These people are nuts.
In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," [Sen. Lindsey Graham] said the Obama administration is "delusional" for thinking it can counter the Islamic State, a terrorist group in Syria sometimes called ISIS or ISIL, primarily through expanded air strikes and by training Syrians for ground combat. [...]
Graham, like some other lawmakers, maintains that the Islamic State is poised to attack America and possibly wipe out humankind if it continues to expand its reach.
"They will open the gates of hell to spill out on the world," he said. "This is not a Sunni versus Sunni [conflict]. This is ISIL versus mankind."
It's not just that ISIS is a threat to the region. It's not just that ISIS is a threat to America. ISIS is now a threat to
all life on earth, or at least all human life. They are the hell-bringers. They are Ebola, plus the Nazis, plus a comet strike.They are catastrophic climate change, except Sen. Lindsey Graham believes in them.
What is it about modern conservatism that demands there always be not just a threat, but an existential threat? It's not enough that Saddam Hussein was a vicious dictator, he also had to be just years away from unleashing a "mushroom cloud" upon us all. It's not just that there was a temporary rise in the number of undocumented minors crossing our borders, we had to have people like Rep. Louie Gohmert explain to us why this was going to somehow result in the end of American civilization. And those kids probably had Ebola. And they were probably Muslims. Reforming health care was going to lead to a dystopian future in which you would appear before a government panel that decided whether you lived or died. Putin is an evil mastermind who has his eyes not just on Crimea or even Ukraine, but on most of Europe if we do not send in our own tanks, or talk much more angrily, or do some other unspecified something. Everything is the immediate precursor to Armageddon, every day, all the time.
It's like the Lindsey Grahams of the world cannot exist without the Next Hitler. There always has to be another Hitler, at every moment, and we are always on the cusp of national or worldwide defeat by that Hitler if we do not respond with military resolve to every last thing, except the things we are not supposed to respond to because that would be interventionism, and if you have been able to discern a pattern between the two other than "does a Democratic leader support the thing?" then you need to write your theory up as a comprehensive explanation so that the rest of us can award you an applicable Nobel Prize.
So now ISIS is the next threat to all of "mankind," and merely bombing them or arming their enemies isn't enough anymore. It's sending American troops to Syria or the end of all mankind, now. Those are the new goalposts for war.
