Back in the Saddle Again

Sorry for the long hiatus, once babies start crawling, they need more time spent in constant attention than I could do and still blog. Who knew? Well, the darling dollbaby is at her grandparents', and I'm about to (finally!) start back to college, so I thought I'd try sharing some thoughts again. For instance, one of the Pandagon trolls got me thinking last night. I'd link straight to the thread, but the troll's already been replaced by bunny videos. I thought I'd repost my responce over here and expand a bit on it. Or at least clean it up a notch.

One of this troll's rants was that Muslim Extremists want to Kill Us All. This is World War IV.
And that got me thinking. One thing that is often overlooked is that THIS IS NOT WORLD WAR IV. It’s not even WWIII. We managed to skip the threequel, as evidenced by the lack of, oh, I don’t know, dozens of vaporized cities? The idea that we’re facing some sort of existential threat is laughable.

One of the things I learned from "Law and Order" reruns, besides that Fred Thompson doesn't look Presidential, is that in order for a crime to occur, a criminal needs three things: means, motive, and opportunity. Muslim extermists may have the desire to kill us all, but do they have the means? Unless they get ahold of a lot more nukes than are currently floating about unaccounted for, my magic eight ball says “no”. “But!” cry the wingnuts, “they didn’t need nukes on 9/11! Did they, Mr. Liberal Traitor Smarty McSmartypants!” Well, no. But we’re a big country. Vast geographically, with a huge population. Muslim extremists can commit mass murder (just like anyone who’s so far gone that that seems like a good idea can), but please. We are 300 MILLION strong. It would take about 100,000 9/11s to “kill us all”.

And while we’re on the subject of this big, populous, obscenely wealthy nation of ours, if this is an existential struggle on the scale of WWII, why are fighting it with both hands, one foot, and three toes tied behind our backs? Why am I not dealing with a universal draft of all males 18-30? Why are we not re-opening shuttered factories, converting them to produce munitions? Why are we not even being asked to fricken ration a single damn thing? Has anyone heard any winger calling for any of these measures? For a matter of national life and death, they sure aren’t taking it very seriously…