Shady Arabia

Shit happens, okay, extremely evil shit like a lunatic couple in San Bernardino, California, deciding to turn the husband’s office holiday party into a killing-field bloodbath. The Revenge of the Crazy Muslim Health Inspector would be the title if some mindless screenwriter made it up. Of course the avenging hero who rights this wrong would be a comically deranged demagogue who can’t tell a Mexican from a Muslim, but promises to keep them both out with a high enough wall. Except that in America the deranged demagogue is a reality-show star with the chops to turn the Republican primary elections into a Halloween-party food fight by scaring his fatally more reasonable opponents into horrifying postures.

Donald Trump wants to ban all Muslims from entering this country? Hah, Ted Cruz will see that and go one better: carpet-bomb anything that moves in the large swath of territory in Syria and Iraq that ISIS controls, even though most victims would be innocent civilians. These are the same civilians that hawks from both parties claimed to be saving by invading Iraq and moving to overthrow the secular governments of Libya and Syria, leading to the creation of ISIS.

All this bravado came down less than one week after the horrible December slaughter in California, when we knew next to nothing about the motives of the perps. What was clear—as confirmed by the FBI, CIA and NSA—is that the many billions spent on our vast government surveillance apparatus had not provided one iota of information predicting the actions of the two nutjobs who caused all that carnage.