Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States -- the Pajamas Media/right-wing-blogosphere/Fox News/Michelle Malkin/Rush-Limbaugh-listener strain -- actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and "our women" will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an actual fear that they have -- not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview.
The other strain of this, and one I've experienced first hand, is the notion that the threat we face today is somehow greater than anything we've faced in the past. This is the Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh view, that this war against Islamofacism is unprecedented, and that those on the left that do not support a pre-emptive and ill planned attack against a construct of the British empire that had nothing to do with 9/11 just "don't get it". The historical fact that we lived for 40 years with thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at our major cities, and that we were in varying degrees of hot and cold war with a superpower that rivaled ourselves is lost on these people. In their mind, box cutters and burkhas are scarier than ICBMs. This is the same mindset that allows veterans who fought in Southeast Asia to support a president who refused to fulfill his TANG service in Oklahoma, a Vice President who took five deferments, and a talk show host who avoided Vietnam because of a boil on his ass.
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