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Tucker Carlson mentioned to his "leftist lesbian friend" (his Situation cohost Rachel Maddow?) that she's the kind of person who would be shot first when al-Qaeda takes over. That's not a direct quotation, since I can't find it anywhere on the Infobahn, but I want to unpack it.

First, I'm going on the assumption that even if he said that in a playful, "Oh, you!" kind of way, it echoes popular sentiment about leftists, lesbians and leftist lesbians. Which is to say, they're unattractive, pushy, hypersensitive, shrill, immoral, drunk on academic terminology, and generally opposed to everything good about the America that will save everyone from terrorists while keeping its own roster of war crimes within tolerable limits.

However, I think a person sort of has a moral responsibility to be someone al-Qaeda would hate. Otherwise, you're...kind of like an Islamist terrorist. It seems cowardly to me to hope that a Qaeda assassin would pause to draw a Venn diagram and evaluate your convictions, cross-checking for mutually-held prejudices and superstitions, freeing you so he could spray bullets at the Jews and porn fans.

I want a prominent conservative Christian to answer this question: does the fact that there exist leftist lesbians in this country make it more likely that terrorists will attack us? That would really put them in a bind. Answering yes would reveal their paranoia and fascism as well as the almost beautiful symmetries between Talibans foreign and domestic. Answering no (the right answer) means you can't really yoke together the War on Terror and the various cultural purification crusades that are always seeping into everything. Which is of course what many conservatives really want; you could substitute 'Mexicans' or 'biracial Vegan Bahai' for 'leftist lesbians' and still piss off Osama bin Laden and Pat Buchanan just as much, even though they would claim to hate each other most of all. Although we already know what Jerry Falwell thinks, someone should pose a version of that question to Rod Parsley or Pat Robertson. Does the existence of your pet enemies make it more likely that terrorists will attack the US?

Naturally I don't believe in a logical magic bullet that would make Pat Robertson's head explode or his followers go away. I'm just saying.

The other thing that's stupid about Tucker Carlson's comment is the naivete about how war works and what al-Qaeda wants. Rhetorical flourishes though they might just be, you occasionally hear things about the enemy marching through our cities or taking over the government, as if this were one of those Twilight Zones where all the neighbors become Commie-robots who vote in the zombie-aliens.

At the risk of going on and on about the obvious, terrorists aren't armies. They don't march. Or sack. They are not modeled after the Visigoths or a military state like North Korea. And the mobile, suburbanized geography of the US itself makes the notion of a besieged city quaint. We are a gigantic country, unoccupiable by an enemy uninterested in occupation. Terrorists don't have a real interest in 'being here' other than as parasites preparing attacks. They don't want to be attorneys general who rewrite the penal code to conform with Shariah. They don't have Post-Its full of helpful hints about improving our Weberian rational bureaucracy. They want to kill a lot of us and re-establish a caliphate so they can relive the glory days, but even that's not the true goal. I don't even think the true goal includes destroying Israel, since it's such a useful recruiting tool (and anyway, try erasing Israel without blowing up the Dome of the Rock. I dare you.)

Their wet dream is the decline and fall of the United States, which will allow them to fill the vacuum and reorganize world affairs to halt the traffic in forbidden things. Having destroyed the USSR, which collapsed barely 2 years after withdrawing from their 10-year disaster in Afghanistan, they've got their sights on the remaining superpower, the one that exports L'eggs and pictures of titties. Five years after the Tradge, they're doing a smashing job getting us to bleed ourselves dry losing one war and forgetting about the stalemated other one while fitfully undermining the rights and freedoms that nominally differentiate 'us' from 'them.'

Actual terrorist attacks are like nudges towards implosion. We're totally playing right into their hands, and the doctrinaire incompetence of the Republican Party means the next Septmber 11-style episode might just be critical mass, the moment when Bill O'Reilly and his hive mind viewership don't stop screaming until the Bill of Rights is treated like a peacetime nicety impeding our survival. That's what terrorists mean when they call our empire decadent. The mismanaged, unfinanced wars and iffy commitment to our founding principles reveal more about our soft underbelly than the presence of leftist lesbians, i.e. the people Christian conservatives revile as evidence of our national decadence, ever will. The God-people are going to get us all killed, which of course is the only way to truly cleanse a Christian nation of its secular taint, but that's another topic.

Islamists want to inspire enough terror that we collapse basically by ourselves. I don't think they're very interested in navel-gazing red state/blue state debates, but at the risk of saying something completely outrageous, maybe there is a greater likelihood of getting attacked under a Democratic president, if he or she is sane and not susceptible to Cheney-like bouts of panicky desperation (e.g. the "one-percent doctrine"). A Democratic president who shows the world that we aren't going to succumb to hysterics, nuke Tehran without provocation or suspend trials-by-jury might inspire terrorists to try again and see what happens, since the Republicans were such facile dupes who required little to no masterminding.

Anyway, terrorists won't be marching anywhere anytime soon, and if they did, I don't think anyone among them would make a distinction between leftist lesbians and the upstanding, conservative Tucker Carlsons of the world who pride themselves on valuing a few things that Islamists also happen to believe and who might just get a prurient thrill thinking about lesbians from time to time. Top or bottom, we're all of us equally fucked.