John Podhoretz approvingly quotes Joe Lieberman at AIPAC:

There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism.

Why? Most of us are inspired to become passionate about things that are near to us, things we have some hope of influencing, rather than the things that are objectively worst. Nobody thinks it’s perverse to be more upset by the serious illness of a friend than some natural cataclysm halfway around the world just because the latter is unambiguously more seriously bad. Pace the Fighting Keyboardist Brigades, penning long angry blog posts about Islamic extremism doesn’t actually do anything to combat Islamic extremism. Protesting it does not reduce it. On the other hand, in a democracy, whether or not we continue hurling young Americans into the abattoir of a misbegotten war is the sort of thing we all have some modicum of influence over through what we write, say, and do.

There is something profoundly wrong when there is so much distrust of our intelligence community that some Americans doubt the plain and ominous facts about the threat to us posed by Iran.

Yes, it’s almost as though there had been some kind of massive intelligence failure regarding the threat posed by some other country, with disastrous consequences.

And there is something profoundly wrong when, in the face of attacks by radical Islam, we think we can find safety and stability by pulling back, by talking to and accommodating our enemies, and abandoning our friends and allies. Some of this wrong-headed thinking about the world is happening because we’re in a political climate where, for many people, when George Bush says ‘yes,’ their reflex reaction is to say ‘no.’ That is unacceptable.

It is also, at this stage, not a terrible heuristic. But I will give Lieberman this much: These are all signs that something is profoundly, profoundly wrong—not that people hold these attitudes, but that they’re justified in doing so.