Mouth Breathing Anger

In a post regarding Rudi's article in Foreign Affairs (a 6000 word essay that omits the word Pakistan, btw), Matt Yglesias points out a dilemma that candidates on the right are facing, namely a bifurcation between the slightly more moderate tone that the Bush administration has taken in the last 8 months and the ever increasing bloodlust of the "base", egged on by Rush, Sean Hannity and other minor haters like Glen Beck.

Indeed, the conservative base appears to be more committed to this vision at this point than is George W. Bush. After all, while I think the rise of moderate foreign policy in the Bush administration has often been overstated, there's no doubt that the President has softened the edges somewhat. Don Rumsfeld is gone. Rumsfeld's cookiest subordinates are gone. John Bolton is gone. Etc., etc. etc. But the Hugh Hewitt crowd, the Rush Limbaugh listeners, the Glenn Beck fans, and that whole lot still, in essence, want to see a bloody, bloody, bloody foreign policy.

I sense this strongly when I read LGF or listen to talk radio. These folks are angry. Their Captain Codpiece has turned out to be an idiot dilettante, they understand that everything Bush has done has made matters worse. They realize that they'll lose in 2008, and all of the fun that they had kicking around John Kerry and Al Gore doesn't seem to have amounted to much. Even their pet issues that they focused on once the war in Iraq wasn't fun to watch any more haven't yielded much fruit. The stock market is crashing, Rove is sneaking out the back door, and the real estate that they bought in Florida or by the beach is worth a hell of a lot less than when they bought it. For them, this is no time to go soft, no time to get tangled in diplomacy between Hamas and Fatah, no time to try to discern the various motives of minority or majority sects in Western Asia. The base wants dead brown folks, the more the better. Here's Newt:

Gingrich said that the "war here at home" against illegal immigrants is "even more deadly than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Outrage over the triple murder in Newark elides with irrational fear of the other, once it is revealed that one of the murderers was "an illegal". Albeit, an illegal that has been in this country since the age of eleven. To Hannity, immigration and terrorism are only one issue. And to the base, that means one thing. If all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.