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Posted on 10/24/2001 5:18:18 PM PDT by Utah Girl

Joe 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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