Like many others here, I've been puzzled by how the Cheney Administration and the right-wingers in general combine fearmongering and wanton risk-taking gambling.
You'd normally expect people who are so frightened to be really risk-averse-- "conservative" in the true sense of the word.
The "pseudocertainty effect" from psychology seems to explain a lot of this.
According to Wikipedia, the
Pseudocertainty effect is:
... a concept from prospect theory. It refers to people's tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
In other words, if you are scared out of your fucking mind, you'll take crazy risks to avoid whatever has frightened you. But if you feel everything is going along well, you will avoid screwing with a good thing.
The Cheney/Rove fear-mongering could be specifically designed to induce risk-taking behaviour to further a radical right-wing agenda, using this pseudocertainty effect to get buy-in.
We've seen them succeed with this on 9/11 and Iraq, attempt it and fail on Social Security, and beginning to fail with it on Iran and Lebanon/Syria/Whomever. I think they tried it with immigration and gay marriage, but if that's the case, nobody except their base appears to be buying it.
The "smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud" is a classic example: holy shit, we're all gonna die! Let's invade Iraq! Aiiee! Normally sane, "conservative" (risk-averse) people pissed themselves with fear and endorsed the biggest policy-blunder gamble in American history-- because of the Pseudocertainty Effect. That didn't make sense to me before, but it's predictable according to this theory.
In the case of Social Security, the wingnuts failed to convince anyone that Social Security was going to go up in a "mushroom cloud". Most people with more than 2 fingers of forehead know that Social Security is a lot more, well, social and secure, than, say, the stock market, which in the post-Enron era everyone knows is little more than a huge casino.
And again we're hearing more "mushroom cloud"-style rhetoric on Iran. Are people scared enough for Pseudocertainty to push them into accepting a gamble as wild and crazy as pre-emptive nuclear strikes and World War III? I don't think so, not yet anyway.
I sure hope nothing literally blows up inside America over the next 3 years. Otherwise, we might see people throwing caution to the wind again and endorsing another foreign misadventure.