BECAUSE WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE

Deep breath. Ready?

9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! THE BETURBANED HORDE IS GOING TO NUKE YOUR GRANDMOTHER! MUSLIMS BLOOBITY BLAH BLAH SCARY WE'RE GONNA DIE! ONLY 9/11 MATTERS IN THIS ELECTION! THIS ELECTION MUST BE ABOUT 9/11 OR YOU WILL BE NUKED BY MUSLIMS!

No, I'm serious. It's 2004 all over again.

THE next president must do one thing, and one thing only, if he is to be judged a success: He must prevent Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America. Everything else — Fannie Mae, health care reform, energy independence, the budget shortfall in Wasilla, Alaska — is commentary. The nuclear destruction of Lower Manhattan, or downtown Washington, would cause the deaths of thousands, or hundreds of thousands; a catastrophic depression; the reversal of globalization; a permanent climate of fear in the West; and the comprehensive repudiation of America’s culture of civil liberties.

Many proliferation experts I have spoken to judge the chance of such a detonation to be as high as 50 percent in the next 10 years. I am an optimist, so I put the chance at 10 percent to 20 percent. Only technical complications prevent Al Qaeda from executing a nuclear attack today. The hard part is acquiring fissile material; an easier part is the smuggling itself (as the saying goes, one way to bring nuclear weapon components into America would be to hide them inside shipments of cocaine).

No seriously, we have learned nothing. The GOP is running on fear again. The op-eds are running on fear.

Fear like this.

So what we have is one presidential candidate who still seems to be casting about for an overarching strategy; and another one who is not entirely sure whom we’re fighting. We can hope against hope that in the next two months, these two men will discuss, in a deliberative and encompassing way, the best ways to protect America from what some nonproliferation experts believe is a nearly inevitable attack. We should, in fact, demand that this conversation take place, because nothing else matters.

Nothing else matters. There is only 9/11. The economy doesn't matter, civil liberties don't matter, the housing depression doesn't matter, energy prices don't matter, nothing matters except constantly living in 2004.

You will obey or you will get nuked. None of the issues in this election matter save one, and that's protecting us from getting nuked by Muslims, otherwise you hate America and you want us to get nuked by Muslims, get it?

Idiots. All of them. I so hate this time of year.