This in the aftermath of the Jim Foley beheading. A short exchange which has to be seen to be believed.

We’d like to parse this for you and say there’s an intelligent point here which is just made badly. The Washington Free Beacon piece this video accompanies doesn’t offer any further context.

Because it’s not an intelligent point to say “Oh, well, ISIL/ISIS might say they’re at war with us but their indiscriminate violence means they’re at war with everybody.” That’s not intelligent for all kinds of reasons, but mostly because it really doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn whether they’re at war with anybody else besides the United States; it is sufficient for them to be at war with us for our interests to be threatened suitably enough to make this an actionable situation.

This is tantamount to, in December 1941, Adolf Hitler declaring war on the United States and shooting torpedoes at American merchant ships in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean – or perhaps more to the point picking up Americans all over Europe and sawing their heads off while repeating his declaration of war on us – and our State Department responding by saying “Well, Germany is also at war with Britain and, by next summer, Russia, plus what’s left of the resistance in Poland and France and elsewhere in Europe, so this isn’t really about us.”

That would be regarded as ludicrous, unserious and idiotic in the extreme.  But that’s what Marie Harf, the State Department’s Moronic Flack #2, just put out. And for added spice, she threw in the accusation that ISIS doesn’t actually represent any religion – as though telling a group of people motivated by not only Quranic doctrine but the exploits of Muhammad to create an Islamic Caliphate that they’re not actually representing Islam is supposed to convince anyone of anything.

Perhaps there is a defense for Harf here, which is that she has no policy to announce. It’s not that her boss’ boss’ boss Barack Obama did any better yesterday when he babbled out to the Martha’s Vineyard press how “appalled” he was at Foley’s beheading. Obama’s tantrum included stupid statements about who the future belongs to and who was the wrong side of history, as though Marxist dialectics he learned at Columbia are somehow a weapon against Muslim jihadist fanatics. History is made by human beings, not some invisible hand. It would be somewhat defensible, if still unnerving, were Obama to justify such a childish, detached attitude toward the unfolding disaster by saying that God wouldn’t stand for such evil to be visited upon the earth. Of course, he didn’t do that and even if he did, the Lord works within us.

He isn’t working within Obama, or at least not in a timely fashion – since it appears the president dragged his feet and thus ruined the mission to rescue Foley. Then his people leaked details about that mission which will make it impossible to successfully conduct  others like it.

We have an American president who actually rejects the idea that he, as the most powerful man in the world, is capable of shaping world events. So it’s no surprise that his underlings and media flacks should be coming up with the most inane, irresponsible excuses imaginable for why ISIS’ direct challenge to us is going to be met with Eric Holder’s lawyers rather than violence on a scale which overwhelms a barbaric, intractable enemy.