Years ago George Carlin joked, “I think we should attack Russia now. They’d never expect it!”

Younger readers, and Democrats with memory problems, might not understand why that joke used to be funny, but at the time it got a huge laugh from the audience. The Cold War had been over for a long time, things had cooled off between the two nuclear superpowers, and Russia had ceased to be a major concern. The idea of wanting to return to the decades of Cold War terror where everyone lived in constant fear of nuclear annihilation was so absurd that you could get people rolling in the aisles with laughter at the suggestion.

And now we have a leading presidential candidate who is already actively trying to bring us back there. She’s not even making a secret of it. She’s been flat-out telling us, with her own face hole, that she wants to impose a no-fly zone on a nation where Russia is conducting aerial military operations. That’s the stated agenda of a candidate who WikiLeaks revealed maintains “both a public position and a private position” on policy. Her stated agenda is to immediately start shooting down the military planes of a nuclear superpower. I don’t even want to think about what her private position might be.

Mikhail Gorbachev warns world is at "dangerous point" as US-Russia face off in Syria.... https://t.co/2lAu6BeqLw — Boston For Bernie (@Boston4Bernie) October 12, 2016

Because that’s what a no-fly zone is, in case you’re late to the party. If you’re still supporting Hillary Clinton at this point I can only assume that you must be. A no-fly zone means crippling the air forces in a particular zone and shooting down any aircraft in the sky.

Which aircraft would that be? Certainly not ISIS; Islamic State and the complex entanglement of opposition forces have no air force. The only people engaged in the conflict with an air force are the Syrian military and Russia. Those are the planes that Hillary Clinton wants to attack.

Whatever your position on the confusing situation in Syria, this is clearly a profoundly stupid and dangerous thing to do. Even if you’ve somehow managed to convince yourself that Putin and Assad are the only bad guys in the conflict and that America’s only interest in Syria is as the noble protector making sure no innocent civilians get hurt, even if you are that brainwashed and brain dead, it should still be obvious to you that shooting down Russian military planes won’t end well for anyone.

Military attacks against another nation’s military can only elicit military retribution. Acts of military retribution can easily escalate to full-scale war. America currently has 6,970 nuclear warheads that we know of, ready to launch at the drop of a hat. Russia has 7,300 nukes that we know of, with thousands in the chamber ready to fire. The two nations are, by a truly massive margin, the largest nuclear forces on planet Earth.

Any questions?

Wait, I have one. Why in God’s name aren’t we all talking about this constantly? Why isn’t this the number one thing on the news every single day?

The single most important job that a United States president will ever have is averting nuclear annihilation. You can tank the economy, lock up all ethnic Italians in internment camps, make abortion mandatory and release a clown fetish sex tape, and as long as life on Earth isn’t snuffed out in a mushroom cloud, you can still say that you did your most important job as president. Hillary Clinton is promising not only to put that job on the back burner, but to knock it right off the stove.

And these are Democrats supporting this! Remember when Democrats at least pretended to be the anti-war party? When liberals thought of the Republicans as the blood-and-oil-thirsty warmongers and Michael Moore made movies about them in his sad guy voice? Now you see rank-and-file blue-collar Democrats everywhere furiously snarling about Trump “cozying up to Putin” and squealing “He wants to make deals with the Russians! Deals!!!”

And they say it like it’s obviously a bad thing. Like you’re supposed to hear that and go, “Oh well that’s obviously way worse than flirting with a nuclear holocaust. Where do I get one of those ‘H’ arrow bumper stickers?”

So now we’ve got the front-running presidential candidate, who we know for a fact was illicitly nominated, trying to drag us kicking and screaming back into the horror of the Cold War at best, and into nuclear annihilation at worst.

I don’t know who’s driving this car, but I want off.

[Featured Image by Foto011/Shutterstock]