World War IV

It's hard to read certain conservative writers. They live in a different world from the rest of us. For instance, did you know that we are right now living in the Fourth World War, one waged against the Islamofascists? And did you know that there is no such thing as Europe any longer, but a continent called Eurabia where the muslims are going to be the ruling classes?

Norman Podhoretz, sometimes called the father of neoconservatism (there will be no mother in his world for anything but actual fetuses), is one of those writers. He believes that the current era should be called WWIV. If you think you skipped a war somewhere, don't fret. The Third World War was the Cold War. Conservatives don't seem to need wars to cause actual physical corpses to count as one, and so they live in WWIV while the rest of us are lagging behind in the aftermath of WWII. I think that the renaming of the Cold War shows how little physical suffering and death matters to Podhoretz. His wars are the wars of ideas. Noble stuff, and amenable to a computer game form of thinking.

Podhoretz wants the United States of Bushland to win WWIV, and the way to do that is to nuke Iran. So.

You might argue that we have always had extremist nutters writing stuff like that. Sure. But usually they don't get invited to the Oval Office to explain their dangerous theories.