Stupid Standard Time

Hugh Hewitt is Breeding Stupidity at the Standard

I tried to forget everything I saw when I wandered into the Standard's site yesterday, but I forgot to close this window and sickened myself again tonight. The wit and wisdom of Mr. Hewitt:

The fact that foreign fighters are streaming across Syria into Iraq in the hopes of killing America (sic) is not evidence supporting the "breeding ground" theory. "Opportunity" to act is not the same thing as "motive" for acting. There is zero evidence for the proposition that Iraq is motive rather than opportunity, but the "motive" theory is nevertheless put forward again and again. As recently as Wednesday the Washington Post account of the aftermath of the London bombings included the incredible--and unsubstantiated in the article--claim that the "the profile of the suspects suggested by investigators fit long-standing warnings by security experts that the greatest potential threat to Britain could come from second-generation Muslims, born here but alienated from British society and perhaps from their own families, and inflamed by Britain's participation in the Iraq war."[emphasis added]
...
(Christopher) Hitchens's point, which must be made again and again, is Blair's point: The killers are killers because they want to kill, not because the coalition invaded Iraq, or Afghanistan, or because there are bases in Saudi Arabia, or because Israel will not retreat to the 1967 borders.

Until and unless the left gets this point, and abandons the idea that "breeding" of terrorists is something the West triggers, they cannot be trusted with the conduct of the war.

Ummmmm.... so let me get this straight. A group of Muslims were born and raised in England and seemed for all the world like assimilated westerners right up until the moment they become suicide bombers, and you feel like the intellectual heavy lifting is complete with the formulation of this brilliant tautology: "the killers are killers because they want to kill."

Hewitt's argument reminds me of both (a) the ridiculous "they hate us for who we are, not what we do" meme advanced by that other leading light of the right-wing, Victor Davis Hanson (and deconstructed here), and (b) the Monty Python sketch in which ordinary Englishmen suddlenly and inexplicably transform into kilt-wearing Scotsmen.

On the other hand, the Pythons thought absurdity was funny. How quaint.

Oh, and if you don't want to let us borrow the keys to your war, that is just fine, given what a dandy job you all are doing, Hugh.