The sidewalks in Paris weren’t yet dry when America’s leading ghoul Bill Kristol was being wheeled in front of cameras to call for 50,000 U.S. ground troops to be deployed to the Middle East, for a war that would no doubt last decades and get many thousands of people killed. All that money and death for something so impractical as a ground effort against a moving target, when a flexible, selective offensive is much safer and more intelligent. But what can you expect from this embalmed-looking buffoon, who seems at this point to only be able to get hard from inhaling the scent of soldier blood.

Of course, this routinely discredited dunderhead won’t be alone in calling for a large-scale war effort. With GOP rivals trying to out-extreme one another, the war drums are now to be pounded with many fists.

From Paul Krugman of the New York Times:

Think, for a moment, about what France is and what it represents. It has its problems — what nation doesn’t? — but it’s a robust democracy with a deep well of popular legitimacy. Its defense budget is small compared with ours, but it nonetheless retains a powerful military, and has the resources to make that military much stronger if it chooses. (France’s economy is around 20 times the size of Syria’s.) France is not going to be conquered by ISIS, now or ever. Destroy Western civilization? Not a chance.

So what was Friday’s attack about? Killing random people in restaurants and at concerts is a strategy that reflects its perpetrators’ fundamental weakness. It isn’t going to establish a caliphate in Paris. What it can do, however, is inspire fear — which is why we call it terrorism, and shouldn’t dignify it with the name of war.

The point is not to minimize the horror. It is, instead, to emphasize that the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can inspire. And it’s crucial to realize that there are multiple ways the response can go wrong. …

Finally, terrorism is just one of many dangers in the world, and shouldn’t be allowed to divert our attention from other issues. Sorry, conservatives: when President Obama describes climate change as the greatest threat we face, he’s exactly right. Terrorism can’t and won’t destroy our civilization, but global warming could and might.•