When did Rudy Giuliani become the Ludwig Wittgenstein of the war on terror?

Rudy Giuliani is back in the news, complaining about what words we use when we talk about what we talk about when we talk about the “War on Terror.”

As a fan of analytic philosophy (AJ Ayer, represent) I suppose I should take heart in Giuliani’s dedication to the precise application of language to concepts. Maybe his beady-eyed pronouncements will spark an interest in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus among jingoistic meatheads … which could be interesting.

But seriously? I know it’s absurd to expect a small-minded, megalomaniacal ex-mayor to have any insights into, y’know, actually winning an international campaign against terror– I can’t remember the particulars of candidate Giuiliani’s foreign policy platform, but I think it was something like “Paint scary eagles on our bombs and remember to wipe Norman Podhoretz’s jizz off my chin”– but do we also have to suffer his suggestions for what vocabulary words to use when we talk about the undertaking?

I remember when Giuliani insisted on replacing “War on Terror” with “The Terrorists’ War on Us,” the most inelegant sequence of words in the history of all language. Big surprise that never caught on, right? It’s only the semantic equivalent of a shit-filled Subaru backing into a pile of moose antlers.

Every sane American now agrees that calling our response to 9/11 a “War on Terror” was the dumbest-ass move we could have made, as it elevated a loose assemblage of murder-thirsty jihadist dickwads into an “army” fighting a “war,” and justified every morally cross-eyed scheme that Doug Feith and Dick Cheney cooked up in their puckered-anus-hearts.

If anything, we should be racing away from that phrase at 1,000 miles per hour, not ramming it deeper down our own throats to justify more stupid decisions that stroke the egos of creepy nihilists in caves and AEI luncheons alike.

Instead, we still give air time to people whose goal is a state of permanent rhetorical escalation, a self-serving frenzy of agitation. When did hysteria become a sign of moral seriousness?