. When you've got blood on your hands, and sometimes the blood of innocents, it makes it easier to sleep at night to think that you are doing it for good. Here in America, it is considered heretical to criticize our troops, even though they exist for the sole purpose of killing other people. What a strange paradox that in a society that supposedly loves peace, we are universally expected to unquestioningly support those of us whose duty it is to make war. I suppose, then, that the people sitting here in America, rooting for the war without getting any dirt (or blood) on their hands, may be supporting the notion that the enemy is evil because they feel as much latent guilt as the people fighting on the ground.

I think that the evil genius of Dick Cheney was his ability to exploit these people that Glenn has brilliantly figured out. They were Cheney's "useful idiots". They served him well in increasing the power of the executive branch.

you wrote: It's as if they compete to become Supreme Nerds of all history,

It's as if they are wanting to be a Chief Nerd who never grew up.

It's embarrassing to have to tell them how 99% of the world sees them?

That is exquisite: it captures it exactly.

Gads! indeed!

-Another example of confusion about a clearly defined protocol within the government, expressed here by one of the faux warrior theorists, is that the president, specifically George W. Bush, is our "commander in chief."-

Is there another 'president' (small 'p' for an even smaller man) in history that has publicly used the term 'Commander-in-Chief' more frequently than the Decider?

"That is exquisite. Captures it exactly. Gads! Indeed" is my comment (didn't get the html tags right: need a way to edit these after posting!)

For adherents of American conservative philosophy, there are few ways in which a person can act in and affect the world outside of himself other than war. If the philosophy you espouse asserts that each of us acts alone and only for our own benefit that philosophy precludes the sort of large acts such as working for elderly care, the environment, care of the sick or even helping children other than your own. If you give up on affecting larger change the result is hedonism, which results in the greed and secret sex scandals we see so often in right wing elite. If don't give up on affecting change the world in larger ways (and most of us desire to do something larger than ourselves before we kick off) for people of conservative philosophy that pretty much leaves religion and war. I see in George Bush a man who yearns to be great and do large things, but whose limited capacity and political philosophy prevents him from understanding or working for the common good.

Ronald Reagan also yearned for a sense of world community, but could not admit of any philospohy that would bind us together other than a larger common enemy than the one we then faced -- communism. So Reagan often wondered out lout "what if all of us in the world discovered that we were threatened by a power from outer space, from another planet....Wouldn't we all of a sudden find that we didn't have any differences between us at all, we were all human beings, citizens of the world, and wouldn't we come together to fight that particular threat?"

Yeah, but shouldn't we be searching for ways to do that without the need for extraterrestrial enemies?

In the disorder Glenn describes paranoia is important, but the fear of others is obsessed upon in part because there is no path within their ideology for seeking common ground. Acting for the larger community, except helping co-religionists or allowing the invisible hand of the marketplace to do good, is socialism, and as a result forbidden. Doing nothing with your life except to pursue hedonism leaves an ultimately empty feeling. Conservatives are emotionally boxed in by their own ideology.

first made me aware of this. First election I voted in was between Reagan and Carter. They both put up speeches the night before election day: Carter's a rational account of the situation and what he would do to handle it. Then Reagan came on with a huge American flag behind him and told stories about how American could be great again, along with some recollections of his good friend John Wayne. I went to bed thinking, boy, will that clown Reagan ever lose big. Thus began my education into the realities of mass delusion.

It can't be a coincidence that the fall of the Soviet Union was followed almost immediately by the discovery that our way of life is threatened by "Islamofascism." The industrial-military complex discovered that the "lessons of World War Two" could be applied to create an atmosphere of perpetual enmity and constantly imminent military threat, so long as a suitably frightening enemy could be conjured up. On paper the newly nominated enemy hardly seemed frightening enough to fill the role, but vivid television images of collapsing towers could be used to obscure his essential impotence.

There is one real danger: that one of our many enemies may find a way to deploy a truly dangerous weapon in one of our population centers. If you were trying to minimize that danger, however, you could hardly have gone about it less effectively than the neocons have. Of course, that has never been their agenda. Indeed, the detonation of a suitcase nuke in San Francisco would make them happy on several levels.