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[W]e continue to over-react to the "terrorist threat." Here I recommend you read John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart's The Terrorism Delusion: America's Overwrought Response to September 11, in the latest issue of International Security. Mueller and Stewart analyze 50 cases of supposed "Islamic terrorist plots" against the United States, and show how virtually all of the perpetrators were (in their words) "incompetent, ineffective, unintelligent, idiotic, ignorant, unorganized, misguided, muddled, amateurish, dopey, unrealistic, moronic, irrational and foolish." They quote former Glenn Carle, former deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats saying "we must see jihadists for the small, lethal, disjointed and miserable opponents that they are," noting further that al Qaeda's "capabilities are far inferior to its desires."

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A new military-themed reality show from NBC, entitled "Stars Earn Stripes," debuts tonight. The show "enthusiastically melds warfare and fame," as a Washington Post review today put it. It features eight celebrities (using the loosest definition of that term) -- such as husband-of-Sarah Todd Palin, former Superman Dean Cain, and former boy band member Nick Lachey -- paired up with "military and law enforcement veterans, including a Green Beret, a SWAT officer, two Marine sergeants, a retired member of the Delta Force and two Navy SEALs", whom NBC hails as the "Bad Ass Operatives." They're all under the "command" of Gen. Wesley Clark, who once actually thought he should be President, as he co-hosts this reality show with former Dancing with the Stars host Samantha Harris (subjecting oneself to the two preview videos below, one wonders how much NBC had to pay to purchase Gen. Clark's dignity in full: probably more than the Terror group MEK paid him to become its loyal shill).

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The contrast between (a) how Paul Ryan is depicted by worshipful Republicans and media figures alike -- as a principled fiscal conservative and advocate of Randian self-sufficiency  -- and the reality of what he's done in his life is as stark as it is typical. The American Right has an amazing ability to lionize leaders whose lives are the precise antithesis of the political values that define their image.

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Shortly after the Islamic Society of Joplin opened a mosque in 2007 in Joplin, a small town in Southwest Missouri, the sign in front was set on fire, an act determined to be arson. On the 4th of July of this year, someone who is undoubtedly a deeply patriotic person was filmed by a surveillance camera throwing a flaming object onto the roof of the mosque in an attempt to burn it down, causing some fire damage (see the video below); despite a $15,000 reward offered by the FBI for information leading to the arrest of those responsible and a clear shot of the attacker's face, nobody has come forward to identify him.

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Few media behaviors are more pitiful than the intense fixation over the "Veepstakes": a word that is at once nauseatingly vapid and yet incomparably valuable as a symbol of our nation's pointless, juvenile political media. Time's Mark Halperin, needless to say, has a column today all about the "Veepstakes," which begins by his proud announcement that he's "covered all of these since 1992." Tapping into his deep well of Veepstakes wisdom, he shares 10 "fundamentals" about this process (keep your eye on Drudge!); here is one of them:

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Page did well enough after joining in 1992 to be assigned to a psychological operations unit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The unit is regarded in the US military as exclusive.

But at the time Fort Bragg was also a recruiting centre for white hate groups including the National Alliance, once regarded as one of the most effective such groups and also among the most extreme because it openly glorified Adolf Hitler. The Military Law Review at the time reported that National Alliance flags were openly hung in barracks and, out of uniform, soldiers sported neo-Nazi symbols and played records about killing blacks and Jews.

"White supremacists have a natural attraction to the army," the Military Law Review said. "They often see themselves as warriors, superbly fit and well-trained in survivalist techniques and weapons and poised for the ultimate conflict with various races."

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Every American national security official will tell you that the most dangerous and savage Al Qaeda branch is the one in Yemen, and that group certainly supplied evidence for this claim with this heinous act over the weekend:

The death toll from a suicide bombing in southern Yemen rose to 45 on Sunday, officials said, in the latest attack against militias allied with the army.

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Earlier this week, The New Yorker's Steve Coll wrote an excellent column on President Obama's kill list and assassination powers. Regarding the lawsuit brought by the ACLU and CCR on behalf of three American victims of Obama's assassinations -- a legal challenge which CBS News' Andrew Cohen called "the most important lawsuit filed so far this year" and "the most important lawsuit filed in the war on terror since President Barack Obama took office" -- Coll argued that it "is to the due-process clause what the proposed march of neo-Nazis through a community that included many Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, was to the First Amendment": "an instance where the most onerous facts imaginable should lead to the durable affirmation of constitutional principle, as Skokie did."

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The highest compliment one can give a writer is not to say that one wholeheartedly agrees with his observations, but that he provoked -- really, forced -- difficult thinking about consequential matters and internal questioning of one's own assumptions, often without quick or clear resolution. That achievement, at its core, is what defines Twilight of the Elites, and it's what makes it so genuinely worth your time to read and think about. Provoking that type of questioning in people is a much more difficult task, and a much more valuable one, than inducing clear-cut, unequivocal agreement (which is often, though not always, accomplished by simply validating someone's already held convictions). For that reason, Hayes' book stays with you long after you are done reading it.

