Aspiring chickenhawks and pundit-warriors should take note, because there's a hot new way to express support for pointless military violence, and it will make your warmongering sound so much less belligerent than that of Cheney, Bolton, and other lunatics. The key word, you see, is passion. You have to be passionate about something unfortunate that is happening in the world, and this wave of passion, if sufficiently abundant, will carry you over any formerly problematic non-sequiturs and allow your heartbreak over this or that humanitarian disaster to smoothly translate to enthusiastic support for military violence.
The debate over whether or not to attack Syria has been a fertile ground for pundits to wave their passion around like it's going out of style. One person whose passion has been clearly demonstrated to my satisfaction is Christiane Amanpour. After virtually melting down on Anderson Cooper's CNN show last week over her co-panelists' stubborn and unanimous reluctance to embrace an attack on Syria - "I can barely contain myself at this point" - Amanpour took to Twitter and explained the origins of her demand for war:
(Retweeters risk drowning in her passion.)
In that appearance on CNN, Amanpour said "I'm so emotional about this," and then, less than one minute later, claimed "this is not emotion" after Andrew Sullivan called her out for looking at policy and strategy through the lens of emotion, rather than reason. When you play the passion card, logical coherence is simply not needed. If you need proof of that, please look at the
dictator-suporting scumbag Amanpour unironically cites to aid her passion-based case for war:
{Originally posted at
Crimethink}