Lunatic of the week: Stu Bykofsky

In a column in the Philadelphia Daily News yesterday, Bykofsky proposed that "another 9/11 would help America." Three thousand lives lost--not to mention countless others in ensuing wars--are a fair price to pay according to Bykofsky for a national circle jerk.

What bothers Bykofsky, it seems, is what he perceives as the lack of collective will to continue to fight the Iraq war:

Most Americans today believe Iraq was a mistake. Why?

Not because Americans are "anti-war."

Americans have turned their backs because the war has dragged on too long and we don't have the patience for a long slog. We've been in Iraq for four years, but to some it seems like a century. In contrast, Britain just pulled its soldiers out of Northern Ireland where they had been, often being shot at, almost 40 years.

That's not the American way.

There's no real way to argue against a guy who claims to know what the "American way" is, except to say that if the American way is to prolong a war with no real objective, and a half-assed commitment from the party in power, then we need look no further than the Vietnam disaster. We stayed in that conflict long enough for 58,000 Americans to lose their lives, as well as hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. And if that weren't enough, we so destabilized the government in Cambodia that a genocide followed the end of the war.

Is that the American way?

What these raving, lunatic right-wingers want has nothing to do with unity, or bipartisanship, or winning the war in Iraq. What they want is to return to the dark years after 9/11, when the administration kept Americans in fear in order to advance a tyrannical domestic policy, and an irresponsible, war-mongering foreign policy. If Americans haven't learned their lesson, only another 9/11--combined with another sinister administration--can bring back that kind of national panic.

Is that the American way?

Adding insult to injury was this discussion about the column on Fox News. News Hounds has the video.