The transcendent bullshit of the 21st century

I think Dionne's right on this.

WASHINGTON--The boilerplate in a candidate's speeches gets little attention because words used over and over never constitute "news."

But one of John McCain's favorite lines--his declaration that "the transcendent challenge of the 21st century is radical Islamic extremists," or, as he sometimes says it, "extremism"--could define the 2008 election.

Whether McCain is right or wrong matters to everything the United States will do in the coming years. It's incumbent upon McCain to explain what he really means by "transcendent challenge."

Presumably, he's saying that Islamic extremism is more important than everything else--the rise of China and India as global powers, growing resistance to American influence in Europe, the weakening of America's global economic position, the disorder and poverty in large parts of Africa, the alienation of significant parts of Latin America from the United States. Is it in our national interest for all these issues to take a backseat to terrorism?

McCain makes his claim even stronger when he uses the phrase "21^st Century." Does he mean that in the year 2100, Americans will look back and say that everything else that happened in the century paled by comparison with the war against terror?

But such a debate won't happen unless Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton challenge McCain's assertion directly and offer an alternative vision.

There is reason to suspect they might be fearful of doing so. They shouldn't be.

Dionne goes on to note that in all likelihood all the high priced consultants advising the Clinton and Obama campaigns will warn against going after McCain on this; that they'll look "soft on terrorism," or something.

Truth is, anyone willing to believe that Osama bin Laden represents a threat as grave as Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo all rolled into one, is already going to vote for Daddy McCain. It's the voters who somehow instinctively know that the world is more complicated than McCain's simple-minded, Cheney-like world view that are the ones the Democratic nominee needs to appeal to.