If some of Sen. John McCain's senate colleagues shudder at the prospect of combining McCain's temper with his power to launch war as president, what must they think about Hillary Clinton's jarring threat that sounds very much like launching nuclear war?
As, she said she'd "obliterate" Iran if it attacked Israel with atomic weapons.
Is this just another effort to show she's as much of a saber rattler as any man and thus fit to be commander in chief? Or is this basic Hillary popping off for cheap political gain?
She began with small steps in inventing herself as something of a toughie. She pandered to far-right Republicans by endorsing a law criminalizing desecration of the U.S. flag.
She rushed to the side of President Bush by voting to support an attack on and invasion of Iraq rather than continuing investigations to determine of Saddam Hussein really had doomsday weapons, a hasty, unconsidered vote she now regrets but for which she won't apologize.
Her presidential campaign includes notable swaggering during photo ops.
She spoke from the bed of a pickup truck, an appeal to rural conservatives. She claimed to have been handy with a gun as a young woman, a nod to the NRA. She eagerly slugged down a jigger of whisky and then a beer chaser for the boys gathered in a saloon.
The chilling threat to "obliterate" Iran can only be interpreted as nuclear devastation, since Iran covers 636,296 square miles (larger than Alaska's 570,380 square miles). "Obliterate" is a word not open to nuance. Dictionaries define it as to "destroy utterly all trace," meaning Hillary would be willing to incinerate Iran's 66 million people, a far more ghastly prospect than the toll of two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II—220,000 killed outright, thousands dying later from radiation. Obliterating Iran would leave millions of square miles in the Middle East and Asia uninhabitable for years because of nuclear fallout.
Hillary's obsession with showing manliness and collaring the Jewish vote with her threat is reckless in the extreme. This is like the crazy talk of Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay who wanted to rain nuclear bombs on Cuba 90 miles off the Florida coast during the 1962 missile crisis and Barry Goldwater's politically ruinous 1963 statement that "low-yield atomic weapons" might be used in the Vietnam War.
Even as hollow campaign bluster, Hillary's threat has consequences. She bolsters the Bush-created U.S. global image of a gunslinger nation spoiling for war.
Look what that got us.
