All week, the bully-in-chief of cable news, Bill O’Reilly, has been passionately recruiting American clergy of all ethnic and supernatural inclinations to preach from their pulpits this weekend for US troops to lead what he sees as a holy war declared by ISIS. “The problem is Islamic fanatics who want to kill Christians and Jews.” The goat that gives him his vein-popping urgency is President Barack Obama who is determined to never make a reference to religion in his call for international propaganda war against the ISIS phenomenon — to accompany his current bombing campaign and any other military action he may lead.
While Mr. Obama is guilty of a host of national security state sins and is not without blood on his hands, the president’s rhetoric is smart when he emphasizes that ISIS is a “death cult” with incredible influence that should be engaged by the forces of civilization. The problem is the fine rhetoric seldom translates into action. Policy always falls back on our runaway national security state and its deep terror of losing some aspect of its power and self-image of exceptionalism.
...
As is his wont, O’Reilly invited a nice Quaker woman and the well-known left-leaning cleric Jim Wallis onto his show so he could badger them over and over with his deeply-felt assumption that killing lots of people is the only answer. “What would you do?” he’d ask belligerently. His guests would try to tell him their alternative ideas, and he’d come back with: “No! What would you do!!?”
Wallis calmly persisted. First, he would not invade like O’Reilly wanted to do. He pointed out that the disastrous Iraq War helped give us ISIS in the first place, and a new invasion would only make things even worse. His point: “The countries in the region have to solve this.” This only inflamed O’Reilly’s obnoxious side even more. He hollered back: “It is our moral obligation to confront evil!” Wallis calmly smiled. O’Reilly then moved on to friendly ally Laura Ingraham and told her, virtually quoting George W. Bush, “We need to step up against the evil doers.”