SEND A THRILL UP RIGHT-WINGERS' LEGS AND YOU CAN SAY ISIS ISN'T MUSLIM

Lucianne.com highly recommends this opinion piece from Investor's Business Daily, where the editorials are even further to the right than the ones in The Wall Street Journal:

Jordan's King Gets Medieval On Them

Leadership: Jordan is taking the war to the terrorists -- not only on land but on the propaganda front, where Islamic State has had the high ground for a while. Jordan's will to win is injecting new energy into the war on terror.

This, of course, is contrasted with the quisling behavior of the Obama White House:

As the West dithers under the weak leadership and wavering resolve of the Obama administration, the Jordanians, however small and threatened they are as a nation, have injected the force multiplier of moral passion into their war effort.

And how have the Jordanians done this? Air strikes (um, I thought the U.S. was conducting the majority of air strikes against ISIS, and was aiding the Jordanians in their air strikes, but never mind), plus bellicose rhetoric ("King Abdullah's fiery vow to make the 'earth shake'").

But this as well:

The king also morally delegitimized the terrorists, saying they had zero claim to the name Muslim -- powerful, given that the king is a direct descendant of Muhammad. He was buttressed by Jordanian officials, who called the terrorists "daesh" -- a derogatory word in Arabic that's as nasty as it sounds, and one that IS hates.

Wait -- what? I thought those who refer to the Islamic State as "Daesh" were just being hypersensitive because they wanted to avoid any name with the word "Islamic" in it. That's what right-wingers told me, so it must be true!

And now it's OK to say that ISIS has "zero claim to the name Muslim"? It's OK to say that ISIS isn't Islamic? Haven't thousands of jeremiads been directed at the Obama administration by right-wing pundits because the administration says precisely this? Haven't there been multiple columns with titles such as "Why Does Obama Insist That Mideast Terrorists Are Not Islamic?" in publications such as, um, Investors Business Daily?

Well, Jordan's King Abdullah not only talked tough (he quoted Clint Eastwood!) but also personally donned a military uniform, to the delight of the American right, amid rumors that he would personally fly a sortie, which later proved untrue but also delighted the right. American right-wingers love tough talk almost more than they love action; as we learned in our last presidency, it thrills them to see tough-talking leaders in military uniforms, just as, thirty years ago, it thrilled them when a president who never saw action used to salute giddily at the slightest prompting. I'm not sure American conservatives even want to defeat ISIS -- often it seems that they just want the (vicarious) experience of the fight, or they just want to see fighting acted out. Give them that and you can say anything you want.