Feeling better this morning, I rubbed anti-flash cream over exposed skin, struggled into my Class 3 Hazmat suit and waded through the quicksand over at WorldNutDaily.

Pat Buchanan hangs out over there, carefully locked away in a vault with 7 foot thick reinforced concrete walls and a 9 inch thick high carbon steel door with a time lock. Every now and then one can hear a loud blaring klaxon, and red lights set in the ceiling begin to flash a warning as the door unlocks and slowly swings open. Mr Buchanan is about to issue another pronunciamento, telling the world where it went wrong, way back in the 10th century.

In the interests of full disclosure: I don’t like Mr Buchanan. As a human being I am appalled by him. As a lapsed Catholic I am ashamed of him. As a Mosaic Jew I fear him. And as an American I am in despair every time he opens his mouth.

But he finally got something right, and honesty requires me to tell you so.

My country has been "torn to shreds," said Fouad Siniora, the prime minister of Lebanon, as the death toll among his people passed 300 civilian dead, 1,000 wounded, with half a million homeless. Israel must pay for the "barbaric destruction," said Siniora. To the contrary, says columnist Lawrence Kudlow, "Israel is doing the Lord's work." On American TV, former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu says the ruination of Lebanon is Hezbollah's doing. But is it Hezbollah that is using U.S.-built F-16s, with precision-guided bombs and 155-mm artillery pieces to wreak death and devastation on Lebanon? No, Israel is doing this, with the blessing and without a peep of protest from President Bush. And we wonder why they hate us.

By now we’ve all seen the photos. Indeed, we didn’t have to see these if we can remember back to 2000, the last time Israel decided to “get some” in Lebanon. It’s always the same; sad clusters of destroyed buildings – mostly homes, photos of old grieving women crying, wrinkled, prematurely-aged hands clasping their heads in shock and terror. Pictures of the innocent children shattered, bloody, bandaged, missing limbs, eyes, noses, eyes staring unblinkingly at the camera, trying to understand why adult hatred has turned their lives upside-down.

I’m not too fond of Crazy Larry Kudlow, either. I kind of think he’s from one of the Tribes, and he should know better than to declare that killing children is “the Lord’s work.” That sort of thinking went out of fashion shortly after Herod killed the children of Israel.

Maybe Crazy Larry Kudlow would benefit from reading the Book of Job:

Men groan from out of the city,, and the soul of the wounded crieth out; yet G_d layeth not folly to them.
They are of those that rebel against the light; they know not the ways thereof, nor abide in the paths thereof.
The murderer rising with the light killeth the poor and needy, and in the night is as a thief.

"Today, we are all Israelis!" brayed Ken Mehlman of the Republican National Committee to a gathering of Christians United for Israel.
One wonders if these Christians care about what is happening to our Christian brethren in Lebanon and Gaza, who have had all power cut off by Israeli airstrikes, an outlawed form of collective punishment, that has left them with no sanitation, rotting food, impure water and days without light or electricity in the horrible heat of July.
When summer power outrages occur in America, it means a rising rate of death among our sick and elderly, and women and infants. One can only imagine what a hell it must be today in Gaza City and Beirut.

Responding to Ken Mehlman, the notorious closeted heterosexual Bu$hCo apparatchik requires only a derives snort. The man is a soulless, unfeeling automaton. Today he argues to kill all the Ay-rabs, tomorrow it will be death to the Lebanese Orthodox Christians and Maronites. Next week it will be back to death to all Iranians.

But all this carnage and destruction has only piqued the blood lust of the hairy-chested warriors at the Weekly Standard. In a signed editorial, "It's Our War," William Kristol calls for America to play her rightful role in this war by "countering this act of aggression by Iran with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?" "Why wait?" Well, one reason is that the United States has not been attacked. A second is a small thing called the Constitution. Where does George W. Bush get the authority to launch a war on Iran? When did Congress declare war or authorize a war on Iran? Answer: It never did. But these neoconservatives care no more about the Constitution than they cared about the truth when they lied into war in Iraq.

William Kristol, one of the charter members of the PNAC, reigning ideologue of the neocons, Likudnik mole deep in the heart of the American foreign policy organs, and (like all neocons) at heart a true Trotskyite, wants war. He wants death and destruction. He wants mushroom clouds sprouting up all over the Middle East, until Israel is surrounded by a glassy landscape that glows in the dark. Then Israel will finally be safe from all their enemies.

And he wants America to do it, because the sacred motto of PNAC is that Israel must be defended to the last American.

Sorry, Mr Kristol, it can’t be done. There are 130,000 American hostages in Iraq, a place they never should have been. A place you schemed and lied and cheated to get them into in order to take the first step of multi-nation-target aggressive war in the middle east. These hostages are armed, and dangerous, but also very vulnerable. They are sharks, yes, in a sea of porpoises.

The naturalist Lucius Beebe wrote an essay about how porpoises defend themselves from great white sharks. They surround the predator, working him as a coordinated pack. As he rushes towards one porpoise, those on the side drive in, slamming their beaks and heads against the shark’s gills. And when the shark turns to strike back at these attackers, he is hit from the side by others. The hunt continues until the shark is so damaged, gills structures shattered by the repeated blows, that it wanders off, bleeding, slowly dying of asphyxiation, unless another great white shark appears, attracted by the smell of blood, and finishes the job for the porpoises, who swim away, having successfully defended the pod.

Even someone like Mr Kristol, whose brain is so clouded by dreams of imperial glory that he is incapable or rational debate, should take a lesson from porpoises, mammals who are much smarter than we are.

There’s a lot more thought in Mr Buchanan’s essay and I recommend reading the rest. As much as I disagree with him on so many topics, he’s dead on this time. Just take your antibiotics before venturing over to the WorldNutDaily.