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Remember when, in the wake of the 9/11 attack, the Patriot Act was controversial, held up as the symbolic face of Bush/Cheney radicalism and widely lamented as a threat to core American liberties and restraints on federal surveillance and detention powers? Yet now, the Patriot Act is quietly renewed every four years by overwhelming majorities in both parties (despite substantial evidence of serious abuse), and almost nobody is bothered by it any longer. That's how extremist powers become normalized: they just become such a fixture in our political culture that we are trained to take them for granted, to view the warped as normal. Here are several examples from the last couple of days illustrating that same dynamic; none seems overwhelmingly significant on its own, but that's the point:

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As I noted the other day when writing about the Chick-fil-A controversy, I was happy to see that almost every liberal commentator condemned the actions by city officials in Boston and Chicago to punish that business due to the distasteful views on homosexuality expressed by its President (see, for instance, Mother Jones' Kevin Drum and Adam Serwer, The American Prospect's Scott Lemieux, Digby, The Nation's Richard Kim, John Cole, Amanda Marcotte, and Atrios). Today, though, The Nation's Lee Fang became the first progressive writer I know of to defend these state actions against the restaurant chain. Ignoring all those commentators, Fang singles out me and Adam Serwer and says that we are "leading the contrarian charge" (given how isolated Fang is among liberals on this question -- to say nothing of the ACLU, which denounced the constitutional violations here as "clear cut" -- Fang has a very strange understanding of what "contrarian" means).

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Late last night, shortly before going to sleep, I saw links on Twitter to what purported to be -- and what certainly looked and read like -- a new Op-Ed regarding WikiLeaks in The New York Times by former Executive Editor and current columnist Bill Keller (it turned out that the column is a fake: more on that in a moment). I skimmed the column last night, made a mental note to return to it in the morning, and when I read it carefully this morning, I found that it contained some extraordinary claims which I had not heard before: chief among them that there are "rumors build[ing] about the potential financial blockade against the New York Times by Visa, Mastercard, and American Express for hosting U.S. government cables published by WikiLeaks," and specifically that this is coming from "backroom pressures by the Obama Administration’s State Department to expand its financial blockade targeting WikiLeaks to include news organizations that host information from their trove of pilfered documents." The column also said that Paypal had announced that it would refuse to participate in this process.

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When it comes to praising President Obama's foreign policy skill and Toughness (in the neocon sense of that term: i.e., a willingness to risk other people's lives with the use of military force against foreigners), The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg has been one of the most reliable and vocal voices. Considered by Obama aides "as the 'official therapist' of the U.S.-Israel relationship," Goldberg has been particularly important in vouching for Obama to Israelis and American Jews on the ground that nobody will be Tougher on Iran than Obama (in return for this service, Goldberg -- like all helpful journalists are -- has been rewarded by the White House with substantial career-boosting access). In his Bloomberg column this morning, Goldberg argues that Israeli officials should pray for Obama's victory in the November election, and makes this argument in support:

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Should government officials be able to block businesses from opening or expanding due to disagreement with the political views of the business' executives? Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel evidently believes he should have this power:

The anti-gay views openly espoused by the president of a fast food chain specializing in chicken sandwiches have run afoul of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and a local alderman, who are determined to block Chick-fil-A from expanding in Chicago.

"Chick-fil-A’s values are not Chicago values. They’re not respectful of our residents, our neighbors and our family members. And if you're gonna be part of the Chicago community, you should reflect Chicago values," Emanuel said Wednesday.

"What the CEO has said as it relates to gay marriage and gay couples is not what I believe, but more importantly, it's not what the people of Chicago believe. We just passed legislation as it relates to civil union and my goal and my hope … is that we now move on recognizing gay marriage. I do not believe that the CEO’s comments … reflects who we are as a city."

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In The New York Times today, Tom Friedman argues that the only thing that could save Syria is if that country is lucky enough to have the U.S. do to it what the U.S. did to Iraq, and in the process, says this:

And, for me, the lesson of Iraq is quite simple: You can't go from Saddam to Switzerland without getting stuck in Hobbes — a war of all against all — unless you have a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts to manage the transition. In Iraq, that was America. 

Just on the level of basic cogency, this makes absolutely no sense. Friedman says that a country will be "stuck in Hobbes -- a war of all against all -- unless" it has America there. But Iraq did have America there, and -- as Friedman himself points out just a few paragraphs later -- it got "stuck in Hobbes," precisely because America was there ("Because of both U.S. incompetence and the nature of Iraq, this U.S. intervention triggered a civil war in which all the parties in Iraq — Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds — tested the new balance of power, inflicting enormous casualties on each other and leading, tragically, to ethnic cleansing that rearranged the country into more homogeneous blocks of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds"). He literally negates his own principal claim --  a country that overthrows its dictator can only avoid Hobbes if it has a U.S.-like force occupying and controlling it -- in the very same column in which he advances it.

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