TAXONOMY

One cannot watch much televised news these days without being floored by the sheer homogeneity of the kind of dead-enders (a.k.a. 28-percenters) who still loudly proclaim the tremendous successes in Iraq. These people look like a blob of fat, white Play-Doh forced through the same mold a few hundred times. Honestly, it's just one middle-aged or old white guy after another. Sure, there's token diversity (albeit scant) among the punditry – they can trot out "Uncle" Dinesh D'Souza every once in a while if they can knock the AEI's cock out of his mouth for a few seconds – but among the "Sunday talk show" type guests….Jesus. How many times do I have to see Lindsey Graham, Jim DeMint, and John Comryn on Meet the Press? For that matter, can anyone tell those bags of fluid apart? Would their wives notice if we switched them?

Then I read Thomas "Six More Months!" Friedman's latest rant from the New York Times, and I started thinking there is more diversity here than meets the eye. They may all look the same, but there are really two kinds of right-wing chickenhawk.

The first, and far more numerous, kind are the complete pussies. These are guys like Jonah Goldberg, DeMint, Hugh "Man Tits" Hewitt, Dick Cheney, or Michael O'Hanlon. If you drafted and forced them into a combat situation, they could be identified by behavior such as:

Pant-wetting

Numerous draft deferments

Faking injuries to avoid service

Shooting themselves in the foot to get out of duty

Joining something like the Coast Guard Reserve and then spending the rest of their lives bragging about their "wartime service"

This describes about 95% of the chickenhawks we see on the news. They're easy to spot because of their over-the-top bluster and ridiculous masculine grandstanding. They talk a huge game. Huge. They're not just for the war, they're for more wars than anyone else. Iran? Syria? Take your pick, Glenn Reynolds will pound his fist on a desk and proclaim that he's for it. They're locked in a mutual, unspoken struggle with their own kind and constantly feel the need to overcompensate for their tiny dicks by being not just a warmonger but the biggest warmonger.

The second kind of chickenhawk – and this is where Thomas Friedman comes in – are the lunatics. These are the guys who don't quite have the balls to enlist in the military, but if you put them into a war zone they'd be slitting civilians' throats and wearing necklaces made out of ears. These are the kind of guys who bring you things like the My Lai massacre. A guy like Friedman has nowhere near the bluster of his fellow cheerleaders. Just look at his friendly, warm, grandfatherly visage. And his "the sun'll come up tomorrow" outlook on Iraq just proves what an optimist he is at heart.

Yes, those are the warning signs. Put 22 year-old Tommy Friedman in Vietnam or Iraq and he'd be smearing his face with warpaint, talking to his rifle, and spending about 12 hours a day sharpening his knife. Am I being too hard on the Friedman Unit? Re-read that latest op-ed on Iraq. If it's a failure, it's because the Iraqis failed. Whose fault is it? Why, the victims' fault, of course! Refusing to accept responsibility for one's actions and blaming them on the victims are the classic sign of sociopathic behavior. Thomas Friedman and his kind bravely tried to jam democracy down a (colonially-defined non-country) country's throat at gunpoint and, if it didn't work, well then only the Iraqis can be to blame.