It’s not only neocons who desperately need enemies, like Ahmadinejad, to succeed so that they’ll have an excuse to bomb bomb bomb Iran, or any place they damn well please. It’s also the paleocons and the concons (conspiracy conservatives), or whatever Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, could be called these days.
Hard to categorize and hard to completely dismiss, Scheuer is the thickly bearded guy who’s been all over the media the last few years calling his cable hosts "Sir," speaking out against the Iraq war, and making the sensible case that one reason "they hate us" is because of our support of Israel–not unlike paleo Pat Buchanan. But Scheuer’s getting so wigged-out lately (writing in his most recent book, Marching Toward Hell, that Americans are now in "a place worse than hell"), that he’s been finding common ground with Fox News’ brightest conspiracy star, Glenn Beck. On Beck’s show the other night, the two got themselves into such a froth over lax security on the Mexican border that Scheuer let loose with this:
"The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States."
Come again? "Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government will protect them effectively, consistently, andwith as much violence as necessary."
Beck bobblehead-nods his assent. This is the kind of doomsday scenario he’s been predicting on his laughable "War Room" segment, in which Scheuer has served as one of the hysterics, saying that if "bubbas" take up arms against the government, "I don’t think you want to defuse it."
Actually, Beck does have his standards when it comes to whackjob guests. Last week, he hustled Congresswoman Michele Bachmann off the air as soon as she likened the U.S. census to the U.S. internment of Japanese-American citizens during WWII. That was over the top for him, but Scheuer’s bin Laden thesis, well, it’s philosophically sound!
And to think that conservatives, of all stripes, took great offense when CIA director Leon Panetta said of Dick Cheney: "[I]t’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point."
