Shorter Fox News: "To prevent another 9/11, we need another 9/11"

I've heard former CIA man Michael Scheuer before on the Michael Smerconish Show and elsewhere, and I recall that he seemed at first to hail from the Sensible Party in our national security community. But like a lot of folks these days he's now swimming in the deep end of the pool:

Yesterday, Glenn Beck guest and former CIA official Michael Scheuer openly hoped for a terrorist attack on the United States, saying, "the only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States...It's an absurd situation again, only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary." Beck nodded solemnly.

This is the same Michael Scheuer who, a few months ago, played patriotism police arguing that anyone who didn't support the United States using torture to interrogate terrorist suspects was anti-American...now he's begging for a terrorist attack on the United States. This is a pretty awesome example of how the right conflates their political interests with the interests of the country as a whole. If there's no terrorist attack, then Americans are safe. But Scheuer can't be right if there's no terrorist attack. And Scheuer being right is actually more important than Americans staying alive.

Exactly. There are so many off-base assumptions here -- that things that people don't like about our government right now are worse than the slaughter of 3,000 innocent Americans, that only "as much violence as necessary" prevents more terrorism (see how this is being re-thought in Afghanistan). That Glenn Beck didn't jump up and object to Scheuer's remarks is telling, yet also not surprising. Sadly, this kind of thinking found its way into my own newspaper a couple of years ago. It was horribly wrong then, and it's horrible wrong now.