How a war supporter thinks

We had our "Stop the Iran War" chat room open again this week. Stormy's husband is working in another state, and she went with him. She spent her days in a small travel trailer in an RV park, watching people come and go and feeling claustrophobic. So, she's wanted to have a chat room where we could have a conversation because it's easier than using an instant message client.

I picked the topic about the Iran war because I was interested in seeing how people would support their positions for or against, and also because while she had no particular opinion at first, her husband, who works in the oil industry, is behind Bush all the way, she told me.

After watching the vitriolic hate coming from the war promoters, she's been won by the anti-war movement.

I've thrown this one guy Carlo out of the chat room at least a couple dozen times because he and his friends do nothing but call us names. It's really quite revealing:

› Carlo_Chambers has joined the conversation.
Carlo_Chambers : hey idiot, I dare you to come to my room and prove you're not a fucking pussy who's afraid of debate
› Carlo_Chambers has left the conversation.
› Carlo_Chambers has joined the conversation.
Carlo_Chambers : come to my room & debate me you fucking pussy
› Carlo_Chambers has left the conversation.

According to this individual, who I know is an adult because he's online all day and night, if you don't believe Bush and Rush that islamofascism is real and are against attacking Iran, you're a pussy coward, faggot, traitor and a stupid idiot. This clarifies the mind of war supporters in all its detail.

To the pro-war crowd, the more people who die, the more it costs, the more countries we invade, the bigger the weapons we use, the better. Period. One hundred thousand dead Americans is only a third as good as 300,000. A trillion dollars spent is only a third as good as $3,000,000,000,000.00. Conventional bombs are only as fractionally good as their larger, nuclear counterparts. Invading two countries is only a third as good as invading six.

The death, the debt, the consequences and the operative issues don't matter one bit. The only thing that matters is escalation and the show of force. Anyone who disagrees with this elegant simplicity gets called a stream of vile names, hatefully. This is the mindset of the Bush administration, and this is what Congress has decided to fund, again and again and again. The government and the country can have no other business because all resources have to be diverted to funding the war, and placating the simplest people who ever lived.

In the back of my imagination, that place that never finds its way to spoken or written language, I suspected this was true. Running the chat room demonstrated it's completely true. It would be laughable if it weren't so sad and troubling. Carlo would be happy to die in a nuclear retaliation for our adventurism, so long as it meant escalation and more show of force, even though he hasn't thought it through. I'm sure a large number of people agree. However, they are no more than one-fourth or one-third of the population, a minority.

Majority leaders have expressed their intention to postpone Bush's war funding request until after the first of the year in part because he plans to use some of the funding to start a new war with Iran. Whether or not they will decide to hand him more money is anyone's guess. We have this time to attempt to talk them out of it, if for some reason they've finally decided to listen.