"Summer's here and the time is right/for dancin' in the streets!"

The radical Islamists, the al-Qaida … would be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on Sept. 11 because they would declare victory in this war on terror.

This was what Steve King (R-IA) had to say about what would happen if Barack Obama were elected president. One funny thing about this little quip of Steve's is that he wasn't even basing it primarily on Barack's stance on the war in Iraq; rather, King's special brand of reasoning led him to this conclusion:

his middle name (Hussein) does matter. It matters because they read a meaning into that in the rest of the world. That has a special meaning to them. They will be dancing in the streets because of his middle name. They will be dancing in the streets because of who his father was.

Beg pardon? "The al-Qaida" will be dancing in the streets because Barack's father was Kenyan? Huh?

But really, the most absurd thing about Steve King is that the doomsday scenario he identifies is really not all that bad. In fact, it says something about the neo-con mindset that making sure Islamists are never happy is their primary goal. Never mind the human cost in American and Iraqi lives: it's more important to make Islamists angry. Let's think about this "dancing in the streets" concept for a second. Islamists are happy, and it didn't (unlike Sept. 11) cost us anything, especially not any lives, to get them that way. Happy Islamists are less likely* to go blow themselves and/or their neighbors and/or American troops up. So really, Steve King thinks that his own pride in not having other people think they've won is worth the continued deaths of American troops. (Once again, the right demonstrates that it hates the shit out of our troops). In reality, Bush's war on terror is a lose-lose situation. We can never win, because we're trying to stamp out the people who hate us, and the more we do that, the more people hate us. They can never win, because they want us to stop being douchebags in our foreign and economic policy, and the entire premise of the war on terror is foreign and economic douchebaggery. The world King proposes actually transforms this lose-lose situation into a win-win. We win because we are no longer hated, and therefore no longer attacked—and let's be clear, this is a war to defend our way of life, according to Dear Leader. The moment we are no longer attacked, we win by the Bush administration's definition. They win because...well...according to King, they think they've won. They're dancing in the streets declaring victory. I don't really care why they think they've won as long as they stop attacking us and their countrymen and -women.

King cares though, because at the end of the day, the lives of Americans, Afghanis, and Iraqis just don't matter very much to him.


*This is one situation where the "embolden the terrorists" scenario is even less credible than usual. Let's think about why Islamists would dance in the streets. Well, it would be because they perceive the U.S. as having installed a president who was Islam-friendly. Is there any mindset in which it would make sense to then turn around and attack the entity that you just celebrated?