Wednesday, August 30, 2006

You Don't Introduce A New Product Line Until After Labor Day



But Fox News seems to have taken a head start in selling the Iran war (note that it's "n", not "q"):

Today Fox has aired multiple segments featuring pundits who claim that a U.S. military attack on Iran is both essential and imminent. Fox anchors repeatedly parrot these arguments. Watch a compilation of clips culled from the last several hours.

You can watch a video at Think Progress.

I don't quite know what to think of all this warmongering. Any war would have to consist of air attacks as the U.S. doesn't have enough troops to do the wars already started properly. But air attacks are not those precision hits the advertising campaign tells us; they would kill a lot of innocent bystanders. That wouldn't make the Iranians overly happy, and America's reputation in the rest of the world would sink even further if that was possible. - I really doubt that Bush would find any comrades for this adventure. Even Blair might blanch at the idea.

That attacking Iran ("pre-emptively") is a lunatic policy doesn't matter here or there, as this administration appears to consist of an alien breed which thinks quite differently from the rest of us. So I wouldn't discount all those war cries just because the whole thing is pure madness. There are many Americans (some even in the wingnutty blogosphere) who fear every single Muslim and who already live a global war between fundamentalist Christianity of some types and fundamentalist Islam of some types, and these people, most unfortunately, have more power right now than the more-or-less sane among us.

Then there is the whole masculinity thread underlying much of the slurs between Iran and the U.S., and I wouldn't discount its ability to overpower saner arguments. Even if real people die real deaths because of it. Even if the only solution to the distress so many wingnuts suffer from would be to nuke out every single Muslim in this world.

Add to this the election troubles the Republicans are facing. I can see the value of fanning the flames of fear in this way, if nothing else. Perhaps enough voters will be scared so much that they press the Republican button again, assuming that they can crawl out from under their beds on the election day. Would just talking about the war work? Or would the wingnuts actually start the bombing before November?

I feel a little bit crazy just writing about this, as if it was something valid to write about. So far have we come in the faith-based years of the Bush reign.