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Biden has been unanimously proclaimed "Buffoon of the Day,"
for his mind-numbing announcement that we'd better end the bombing
of Afghanistan soon, or risk being branded "hi-tech bullies."
I don't want
to suggest that there's more here than meets the eye, for there
is not much depth to today's honored Buffoon, but there are a few
suppressed assumptions and a hidden agenda lurking beneath his warning.
The first is that it's somehow unfair for us to smash away at the
Taliban without giving them a chance to smash us back. This is a
variation on the old, and I hope by now discredited, doctrine known
as "proportional response." According to this bit of silliness,
if somebody did something mean to us, we were entitled to strike
back, but only with the same quantum of meanness. To do more would
constitute a violation of the rules.
The doctrine
of proportional response incorporates the unstated assumption of
moral equivalence, which puts all countries, peoples, ethnicities,
races, and other collections of human beings on the same moral plane.
If some morally challenged country attacked a saintly country, you
could not very well argue for proportional response, since you would
want the saintly nation to prevail, and hence you would be willing
to accept a disproportional response.
Which is exactly
what we want (Hello Joe?). We do not want to duke it out with the
terror network according to the Marquis of Queensbury rules; we
want to grab the terrorists and throw them against the wall. And
we want to show them, and anyone else who might contemplate a murderous
assault against America or Americans, that they better not mess
with us, because they won't survive it.
Precisely because
our leaders for the past several years have turned from the righteous
path of wildly disproportional response, we are in a pickle now.
Having failed to smash them thoroughly, we find ourselves facing
a very dangerous threat, which forces us to do more than would have
been necessary a few years ago.
Contrary to
Buffoon Biden's rumination, we should delight in a reputation as
a high-tech bully. I'd even go further. I'd be willing to pay for
universal recognition of the United States as a crazed, uncontrollable,
unstoppable, utterly lethal high-tech bully. Just the sort of country
you don't want to mess with.
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