The odd kneejerk.

The perverseness of the news media is today led by Joel Achenbach who seems to think that there's something unmanly about dropping a 500 lb. bomb on a creep like Zarqawi. Apparently, setting IEDs to explode when nameless strangers drive by and sending some teenage nitwit loaded with explosives into a crowd at a mosque with instructions to detonate himself are more heroic forms of murder. If you know who your target is and put a bomb on the crosshairs with a minimum of collateral damage, you're a cold-hearted bastard; not like this man with the dead eyes who prides himself on sawing off the heads of hostages who have no significance other than their misfortune to fall into his hands.

The silliness of Achenbach's piece can't be explained by stupidity. He's not stupid. James Lileks on Hugh Hewitt's program blamed it on laziness, apparently on the theory that he just punched out his first visceral reaction and hit "publish." But what kind of sullen resentment would cause that to be his first thought? I thought, "Great!" and so did Mark Steyn and Christopher Hitchens and practically every other American outside the MSM or the MoveOn.org Rolodex. Nick Berg's father predictably claims that it saddens him when anybody is killed, and finds it another reason to hold against George Bush.

Lileks argues that Achenbach couldn't really have meant what he wrote, that he was musing on the old chestnut that if every soldier had to look into the face of those he kills, there would be fewer wars. But we're not talking about targeting some conscript here; this is Zarqawi, who's been distributing Ricin and planning the murder of random civilians. That he would cough up this without having thought about it and discarded it as drivel, indicates that he's a pretty shallow guy, and that's the best I can say for him.

The reaction from the liberal media in general makes me think that when they heard the news, their first reaction was to assess how it would affect Bush's political fortunes and go into damage control mode. Such people presume to be our ethical instructors, but they have become cold to normal human emotions. In truth, they are more dead to human feelings and morality than the jet pilots for whom they have such disdain. I think it's part of the war against normal male instincts and the emasculation of society being driven by feminism.