Conservative Cowards

Diarist DarkSyde at Daily Kos makes a good point about how today's war hawks are distinguished not by bravery, but by good old pee-in-your-pants fear:

I know there are millions of brave, decent conservatives. My apologies to those folks for the following. But good grief, when did the Republican Party become infested with what sound like so many loud, whining cowardly pundits? One second Reagan is up there standing toe-to-toe with the Rooskis, negotiating cool as a cucumber with 20,000 nukes pointed at him, and the next thing I know, the likes of Limbaugh or the crew at Powerwhine and Freeperland, are all shrieking like a class full of tweaked-out, neurotic fifth-graders having a panic attack every time OBL pops up in a grainy video with a rusty AK in the background. What the hell happened to the GOP I once knew?

Death and injury are is as tragic as they are inevitable for human beings. And understandably, we all worry about both, we all cry and mourn when either strike, especially with ourselves or those we love playing the starring role. And I have no desire to down play the loss that anyone feels when someone they love is struck down, be it by terrorism or leukemia. But ...some perspective maybe?

Heart disease and cancer will claim about 1.5 million American lives each and every year. As far as accidental deaths (~100,000/year), motor vehicle accidents far and away lead the pack (+40,000/year), with accidental poisoning and falls in place and show1. You can play with those stats all kinds of ways. But the bottom line is that over the course of a civilian lifetime, the odds of falling victim to Al Qaeda rank somewhere between falling off a ladder to your death and being struck by lightning inside your home.

How does Al Qaeda compare with past threats?

This is a UR-100, NATO designation SS-11 Sego. The SS-11 was one of the workhorses making up a significant portion of the land based Soviet nuclear deterrent. These weapons initially carried a single one-megaton nuclear warhead. Later versions carried up to six 300-500 kilo-ton devices in a single MIRV configuration (The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima yielded about 15 kilotons). Between 1970 and 1985 there were well over 1000 SS-11 missiles and later, larger variants deployed throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in both silo and mobile launcher systems.

Had the SS-11s and their buddies been launched at the US during the cold war, they would have reached their targets in a few minutes and converted some 20 million US citizens intoplasma. Many millions more would have died in agony over the next few weeks. A full Soviet attack would have turned every major city and military base into a smoking, glassy, radioactive crater.

[snip]

The Cold-war is just one of many threats we've faced that exceed the danger posed to America from Osama bin Laden by orders of magnitude. We also survived Hitler, Imperial Japan, the Kaiser, a Civil War, and the British Empire--the latter one twice by the way--just to name a few.

In that historical context, reading or hearing a bunch of yelping GOP crybabies incessantly screeching in craven horror that Al Qaeda is the worst, gosh-darn biggest bad-ass threat we've ever faced is, frankly, an act that has grown tired and embarrassing. And when they yammer, time and time again, that it's not enough for them to be quivering under their beds, they insist the entire country crawl under there and obsess along with them, while they lay in fetal position swaddled in their faded George Bush security blanket squawking in fear, it's enough to make Burt the Turtle recoil in disgust.