I missed all the fun this past weekend piling on poor Maryscott O’Connor when the pajama-clad left/dom exploded from the pages of the Washington Post onto righty blogs as the poster girl for the Daffy Duck left.

First, I was happy to see that we have one thing in common; we both smoke when we write. Longtime readers of this site know that when I prepare for my muse to take me in her arms and stroke me (yes…it’s THAT kind of relationship friends), I brew a strong pot of fresh bean coffee (this time of day I prefer either Kona or a Jamaican blend) and carefully place a freshly opened pack of Basic 100’s Full Flavor cigarettes within easy reach. The two - coffee and cigarettes - go together like sex and Barry White. And when in the throes of creative ecstasy, watching as the words writhe effortlessly (or tortuously) on the monitor in front of me, I unconsciously caress one cigarette after another, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs and exhaling a Murrowesque cloud of thoughtful, wisdom drenched, aromatic vapors.

If I can’t write like Murrow, at least I kinda smell like him.

Anyway, Maryscott sure sounded angry, didn’ she? Doc Sanity should make a housecall on this fruit and nut cake. Failing that, I think the poor woman needs a gigantic hug from all of us righties who make her life so miserable, day after day.

But Maryscott has the advantage of being in possession of at least half a brain. Poor Jim Carroll of the Boston Globe has not been vouchsafed such a luxury:

LAST WEEK, the rattling of sabers filled the air. Various published reports, most notably one from Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker, indicated that Washington is removing swords from scabbards and heightening the threat aimed at Iran, which refuses to suspend its nuclear project. It may be that such reports, based on alarming insider accounts of planning and military exercises, are themselves part of Washington’s strategy of coercive diplomacy. But who can trust the Bush administration to play games of feint and intimidation without unleashing forces it cannot control, stumbling again into disastrous confrontation?

An Iranian official dismissed the talk of imminent US military action as mere psychological warfare, but then he made a telling observation. Instead of attributing the escalations of threat to strategic impulses, the official labeled them a manifestation of ”Americans’ anger and despair.”

The phrase leapt out of the news report, demanding to be taken seriously. I hadn’t considered it before, but anger and despair so precisely define the broad American mood that those emotions may be the only things that President Bush and his circle have in common with the surrounding legions of his antagonists. We are in anger and despair because every nightmare of which we were warned has come to pass. Bush’s team is in anger and despair because their grand and — to them — selfless ambitions have been thwarted at every turn. Indeed, anger and despair can seem universally inevitable responses to what America has done and what it faces now.

“Rattling of sabers”…”removing swords from scabbards”… It sounds like Mr. Carroll has accidentally stumbled onto a game of Dungeons and Dragons. And the fact that “every nightmare of which we were warned has come to pass” would make things pretty dicey for us if only someone would please tell us 1) which nightmares are Carroll talking about and 2) who did the warning?

This is called hyperbole. Writers use it in lieu of outright lying when trying to sound like they know what they’re talking about. Not only does it give them a privileged frame of reference (Am I the only one who racked my brain frantically trying to conjure up which nightmares he was talking about and which one of 10,000 unhinged lefties might have warned us about them?) but it certainly does heighten the drama, doesn’t it?

Except, of course, this is not a screenplay, it’s a newspaper column. Or is it? Mr. Carroll’s psychological analysis of the Bush Administration’s “anger and despair” as well as our own “anger and despair” (I guess “anger and despair” are lethally contagious) makes it seem as if rather than appearing on the OpEd page, Carroll’s screed might have better been published in another venue more suited to his penetrating amateur psychoanalyzing.

I guess Mad Magazine didn’t have the space available.

Mr. Carroll explains:

While the anger and despair of those on the margins of power only increase the experience of marginal powerlessness, the anger and despair of those who continue to shape national policy can be truly dangerous if such policy owes more to these emotions than to reasoned realism. Is such affective disarray subliminally shaping the direction of US policy? That seems an impudent question. Yet all at once, like an out-of-focus lens snapping into clarity, it makes sense of what is happening. With the US military already stressed to an extreme in Iraq by challenges from a mainly Sunni insurgency, why in the world would Washington risk inflaming the Shi’ite population against us by wildly threatening Iran?

But such a thing happened before. It was the Bush administration’s anger and despair at its inability to capture Osama bin Laden that fueled the patent irrationality of the move against Saddam Hussein. The attack on Iraq three years ago was, at bottom, a blind act of rage at the way Al Qaeda and its leaders had eluded us in Afghanistan; a blindness that showed itself at once in the inadequacy of US war planning. Now, with Iran, nuclear weapons are at issue. And yet look at the self-defeating irrationality of the Bush team’s maneuvering. How do we hope to pressure Tehran into abandoning its nuclear project? Why, by making our threat explicitly nuclear.

