Commando porn

Gilliard and Wolcott and Atrios and Kevin and Digby all notice how some media and blogger chickenhawks are gleefully indulging themselves in another round of macho terrorism tough talk.
Gilliard refers to all the TV shots of machine-gun-toting security guards in American subways as "Security Theatre", while Wolcott writes about "this scare talk complemented with commando porn images of security patrols packing enough firepower to retake Stalingrad. What are those weapons for? It's not as if terrorists engage in running gun battles in the West. They plant explosives, and once those explosives go off, guys standing around with machine guns . . . don't make a whole lot of difference."
And as usual, Digby gets to the heart of it.
He describes how people were seduced by the drama of 911:

9/11 was a very dramatic act of terrorism, a made for TV spectacle that horrifed and riveted the world for days. Many of these people threw themselves into the fantasy that this "war on terrorism" was the gravest threat the world has ever known (MAD be damned) and that they were somehow at the center of this conflict, destined to be heroes of the age. There were even those who said overtly that the greatest generation were a bunch of free-loading socialists compared to the freedom fighting liberators of today . . . I can understand the excitement of the twenty somethings like Pat Tilman who joined up after 9/11, driven by a strong desire to test his mettle and physical courage. (Hell, that was the reason Oliver Stone joined up in Vietnam, Kerry too --- it has little to do with politics.) Young men being excited about war is nothing new . . .

But the chickenhawk problem is that they were and are too cowardly to actually fight. And this makes it impossible to ever win.

We are dealing with a group of right wing glory seekers who chose long ago to eschew putting themselves on the line in favor of tough talk and empty posturing --- the Vietnam chickenhawks and their recently hatched offspring of the new Global War On Terrorism. These are men (mostly) driven by the desire to prove their manhood but who refuse to actually test their physical courage. Neither are they able to prove their virility as they are held hostage by prudish theocrats and their own shortcomings. So they adopt the pose of warrior but never actually place themselves under fire. This is a psychologically difficult position to uphold. Bullshitting yourself is never without a cost . . . Playing laptop Pattons at full volume, supporting the president and the entire power structure of the government is their only way of proving to themselves that they are warriors. They are damaged by their own contradictory past and as a result they cannot see their way through the haze of emotional turmoil to seek out and find real solutions to the problem of terrorism. They lash out with trash talk and threats and constant references to their own resolve because they are afraid. They've always been afraid.

And what scares me is how many of these people are now talking on some of the right-wing websites about how much they want to just nuke all Muslims and the whole middle east.
Do they think war is a videogame?