It’s so great to be bombing again. And not like any of this BS remote-controlled bombing where we only admit to it two weeks later, after photos surface of some remote-control jockey from the 38th Chairborne precision-striking a Yemeni funeral. I’m talking real deal bombing. Maybe we even get another Outkast song out of it.

These aren’t my sentiments, but if you watched the Sunday American talk shows this week, you could get the impression that these were the attitudes of an entire nation: There is a humanitarian crisis in northern Iraq, and the only way to stop the killing is to kill our way our of it. No, dig UP, stupid. The president has already authorized several strikes in just a couple days, but, like, what is the freaking holdup?

By now seemingly every print and online outlet has had a crack at explaining why the Sunday shows are so phenomenally useless. And they are. They are invariably the most intelligence-insulting television panel discussion on a day during which their far more popular competition is usually the Beefcake Backslap Chucklefuck Hour on Fox, discussing how Stem test scores will affect our nation’s football readiness. The purpose of these shows is to give a klatsch of DC navel-gazers time to congratulate themselves on addressing problems you don’t face and with which you do not identify, by advocating policies you don’t support or need. These are people who neither know of nor care about your existence, and they are endlessly high-fiving themselves for screwing you over on your behalf.

So you can imagine that bombing stuff is something of a relief for them. It’s pretty easy to convince Americans of the need to smoke tairrisssts outta their caves, especially without a formal budget resolution listing fixed costs. This isn’t just David Gregory picking nits; this is the real red-blooded stuff – with the blood and everything.

Both This Week with George Stephanopolous (guest host: Martha “Furrowing” Raddatz) and Meet the Press with Koko Presses the Button for Gravitas began by needlessly mentioning that Obama is playing golf this weekend. Aggro Conservadad Memes – “They’re not just for that ‘fwd: fwd: fwd:’ email from your uncle’s AOL address anymore!”

But things didn’t really get going until John McCain appeared on State of the Union with Candy Crowley. With the exception of Lindsey Graham, McCain is the only person who could host an 80-guest party in his DC apartment and give every person in attendance their own souvenir Sunday show mug. There is a chair in each green room of each broadcast television network’s Washington bureau rendered totally unusable by others because the memory foam can’t forget the shape of his ass. So the fact that he appeared on uplink probably accounts for the only sense of wistfulness and regret in his eyes as he called for lots of war stuff.

For the last five years, McCain has called on Barack Obama to involve the US in every potential war available – including the Tek War, which he only just heard about by picking up William Shatner’s histories of it. Naturally, he was angry at Obama about this one. “This has turned into, as we predicted for a long time, a regional conflict that does pose a threat to the security of the United States of America,” he said, without bothering to clarify until pressed by Crowley.

Crowley wondered why it would not be enough to continue Obama’s air strikes while also continuing drops of humanitarian supplies to the 40,000 Yazidi “Christians” who fled up Mount Sinjar, exposed to the elements and awaiting the coming cleansing by the Islamic State (Isis). “That’s not a strategy. That’s not a policy,” McCain replied, failing to supply the latter himself, and offering the former only in I-was-right, kill-’em-all knee-jerk terms. “That is simply a very narrow and focused approach to a problem which is metastasizing as we speak. Candy, there was a guy a month ago that was in Syria, went back to the United States, came back and blew himself up.”

Shit, there was a guy? Scramble all fighters.

McCain went on to say that there are “over 100 Americans” currently over there fighting for Isis, which you know is probably bullshit and surely a talking point, since Rep Peter King (R – 9/11) said the same thing over on Meet the Press. McCain later said “metastasizing” twice more; whereas King didn’t say that word at all, so you know that was just John crushing it on his own.

But King was in fine form, which basically means we’re all in danger, right now, and you should probably punch a hipster on your way to work and use his WWI centennial retro gas mask to save yourself.

“Every day that goes by, Isis builds up this caliphate, and it becomes a direct threat to the United States,” he said. Which, OK. They say they have a caliphate, so it must be true. I am a female body inspector. My dad is the world’s best dad. WCW’s Tony Schiavone welcomes you to the greatest Nitro ever!

Smarter pseudonymous writers than I have explained why people like King and network TV hosts simultaneously call America the greatest nation on earth and explain that it’s in dire existential danger at the slightest jihadi woofing, and that’s because it moves the dial. Even if you concede, as I do, that both Isis and Peter King are the same degree of legitimately scary, there’s an irreplaceable frisson to making Isis scarier. It works on all of us. There is an ebola of Isis in your Baskin Robbins right now.

King went on: “They are more powerful now than al-Qaeda was on 9-11. So Dick Durbin says we’re not going to do this, we’re not going to do that. I want to hear what he says when they attack us in the United States. I lost hundreds of constituents on 9/11.” Did you hear that? Peter King can’t stop dropping culpability for 9/11s on Iraq. It’s like a hobby with this guy. And why not? It works.

Here’s how much: On both This Week and Meet the Press, the big domestic part of the Isis discussion was a Hillary Clinton interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Naturally, Goldberg was excited about his scoop, talking animatedly despite the fact that 5,500 miles away Bibi Netanyahu was drinking a glass of water at the same time. Here’s the Clinton money quote:

I know that the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protest against Assad, there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle, the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadis have now filled.

This quote more than anything tells you how spooky Isis really is. Which is not to say that they aren’t materially and existentially scary to the Yazidi and the people of northern Iraq and elsewhere. They are, and it’s worth having a sober discussion about what to do about these militants, bereft of whitewashing the existence of George W Bush or watching someone like John McCain score sad points by crowing that he was right about this one of 75 immediate existential threats he’s seen looming from every shadow for five years. It certainly deserves better than the National Review’s Rich Lowry smugly tut-tutting at Obama about geopolitical vision – “Here it is, Iraq, where his view of how the world should work is being discredited by the day” – and waving the sort of desperate hard-on for seeming wise and avuncular that only comes from looking like someone who showed up to the panel late because mom wouldn’t let him leave the Webelos bake sale.

Under normal circumstances, the doctrine of unintended consequences is a weak, last-ditch excuse for not doing anything. But it’s kind of helpful when the discussion is about handing out stockpiles of munitions and training to barely affiliated rebels who may or may not have religious axes to grind. Peter King has a 9/11 that could tell you all about that, one that starts with CIA training of mujahideen in Afghanistan.

But now Hillary Clinton wants to seem reliably martial for her will-she/won’t-she 2016 run, and that means taking those unintended consequences and erring on the side of more bombs, more guns and more farmed-out proxy wars where we don’t want any telegenically dead Americans. And that means gainsaying the administration’s hesitant Syria policy and throwing credit to the McCains, Kings and Grahams who said that we should have been arming those rebels all along.

Many of whom turned out to be Isis. Who are now arming themselves with materiel the US military left behind in Iraq. What a blast.