One last hurrah for Obama and his debate rescuer, and it was a doozy. I actually think you can make a case, on a certain level, for downplaying the impact of North Korea's attack on Sony. We don't need to give a petulant dictator like Bowl Cut Jr. the satisfaction of seeing us freak out over something they did to us.
But you can downplay in a strong, confident way. I think they'll find out pretty soon whether this was a good idea, and that's all I'll say about it right now. Take that approach and you get him laying awake at night wondering. Or . . . you can be smugly dismissive, which sends a message not only to the Norks but also to Americans that little in the way of action should be expected from you. And Obama being Obama, that is of course exactly the message he sent:
Do note the classic Democrat fixation with making sure they act "proportionally" in response to any act of aggression. Forget about any notion that an antagonist who messes with the United States will rue the day it came up against the most powerful nation in the world, and will be licking its wounds for such a long time that it will learn its lesson good and hard about doing anything that stupid again.
Nah. It doesn't work that way under Barack Obama. Whatever you do to us, we'll respond with something on an equivalent scale and absolutely no more, and that's if we do anything at all. During the Clinton Administration, it was all the rage to be "proportionate" in response to provocations from Saddam Hussein or other Middle Eastern troublemakers. They were trying harder to avoid criticism at the United Nations than they were to assert America's superiority.
Obama is doing the same now, but the stakes are arguably bigger. We are no longer in an age when the only way to attack a nation is by launching missiles or by putting boots on the ground. Clearly North Korea can't touch us there. But if they can hack into Sony's IT infrastructure, why should we be overconfident about the prospect of a cyberattack against our power grid or our water supply? It's easy to laugh when they threaten a 9/11-style attack, but are you sure they don't have the wherewithal to do something digitally the likes of which we've never seen? This is the sort of thing Obama needs to be taken seriously.
Is he? I'll admit that some of my reaction is based on preconceived notions. If George W. Bush or Dick Cheney sat there and said exactly the same thing (except for the "proportionally" part), I'd probably view it as an act of quiet defiance that would likely be followed by decisive action. Because that's what we came to expect from Bush and Cheney. Coming from Obama, I'm more inclined to take it as a disinterested president's attempt to dismiss a matter he really doesn't want to deal with.
Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I am. But given the track record to date, why would you come to any other conclusion at this point?
