…commentary by Norman Podhoretz {that’s right, Norman — back in New York, pronounced Nawmin}, I must remark upon the free time I now have to really spend some hours in the blogosphere. It’s great!

On the bummer side, having a lot more time to spend reading the comment sections of various other right thinking blogs often means getting to read comments by liberals, some sincere left thinkers, some genuinely misinformed portsiders and some simply trolls that haunt certain blogs to garner attention as they disagree with anything and everything the blogger and his/her regular commenters say, no matter what.

It’s only a bummer because one is reminded that there are millions of voters in this country whose views on important issues mirror those harbored by the mainstream media and the many liberals that infest Congress. No matter how much hard, in-your-face evidence is produced that refutes positions they endorse, these folks won’t stray an inch from the leftist party line.

They worship the man-made global warming myth, ready to throw their support behind completely unnecessary and useless measures that would deal our economy a devastating blow. While it would hurt as many of them as anyone else in the United States, it wouldn’t bother the rich folks like Al Gore who serve as the high priests of this most spectacular con in the history of the earth.

They utterly refuse to believe that there are Islamofascists who want to kill us, and deny that the War on Terror is anything more than a bumper sticker phrase. Regardless of all the terrorist attacks against Americans from Carter’s Teheran embassy adventure through 9/11 and the variety of terrorist ops that have more recently taken place in Europe and elsewhere around the world and the stated intentions of terrorist leaders like Osama bin Laden, these total simpletons and general purpose fools people just go about their lah-di-dah Utopian lives, assuming that there are no differences of any kind that can’t be solved by a diplomatic embrace with perhaps some capitulation thrown in.

They are so short sighted and moronic that they fail to see why amnesties awarded millions of illegal aliens would massively damage our economy (here I will sorrowfully include a shameful number of name-only Republicans and the President himself).

What a deal! They promote widespread poverty, a smashed economy and a suicide bomber on every corner.

Wait, a suicide bomber falls under the heading of “Applied Islam”.

Moving right along, the column by Norman Podhoretz I referred to above has to be the best and most insightful analysis, by far, of the ongoing Iran nuke kerfuffle I’ve read yet.

Although many persist in denying it, I continue to believe that what Sept 11, 2001, did was to plunge us headlong into nothing less than another world war. I call this new war World War IV, because I also believe that what is generally known as the Cold War was actually World War III, and that this one bears a closer resemblance to that great conflict than it does to World War II. Like the Cold War, as the military historian Eliot Cohen was the first to recognize, the one we are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism, yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of communism; it is global in scope; it is being fought with a variety of weapons, not all of them military; and it is likely to go on for decades.

What follows from this way of looking at the last five years is that the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be understood if they are regarded as self-contained wars in their own right. Instead we have to see them as fronts or theaters that have been opened up in the early stages of a protracted global struggle. The same thing is true of Iran. As the currently main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11, and as (according to the State Department’s latest annual report on the subject) the main sponsor of the terrorism that is Islamofascism’s weapon of choice, Iran too is a front in World War IV. Moreover, its effort to build a nuclear arsenal makes it the potentially most dangerous one of all.

The foregoing summary has been more than enough for an entire column, but constitutes merely the tip of an iceberg.

I’ll leave it to you folks to read the rest of the article, but I want to block quote something that should stand out to every reader as the perfect definition of the threat that Iran’s leaders present to the non-Muslim world.

…Nor are they inhibited by a love of country:

We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.

These were the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who ruled Iran from 1979 to 1989, and there is no reason to suppose that his disciple Ahmadinejad feels any differently.

Ahmadmanjihad wants desperately to get his nukes in a row so he can Armaggedonize his way to glory in the annals of Islam, even if it means the vaporization of himself and his country.

Remember the intense footage and emotion charged reporting we saw on 11 September 2001 when we turned on our TVs en route to the coffee maker? Imagine turning on the TV one morning soon to an announcement that “approximately 6 hours ago, U.S. Stealth aircraft dropped nuclear cluster bombs on targets in Iran…” and seeing video of multiple mushroom clouds in the distance.

That could well happen….