How do we kill it, Ash?

Kevin Drum flags a column by Kathleen Parker in the WaPo that makes DB's brain melt a little:

BAREFOOT AND PREGNANT....Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker takes to the pages of the Washington Post today to add herself to the Dinesh D'Souza Hall of Fame: people who think that maybe the sharia-loving ayatollahs have some worthwhile social insights after all. In this case, it's their view that women should stay home with their babies and let men take care of the world's important business. The proximate cause of today's rant, you'll be unsurprised to learn, is the "humiliation" meted out to the West by Iran's release of Leading Seaman Faye Turney:

Just because we may not "feel" humiliated doesn't mean we're not. In the eyes of Iran and other Muslim nations, we're wimps. While the West puts mothers in boats with rough men, Muslim men "rescue" women and drape them in floral hijabs.

We can debate whether they're right until all our boys wear aprons, but it won't change the way we're perceived. The propaganda value Iran gained from its lone female hostage, the mother of a 3-year-old, was incalculable.

Does this barely literate frothing really deserve promotion from the syndicated ghetto Parker normally occupies? Why?

Truly remarkable. There are so many reasons to pick this apart, but I just wanted to highlight what I have begun to realize about these wingnuts who get all geared up to hate people they later (and correctly) identify as somewhat resembling themselves.

They remind me of Ian Holm's android character, Ash, in Alien. He is supposed to be on the same side as the humans, but in the end, his respect for the killing machine they face -- in concert with the instructions he was programmed to carry out by his superiors -- makes him turn on the people sharing his vessel. It's just like these Parkers, D'Souzas and Drehers. They follow their party lines and actually admire the authoritarian nature of their sworn enemies until they respect them more than the people around them. It's quite dark, really.

In fact, it's crazy. I would go so far as to suggest that their methods have become "unsound:"

KURTZ: Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us.