Just when you thought the current level of right-wing fear mongering couldn’t get any worse, the Wall Street Journal writes an editorial about nuclear weapons.

Did you know that while you were sleeping, America’s vast and technological advanced nuclear arsenal was rapidly deteriorating? It cites the Perry-Schlesinger commission as evidence to make this point, which should be news to the Perry-Schlesinger commission since the Commission’s report never makes this point. The Journal’s editorial lays out what has become the right wing’s main push back against the new START treaty currently being negotiated between the US and Russia: the state of our apparently decrepit nuclear arsenal. The right is now posturing that they will not support a new START treaty – a treaty that was initially pushed by President Ronald Reagan – unless Obama puts up money for building a new nuclear warhead to replace existing ones.

The Journal writes:

A group of Senators is telling the White House that it will have little or no chance of success unless it also moves ahead with nuclear-warhead modernization. … The deteriorating U.S. nuclear arsenal is emerging as a big security problem, and Start won’t be an easy sell even with the money for warhead upgrades.

Our nuclear arsenal is not deteriorating. We spend billions on programs to ensure the reliability of the US nuclear arsenal. The Wall Street Journal and Senators like Jon Kyl seem to not have read or are just choosing to ignore the JASON report – a report from independent scientists tasked with assessing the US nuclear force. The JASON report concludes that:

Lifetimes of today’s nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss in confidence, by using approaches similar to those employed in LEPs [Life Extension Programs] to date.

In other words, what we are doing right now to maintain are nuclear weapons is working and we don’t need new warheads. Furthermore, members of Congress should know this, as the defense spending bill, which passed with bipartisan support in the House and Senate, includes funding for the nuclear stockpile stewardship program which ensures the reliability of the US nuclear arsenal.

But in the hyper-paranoid neoconservative vision of national security we can’t cut our nuclear forces. In fact we need to build new nuclear weapons, because the Cold War never ended, Russia wants to kill us, China is the new Soviet Union, and Iran and North Korea need to be attacked right away. This is crazy and is even more extreme than the disastrous foreign policy approach that dominated during the Bush administration.

The anti-immigrant group, NumbersUSA, posted a video today of its director, Roy Beck, on Fox & Friends touting recent polling by its unofficial sister group, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which claims to show that religious leaders lobbying for comprehensive immigration reform are out of tune with the people of faith they represent. However, even Fox News religion contributor Father Jonathon Morris seemed to hesitate when it came to agreeing with the polling, despite Alisyn Camerota’s leading questions:

BECK: There’s about 5 billion people who would like to come the United States overall — they’re more impoverished than the average Mexican. And so, it’s just that the leaders have put their priorities on those where the members of those churches — their priority is on compassion within their own community — the 15 million Americans who are unemployed…

MORRIS: I believe there is a natural right of every human person to look for a better life — to emigrate with an “e.” But there’s also a responsibility of every country to control the amount of immigration. To make sure it’s sustainable, to make sure it’s safe — both for the immigrant and the citizens….

CAMEROTA: But is it religious leaders’ responsibility to lead the charge on this?

MORRIS: It’s the responsibility to give principles for decisionmakers and then for politicians to say “we’re going to implement policy that’s good for the human being.”

Watch it:

Morris’ logic echoes that of the Reform Immigration for America Campaign and the strategy he proposes resembles the approach that religious leaders have already adopted. Morris even referred to Kevin Appleby from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) as the “expert” on the polling. Appleby countered Beck’s claims by citing a “more scientific” survey conducted by the University of Michigan and Stanford University which found that 56 percent of Catholics support a legal path to citizenship and 61 percent say immigration levels should stay the same or increase. Another recent poll by Zogby showed that 69 percent of Catholics polled support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, provided they register with the government. Meanwhile, the poll Beck cites indicates that 69 percent of Catholics think immigration levels are too high with 54 percent opposing a path to legalization.

