Over a decade after thousands of New Yorkers were murdered by Muslim terrorists, the city’s mayor is declaring victory in the War on Salt. Next up he plans to wage a spring offensive on Styrofoam cups. After that, who knows?
We live in surreal times. In the Middle Ages, cats and rats were put on trial. In this modern age, we began by waging wars on poverty and drugs, both of which we lost, and have now retreated to fighting wars on food ingredients, the bags we carry them in and the containers out of which we eat and drink them.
There’s no telling what surreal enemy our wise and brilliant leaders will declare war on next. Shoes? Pepper? Umbrellas? Mathematics? The color blue?
There’s just no way to know anymore.
The United States has lost the War in Afghanistan, a minor matter that no news outlet can find the time to report on because they’re too busy covering a breaking story about a Republican Senator taking a sip of a water. Maybe a War on Water can be next. Was there a Styrofoam cup involved? It’s time for one of those hard-hitting investigations that reminds us what a tragedy it will be when the last newspaper is strangled with the entrails of the last news network and the media’s commitment to serious journalism is finally replaced by pictures of cats, wardrobe malfunctions and mutual accusations of racism. (And we won’t even notice when it finally happens.)
But who can find the time to fight a war against Islamic terrorists, when there are more pressing wars to be fought? Like a war on being fat.
Michelle Obama declared that obesity was a national security threat. And the Pentagon, which now exists only to ratify the latest leftist social experiment from the White House, whether it’s Green Energy, Gay Marriage or bombing the fattest state in the country (Michigan), issued a report agreeing that snack foods posed the greatest threat to the military since Global Warming and the lack of Tranny toilets on submarines.
The military has been unable to identify the Fort Hood Massacre as a terrorist attack and fires any instructor who talks about Islam as anything other than a wonderful Religion of Peace practiced by our closest allies in Saudi Arabia and on board a plane headed for the Pentagon, but the political generals are always ready, willing and able to jump on any truly serious national security threat. If only Iran began developing the world’s biggest chocolate bar, then the bombing raids would begin as soon as the chocolate enrichment process reached the caramel-nougat line.
Faced with a seemingly unwinnable conflict against the Soviet Union, American leaders began to retreat into smaller social wars that were actually far more unwinnable. Those wars have also gone the way of the dodo. The War on Poverty is one with the ages and the War on Drugs is usually only mentioned in a pejorative context.
But the same government that couldn’t get a small percentage of the population to stop doing cocaine and heroin imagines that it will somehow be able to compel 11-year-old boys to stop eating candy and drawing guns. A heroin addict is nothing compared to a normal growing boy seeking a sweet sugar rush before playing a game of cops and robbers. The authorities would have better luck getting Obama’s campaign staff to Say No to Drugs.
The government that couldn’t stop drug use or defeat Islamic terrorism has set its sights on something easier. Taking candy from a baby.
During his State of the Union Address, in between promising to create hubs full of 3D printers and drag every three-year-old to a preschool so he can get a head start on being indoctrinated in important knowledge skills, like recycling and understanding white privilege, Zero Hussein announced that the mission in Afghanistan had been completed because Al Qaeda was defeated. Then he explained that while the war was over, American soldiers would have to go on staying in Afghanistan to continue fighting the already defeated Al Qaeda in a war that was no longer a war, but an extended vacation with shooting.
Since Al Qaeda did not have a significant presence in Afghanistan at any time during his maladministration, defeating it was fairly easy, and true to form it only cost thousands of lives. But somehow it still isn’t defeated. Still if fighting things that don’t exist gets applause, put your hands together for the War on Global Warming, which has recently been scaled down to Climate Change, which means that any time the weather changes, it’s probably due to people using the wrong kinds of light bulbs, driving the wrong kinds of cars and not paying enough attention to Al Gore’s latest plan to fill up the pockets of his cheap oversized suit and those of his Wall Street buddies who care almost as much about the environment as they do about feminism, racism and wiping out entire economies.
The War on Terror may have been a tough nut to crack, but let’s focus on the War on Thermometers. They’re small and have little pockets of red fluid that are easy to crack open. Everyone used to say that everyone talks about the temperature, but doesn’t do anything about it. Finally we’re going to do something about the weather. And the little kids who eat candy. And once we’ve won the wars on the rain and sun, on sugar, spice and everything nice, then we can finally begin learning the rules of being in the underclass of the new Caliphate.
During the election, Obama promised to begin “nation building” at home. Since that usually involves destroying a country’s military, wrecking its industrial base and then feeding them off the back of trucks while communicating with them only through interpreters, it looks like he’s making good on his promise. Chicago already looks more like Kabul or Baghdad than America. And Chicago is the second capital of the new Obamerica that is swallowing the country.
Nation building at home means bringing the war home. Nation building is something that we usually inflict on our worst enemies in the hopes of teaching them a better way to live. It means wrecking the United States and then rebuilding it in the way that our conquerors see fit. All those little wars aren’t really being fought against salt, sugar, plastic bags and a thousand other tiny inanimate enemies. They are being fought against you.
Guns don’t kill people. And salt and sugar don’t eat themselves. Plastic bags don’t fill themselves with groceries and, barring the driverless car reportedly on the horizon, your old-fashioned gas guzzler won’t drive itself home from the store with plastic bags full of salt and sugar in the trunk.
The left has blown the war against Islamic terrorism. For the most part it has chosen not to fight it. Its real enemy isn’t some bearded guy sitting in a cave with a Kalashnikov being propped up by his fourth wife’s Hijab; it’s Mr. and Mrs. America in all their racist, overeating and polluting criminality. Lefties are not terribly interested in conquering other countries, until they have finished the conquest of the country that they’re in.
What we can expect is a war on everything but the war we’re in. To the sort of people who declare war on salt and make up fake global crises to force everyone to pay more to fly, Islamic terrorism is just what happens when the sainted 3rd World gets tired of our overeating and overdriving, and the oil companies and agribusiness that cater to our needs, and begins fighting back. The understanding that the terrorists are not just out to protest the destruction of the rainforest or fracking, but intend to establish a totalitarian theocracy based on over a thousand years of bloody history never even enters the minds of the sort of people who declare wars on salt and Styrofoam cups.
There is no denying the fact that much of the country is only too willing to turn away from the bleak prospect of a seemingly unwinnable war against a huge number of ruthless enemies and instead begin lecturing their neighbors on how to raise their children and cook their meals. There is a measure of pettiness in all of us and now that pettiness has been elevated to a national security agenda.
Do your neighbors’ kids look too fat? The government is doing something it. Does the weather feel too warm or too cold? Washington D.C. is on the case. Are you sick of selfish people who don’t bring a usable bag along when they shop for groceries after a long day of working for a living? Let Uncle Sam or Uncle Barack handle that pesky problem.
Faced with an external threat, people often turn on each other fighting the small petty wars against each other that they can win, rather than going out to slay the dragon. And we are up to our necks in these small and petty wars, that are small only in concept not in scope. The bigger the threat, the smaller the wars become until we are fighting everyday household items, rather than the terrorists trying to break into our house and kill us.
In New York City, an awkward skeletal tower stands near where the World Trade Center towers once touched the sky. And on some lampposts you can still see the faded imprint of missing person flyers. But there is good news. Mayor Bloomberg reports that the war on salt has been won.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century. He blogs at Sultan Knish.
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