OH FOR GOD’S SAKE!

I’m trying very hard not to lose control, a task made nearly impossible when reading such imbecilic, idiotic drivel.

The attack on Iraq three years ago was, at bottom, a blind act of rage at the way Al Qaeda and its leaders had eluded us in Afghanistan; a blindness that showed itself at once in the inadequacy of US war planning.

You’ll have to excuse me while I wipe my monitor of the spittle that exploded from my sputtering mouth, which occurred just prior to my jaw hitting the floor and starting to dig.

“At bottom” nothing. Say it was for oil. Say it was to avenge Saddam’s attempted assassination of his father. Say it was to get his buddies at Haliburton richer. Say it was because Bush knew there were no WMD’s but invaded anyway to help him win re-election.

Posit any crackpot, confused, moonbat theory about why we invaded Iraq. But to say that “at bottom” the invasion was an “act of blind rage” is mindless. The notion has no basis in fact whatsoever, There is not a shred of proof for it.

Proof? Proof? We don’t need no stinkin’ proof. We’ve got Jimbo Carroll and his Travelling Pseudo-Psychoanalytical Crystal Ball to look into the souls of men and tell us what they’re really thinking and feeling. And, of course, that special insight granted to only the purest of liberals who, after all, only have our best interests at heart and a desire to tell us what it all means.

And is this guy serious about “the inadequacy of US war planning” in Afghanistan? We did in a couple of months what the second most powerful army in the history of human civilization - the Soviet Military - couldn’t accomplish in a decade! And this represents “inadequacy in US war planning?” Get. A. Grip.

It’s almost as if Carroll has ensconced himself in an alternate imaginary universe, oblivious to the reality in this one, skipping along with his head in the clouds and his foot in his mouth, spouting his lunacies without realizing that the inhabitants of the real world look upon him as we would a masturbating monkey in the zoo; with a mix of curiosity and embarrassment.

More words of wisdom from our Flatulently Freudian Flim-Flam Fakir:

As if that were not irrational enough, the Bush administration chose this month, in the thick of its nuclear standoff with Tehran, to reveal plans for a new nuclear weapons manufacturing complex of its own — a major escalation of US nuclear capacity. This represents a movement away from merely maintaining our thousands of warheads to replacing them. The promise of new bombs to come, including the so-called bunker-buster under development, may be the final nail in the coffin of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which binds Washington to work for the elimination of nukes, not their enhancement.

Set the cauldron of Iraq to boiling even hotter by daring Iran to join in against us. Justify Iran’s impulse to obtain nuclear capacity by using our own nuclear capacity as a thermo-prod. How self-defeating can our actions get?

Surely, something besides intelligent strategic theory is at work here. Yes. These are the policies of deeply frustrated, angry, and psychologically wounded people. Those of us who oppose them will yield to our own versions of anger and despair at our peril, and the world’s. Fierce but reasoned opposition is more to the point than ever.

“Nuclear standoff?” Um…that would require two states to possess the demon weapons, something that may come to pass sooner rather than later but is not the case at present. Therefore, Carroll can drop the dramatic pretensions anytime he wishes.

As for our “bunker busters,” those have been in development for more than a decade which means that the former Commander in Chief William Jefferson Clinton also signed off on their development. Was he suffering from “anger and despair” too?

Building new nukes and retiring old ones is not against the NPT or START nor is it considered provocative except by anyone but liberals like Carroll who view any attempt by the United States to defend itself as “provocative” by default. I guess when someone says that they wish to destroy you while in the midst of racing to build weapons that can accomplish that task, we should avoid provocations like improving our ability to stop a bunch of maniacs from bringing about the end times.

The hysterics on the left about the United States using nuclear weapons has a kind of breathless, gossipy quality to it - sort of like a bunch of 13 year old girls talking about sex at a sleepover: “And then he kissed me and I got all mushy inside…OOOOOH.” It’s as if the mere discussion of the subject is both exciting and forbidden at the same time while giving the writer a special thrill to be in virgin territory. It’s not going to happen. To believe that there is one chance in a million of it happening is ignorant. Or it is a deliberate attempt to add to the “Bush is evil” theme that seems to be lefty writer’s favorite pastime.

Carroll is not a serious man. And to write a column so full of laughable postulates about the inner motivations of the Bush Administration is to reveal a either a writer who is extremely bored with himself or, more likely, unconsciously transferring his own “anger and despair” onto his enemies.

Wonder what Dr. Sanity would have to say about that?

UPDATE

Jonah Goldberg:

The week the deranged president of Iran again calls for the annihilation of Israel and once again denies the Holocaust ever happpened James Carroll draws the only logical conclusion: Bush is a lunatic and this administration is run by “deeply frustrated, angry, and psychologically wounded people.”

That about covers it…