XDA

After a couple of weeks of inoffensive, albeit somewhat pedestrian, columns, the local Mad Munchkin, law professor Paul Campos has returned to form with a completely incoherent case of the vapors over plain talk from the last of his kind, pro defense Democrat Joe Lieberman. Behold Lieberman's offending quote:

"I'm worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don't appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us - more evil, or as evil, as Nazism, and probably more dangerous than the Soviet communists we fought during the long Cold War."

Paul Campos can't believe anyone would be so stupid as to say that. He writes:

That a statement like this is treated as a reasonable observation rather than denounced as transparently hysterical nonsense indicates the extent to which hysterical nonsense now passes for clear-eyed statesmanship. And that should be far more frightening to Americans than any terrorist threat.

The Nazis were really bad, as Professor Campos points out: The Nazis managed to murder perhaps 10 million people, while starting a war that killed at least 40 million others.

Yeah, by 1945 they did that, but in the mid 30s, their murder victims numbered in the few hundreds, rising each year. In the current countdown to a third hot world war in a 100 years, Hezbollah and al Qaeda are actually ahead of the Nazis.

Campos has more semi-reasoned argument that Lieberman is wrong: At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union's explicit goal was to establish a global communist dictatorship. In the pursuit of this goal, the Soviets built an army of 6 million men, equipped with, among many other things, 10,000 nuclear weapons, which in a matter of minutes could have wiped the United States off the face of the Earth, while killing perhaps 150 million Americans.

Yes, but the Soviets were not suicidal fanatics and could be deterred from too blatant adventurism or a direct attack on the United States because of our military might and the MAD doctrine. Does anyone think that our several thousand nuclear weapons deters al Qaeda for a second? Didn't seem to scare them much 5 years ago.

But there's more: More Americans drown in bathtubs every year than are killed by terrorists...

Clearly Campos is in the camp (with Michael Moore) that doesn't believe there is a terrorist threat, and whatever threat it composes is somehow less a threat than fellow Democrat Senator Lieberman' supposedly wild eyed, cowardly wolf crying.

It was Lieberman's point that many Democrats don't see the true danger of Islamic fascism; Paul Campos could not have proved Lieberman's fears any better had he actually tried.