A recent memo written by Dr. Robert P. Jones, president of Public Religion Research, explains many of the discrepancies by pointing out that the CIS poll “is not based on a scientific random sample of Americans but rather on an opt-in online panel survey.” Though Zogby tries to make their online samples “representative” of the U.S., it’s still a self-selected pool of respondents. Jones also notes that “the question wording is problematic in several places.” Meanwhile, the poll that Zogby conducted for the USCCB used the “tried-and-true” method of a random telephone sample.

During an interview with RNC chairman Michael Steele this morning on NBC’s Today Show, host Meredith Vieira noted that Republicans have been politicizing 23-year old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt at blowing up a U.S. airliner. After pointing out that Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) has even been trying to raise money off the incident, she asked Steele if “it is fair game for the Republicans to say that Democrats are less concerned with Americans’ safety than Republicans are.”

“I don’t think it’s a question of saying…who is more concerned,” Steele said, before launching into a rather incoherent attack on President Obama’s “approach to foreign policy”:

STEELE: What it is is looking at the approach this administration has taken from its very first moments coming in talking about closing down Gitmo with no strategy or plan to do that and here we are a year later and Gitmo is still part of the mix. Now with this recent incident given everything in between, there is this image at least that’s been created, this presence of the presidency and so forth that is not consistent in their approach to foreign policy and there are a lot of questions out there.

Watch it:

Steele must have had a change of heart about Gitmo. He has previously criticized Obama for wanting to close the prison facility. “It’s astonishing that the day after we learned one in seven terrorists who have been freed returned to terrorism, President Obama gave a speech in which he is still promising to close down Gitmo,” Steele said last May.

And when the administration announced its intention to send Guantanamo detainees to a federal prison in Illinois (i.e the very “strategy or plan” Steele is demanding) to close the facility, Steele whined. “President Obama has left little doubt that he is more concerned with America’s world popularity than the will and the safety of the very people who elected him president,” he complained.

The RNC website contains numerous statements and blog posts attacking Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo Bay.

I wrote yesterday about the spectacle of Fox News personalities Britt Hume and Bill Kristol promoting the failed Christmas attack as a “success” for Al Qaeda. Today’s conservative Al Qaeda publicist is Lurita Doan, who was forced to resign in May 2008 as head of the General Services Administration under the Bush administration — something which, given Bush’s well-known lack of enthusiasm for punishing failure, says a lot. Doan writes “Everyone keeps saying how lucky we are that the “crotch” bomber on Flight 253 was unable to ignite the explosives hidden in his underwear, but I am sorry to report that the attack was a actually a huge success. The plane was not destroyed and no lives were lost, but the larger, strategic goals of al Qaeda were certainly advanced.”

As I noted yesterday, it is true that one of the goals of terrorism is to elicit a wild over-reaction from the target government, resulting in greater publicity and a larger pool of potential recruits for the terrorists’ cause, and so any response has to be balanced against that. But the idea that “the strategic goals of al Qaeda” are better advanced by more security theater at American airports than they were by, say, inducing the United States to invade and occupy two Muslim countries and engage in a global campaign of kidnapping and torture, is just ridiculous on its face.

But this is largely beside the point, because conservatives like Kristol, Hume, and Doan aren’t genuinely (or at least primarily) interested in analyzing threats and policies to deal with them, they’re interested in promoting a specific, and politically advantageous, narrative about the nature of those threats. And apparently, the possibility of those threats serving as Al Qaeda propaganda is a price they’re willing to pay in order to achieve that political advantage.

Over-stating the strength and prominence of Al Qaeda has been a tendency of the right for years. In Iraq, for example, even long after it had become clear that Al Qaeda represented a small part of the Iraqi insurgency, the Bush administration was still promoting it as the lead actor in the insurgency, because it fit within the administration’s narrative of why we’d gone into Iraq in the first place.

But as Marc Lynch, who monitors Arabic-language media (and who wrote a great book on the subject which you should read), wrote at the time, this did real harm in the wider Arab and Muslim world, “where the exaggeration of al-Qaeda’s role works directly and devastatingly against American goals.”

