Promise them anything, but give them death

Writes Roger Simon about the debate:

[T]he crowd didn’t get into real cheering until death raised its zany head. The candidates were asked about launching an attack into Pakistan, as we did with the killing of Osama bin Laden, and Newt Gingrich, a historian (as he never tires of reminding people), brought up America’s seventh president, Andrew Jackson. ‘Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear idea about America’s enemies,’ Gingrich said. ‘Kill them.’
“This excited the members of the audience so much…[that] the best thing a Republican candidate can do is promise them anything — as long as it involves somebody dying. Monday night, Ron Paul said: ‘Maybe we ought to consider a golden rule. Don’t do to other nations what we don’t want them to do to us.’ He was roundly booed.” (Thanks to Michael Tennant)

100% Prolife Good Christian folk! And if Russia makes good on its promise to regard an attack on Tehran as an attack on Moscow (call it the Monrovsky Doctrine) these people will have whole new populations of people they can long to kill–for Jesus! Assuming the world survives the first 24 hours of such a war.

A couple of days ago, one of my neocon readers, perpetually baffled about whether it’s murder to kill a civilian in a country not at war with us, attempted the rationalization for pre-emptive cold blooded murder of a civilian by asking whether we would have been justified attacking the approaching Japanese fleet had we known about it. (Because, for neocons, every war is perpetually World War II and all our enemies are Hitler and Tojo. That’s because, being members of Generation Narcissus, they only know war from the stories of their parents since they did not serve themselves and they feel a belated and guilty need to prove their manhood as Dick “I had other priorities” Cheney did). Prescinding from the fact that a civilian in Iran is not an approaching armada on a mission to bomb Pearl Harbor, I said we would have been justified meeting the fleet and ordering them to turn around and, if they had attacked, fighting back. My reader, of course, insisted we should have fired on them.

Happily, she was not President during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A man who had actually fought in the war was and he knew that firing on the Russian ships approaching Cuba would have initiated World War III. Our neocons, who have never served, who have lots of abstract secular messianic plans for “ending evil” through the use of other men they send to suffer and die, and who are big talking cowards who confuse brutality with courage, have no sense of what a just war looks like, which is why they can’t tell what murder looks like and can’t wait to get us into our next war.