Glenn Greenwald calls out the neoconservative armchair would-be saviors of civilization so you don’t have to:

They are society’s freedom fighters, the Progeny of Churchill, Patton and Napoleon, bravely and tenaciously manning the barricades of Civilization itself. They’ll find a powerful and protective Warrior who leads them; advocate all sorts of fascinating technologies and complex spying schemes to wage the War; spend hour upon hour chatting about battles and tactics and strategies; and endlessly depict themselves as besieged though tenacious. Far from being “psychologically exhausting,” convincing yourself that you are all that — as Steyn and comrades explicitly do — is to bathe oneself in self-affirming and self-glorifying virtue. Nothing could ever compete with such glory when it comes to psychological fulfillment. …

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Just consider the grandiose, baroque rhetoric they employ. What they are defending — today’s U.S. — is not merely good. It’s not even great. It’s not even the greatest thing there is on the Earth right now. No — it’s much more grand than that: it’s the Greatest Country ever to exist on the Earth in all of human history. That’s what they’re defending; that’s the magnitude of the burden they bear, the incomparable importance of the crusade they lead.

Conversely, the Enemy they are facing down (from a safe distance) is not merely threatening or evil or scary or formidable. No, it’s much, much more than that. This is the greatest Enemy that exists on the planet, the most cunning and nefarious and evil force the world has ever seen — not just now, but for all of human history. There is nothing remotely like the depravity and power of this particular Enemy — and there never has been. Ever. Everything these faux-warriors face and defend is superlative; there has never, ever been a war like the one they are waging. None of the old rules apply. This is all unique, unknown, the first and most important of its kind.