It magnifies al-Qaeda’s perceived power, strengthening its own media campaign and feeding its most powerful propaganda instrument… The [Bush] administration in effect claims more power and military success for al-Qaeda in Iraq than al-Qaeda claims for itself — for which the al-Qaeda leadership can only be bemusedly grateful. Forget al-Hurra — if you’re looking for a real public diplomacy fiasco, you’ll be hard pressed to do worse than the US acting as al-Qaeda’s agent in promoting its Iraqi success.

As Lynch wrote last week in regard to the failed Christmas bombing, “In most of the Arab newspapers which I follow on a daily basis, the failed airplane plot didn’t even make the front page — or, at best, got a small and vague story.”

In American conservative media, however, the Al Qaeda Threat is the lead story. On Fox and Friends this morning, right-wing talker Laura Ingraham said of what terrorism experts estimate to be perhaps a few thousand committed extremists: “This is a major, major threat to our way of life!”

Remember when conservatives used to attack Al Jazeera all the time for giving Al Qaeda free publicity? In March 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed “We are being hurt by al-Jazeera in the Arab world…There is no question about it.”

“The quality of the journalism is outrageous — inexcusably biased — and there is nothing you can do about it except try to counteract it.” He said it was turning Arabs against the United States.

“You could say it causes the loss of life,” he added.

Later that year, Fox News ran a story entitled “Al Jazeera: Friend or Foe in the War on Terror?” Given how committed Fox News and other conservative media seems to be to waving Al Qaeda’s flag for them, maybe we should be asking the same question now about them.

The Congressionally mandated Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) will be a crucial test of President Obama’s commitment to reducing nuclear weapons. The NPR will lay out a new US nuclear strategy and should set the stage for future budgetary decisions regarding the nuclear force. In other words, there is a lot of money on the line in this document, which means there will be a ton of resistance to change, especially from inside the Pentagon.

The LA Times lays out the state of play in the on going bureaucratic fight between the White House and the Pentagon:

Officials in the Pentagon and elsewhere have pushed back against Obama administration proposals to cut the number of weapons and narrow their mission, according to U.S. officials and outsiders who have been briefed on the process. In turn, White House officials, unhappy with early Pentagon-led drafts of the blueprint known as the Nuclear Posture Review, have stepped up their involvement in the deliberations and ordered that the document reflect Obama’s preference for sweeping change.

The stakes are high. An NPR that fails to put in place the steps for future reductions in US nuclear forces, will greatly undermine Obama’s credibility and therefore the global nuclear non-proliferation agenda. To put it bluntly, if you can’t even get your own government which you control to follow your lead, you won’t be able to lead globally.

It is no surprise that initial drafts out of the Pentagon were anything but ambitious and that the White House is having to get directly involved in pushing back. The Pentagon’s bureaucracy instinctively opposes anything that would force it to change and a far reaching NPR could require significant modifications in force structure, such as to the Air Force’s nuclear bomber force. In the opening of his piece on the NPR, Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe colorfully captured how stuck in its ways the Pentagon remains, despite tectonic shifts in the global landscape.

After an hour-long ride down a nearly deserted highway covered in ice and snow, the two young officers arrive for their shift at this highly secure outpost deep in the northern Rockies. Air Force Captain Chris Ferrer and Lieutenant Moses George, carrying a bulky orange briefcase of secret codes, descend some 75 feet underground to a capsule protected by a 4-foot-thick door of steel and concrete. They will spend the next 24 hours ready to receive a presidential command to launch dozens of nuclear missiles from silos buried across north-central Montana. It is a routine that is virtually unchanged from the 1960s. The targets, most of them in Russia, also remain largely unchanged from the Cold War.

What a gigantic waste of time and money. Nearly 20 years after the end of the Cold War, we spend billions of dollars and divert the energies of numerous military personnel to the task of preparing for a nuclear war against an adversary that no longer exists. Yet no matter how asinine and outdated the Pentagon’s approach is, getting them to move beyond the Cold War and into the 21st century is the first big hurdle Obama will confront in his efforts to combat nuclear proliferation.