Shouldn't we be quaking in our boots?

Genn Greenwald at Salon.com makes a great point.

Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States -- the Pajamas Media/right-wing-blogosphere/Fox News/Michelle Malkin/Rush-Limbaugh-listener strain -- actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and "our women" will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an actual fear that they have -- not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview.

And their key political beliefs -- from Iraq to Iran to executive power and surveillance theories at home -- are animated by the belief that all of this is going to happen. The Republican presidential primary is, for much of the "base," a search for who will be the toughest and strongest in protecting us from the Islamic invasion -- a term that is not figurative or symbolic, but literal: the formidable effort by Islamic radicals to invade the U.S. and take over our institutions and dismantle our government and force us to submit to Islamic rule or else be killed.

Those of us of a certain age, as they say, lived through the early years of the cold war, Kruschev saying, "We will bury you" and the Cuban missile crisis obviously survived this threat. And it was truly a threat. "They" had bombers and ICBMs." We had air raid drills and some built bomb shelters, but nobody gave up their civil rights.

Have we raised a generation of cowering wimps who truly believe that the "Islamo-facists" can actually storm our shores and put our women in Burkas?