MORE RIGHT-WING DEATH PORN

Yesterday, Pat Campbell, a conservative talk-show host based in Orlando, had GOP congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado on as a guest. The discussion turned to terrorism:

CAMPBELL: Now, here's the other thing, too, with the possibility of an attack: I had Juval Aviv on the program last Friday. He's a former Israeli counterterrorism expert. He's claiming that an attack on U.S. soil is imminent, like the kind we saw in London, within the next, you know, ninety days. He said it's not just going to be, you know, one city like New York, or just major areas, but probably six, seven, eight cities, some of them right in the heartland. Worst-case scenario: If they do have these nukes inside the borders and they were to use something like that, what would our response be?

TANCREDO: What would be the response? You know, there are things that you could threaten to do before something like that happens and then you may have to do afterwards that are quite draconian--

CAMPBELL: Such as?

TANCREDO: Well, what if you said something like, if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites.

CAMPBELL: You're talking about bombing Mecca.

TANCREDO: Yeah. I mean, what if you said, "We recognize that this is the ultimate threat to the United States, therefore this is the ultimate threat, this is the ultimate response." I mean, I don't know -- I'm just throwing out there some ideas because it seems to me, at this point in time, or at that point in time, you would be talking about taking the most draconian measures you could possibly imagine. Because other than that all you could do is, once again, tighten up internally.

I transcribed that from an MP3 file available at Campbell's Web site. (It's also posted at this site, where the headline is "US Representative Tom Tancredo in Response to U.S. Nuke Threat: We Could Nuke Mecca," even though neither Tancredo nor Campbell goes quite that far.)

If you listen to it, notice how excited Campbell seems. And notice, on Campbell's site, that the possibility of a simultaneous nuclear attack on as many as eight U.S. cities was so deeply unsettling that Campbell decided to air the remarks again today.

What's going on here? Well, I'm sure al-Qaeda would love to be able to nuke eight U.S. cities at once, but there still hasn't been an al-Qaeda attack using weapons of mass destruction, much less one involving the shipment of nukes to multiple locations for simultaneous detonation.

Therefore, this is nuts.

Ah, but it's fun. It's fun to imagine bombing (or nuking) Mecca -- it's about as much vicarious fun as a right-winger can have with his pants on. Therefore, it's fun to imagine terrorists doing something so awful that we might be able to justify bombing or nuking Mecca -- even if what justifies this it is a staggering attack that presumably would leave tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans dead.

Oh, and I love that "some of them right in the heartland" part. (Yeah, this time the ragheads aren't just gonna kill New Yorkers -- they're gonna kill some real Americans!) That does, however, come straight from Juval Aviv, Campbell's earlier guest, who has a book out and clearly knows who in America is most likely to buy it.

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UPDATE, MONDAY, 7/18: The story makes USA Today, via AP.