By all accounts, it's pretty much the nonsense you'd expect: Conservatives are the real Americans, Obama is taking us to hell in a handcart, science and rationalism are naughty, victimizing the powerless=Good, empowering the powerless=Evil, that sort of thing.
But one bit of reportage really caught my eye, this from Christopher Beam of slate.com:
...the next speaker, John Bolton... recalls the time during the campaign when Obama said Iran was just a "tiny" threat. "Is the loss of one American city picked at random—Chicago—is that a 'tiny' threat?" He delivers this line like Kevin Nealon's Subliminal Man. This brings the house down.
Let's, for the moment, disregard the fact that Bolton has misquoted President Obama on the "tiny threat" reference, and let's also disregard the apparent glee that "real Americans" feel at the thought of Chicago being destroyed, Sodom-and-Gomorrah-style. Instead, because it's been sticking in my craw for a while, let's focus upon the current right-wing monomania concerning Iran.
To the heart of the matter: Even assuming that Iran possessed both nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles capable of reliably delivering them to any given city in the U.S., why in the world would they launch said attack? It is a certainty that any such attack would result in the total annihilation of Iran, its reduction to a charred radioactive cinder, the deaths of a huge percentage of its populace. I find it hard to believe that this is what the leadership of Iran desires, and I am supremely confident that they are capable of "doing the math," so to speak.
"But, Wade," you say, "their President, Ahmadinejad, is a crazy fundamentalist and says terrible things about destroying Israel!" True enough... and he has about as much power in Iran as does John Bolton in the United States. The Presidency of Iran exists only to provide a certain amount of "democratic" sheen to what is a de facto dictatorship.
No, the real power in Iran resides in the person of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. The military, the press and the judiciary all answer to Khamenei and are dependent upon him for their positions. And, though he is a despot, he is also a rational actor who wishes to retain his power, just as did the many Soviet Premiers who did not launch nuclear attacks upon the U.S. -- and for the same reason: their assured destruction, should they do so.
Though Iran is, indeed, a major regional power -- one that has been further empowered by the ill-advised U.S. invasion of Iraq -- and poses a direct threat to certain aspects of American policy in the Middle East, it is not about to start a nuclear war with the world's sole superpower. Either the right-wing wackos are too stupid to recognize this reality, or they are baselessly fear-mongering concerning Iran.
In either case, why would anyone listen to them?
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