A few days after the release of the James Foley beheading video, Daily Kos blogger Mark Sumner claimed that Americans were needlessly “freaking out” about ISIS. On Wednesday, Sumner was back with more condescension, this time alleging that our reaction to the jihadist group has been not merely hysterical but also stupid. He also argued, as he did in the first post, that “ISIS represents no threat to the United States.”
Sumner asserted that America’s “shaking-in-our-boots cowardice” over terrorism has caused an appalling amount of military and civilian death thousands of miles from our shores (“Stop making our service people, and innocents on the ground, sacrifices to your ill-defined "they're out to get me"-itis”) and wrote that President Obama, in his speech later Wednesday, would have been justified in telling the public to “grow up” regarding ISIS.
From Sumner’s post (bolding added):
ISIS represents no threat to the United States. None.
Are there terrorists in this world who would like to give us a bloody nose? Absolutely. You know what? You've already surrendered an astounding amount of your personal privacy in the name of enabling agencies to reduce that threat. Stop being so eager to bend over and give the little that remains…Don't get out the checkbook to buy more nonsense.
And hey, you've already left more Americans on the battlefield created by our shaking-in-our-boots cowardice than any terrorists might have hoped…Stop making our service people, and innocents on the ground, sacrifices to your ill-defined "they're out to get me"-itis…
…[A] terrorist [is] an asshole playing you for a reaction. Someone who gets off, not on the things he is doing, but on seeing how badly those things upset you…
So why are you in such a hurry to give them exactly what they want? Beating your chests and threatening to spend a billion-trillion-zillion dollars? That's not scaring terrorists. That's empowering them by treating them like a much more serious threat than they actually represent. Threatening to drop more Americans right there where they can be killed by the thousands? Please. You're making them drool.
…[T]hey don't care if they lose on the battlefield…Going to war in this situation only shows that you've surrendered the only thing that is an actual weapon against terrorists: reason…
The only threat to America is the threat being generated by Americans.
I'd very much like to think that the president will address the nation with the immortal phrase, "grow up." But no, that's not going to happen. Instead, we're going to act because, God help us all, the people demand action.
