Why It's Great To Be a Psychotic A-Hole

By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, February 29, 2012

President Obama apologized this week for the U.S. military's accidental burning of Qurans in Afghanistan. "I wish to express my deep regret for the reported incident," said Obama. "I extend to you and the Afghan people my sincere apologies. ... We will take the appropriate steps to avoid any recurrence, to include holding accountable those responsible."

The Quran burnings prompted massive riots in Afghanistan, as per the Islamist handbook, page 248, which, incidentally, may be the only book other than the Quran published in most Arabic-speaking countries. U.S. servicemen were murdered. The Qurans were only burned in the first place because terrorists were writing messages in them to their friends. None of that stopped Obama from making his apology.

Obama sure taught those Afghani terrorists a lesson. He taught them to keep on being psychotic a-holes.

Let's say you're driving on a city street with your daughter in the car. You accidentally rear end a sketchy looking fellow in a pickup truck, scraping his bumper. He immediately climbs out of the truck, baseball bat in hand, and proceeds to wallop your little girl in the head. Should you apologize for rear ending him? Or should you try to protect her from the second shot by killing this psychotic monster?

The liberal answer is an odd version of the legal eggshell-skull approach to torts -- you leave the victim as you find him. From the liberal perspective, this means that if you scraped a guy's bumper, it's your fault if he goes berserk and murders your child. The same holds true on foreign policy: It was our burning of the Qurans that caused the psychotic behavior. The solution is not to burn Qurans and to apologize as early and as often as possible.

The real solution is something different: Kill the bad guys, or imprison them. No apologies. There's no way to avoid setting off psychotic people; sooner or later, they're going to go off and hurt somebody. The key to stopping crazy people is to go after them pre-emptively, to hunt them down, identify them and take them out of play.

If we don't, we embolden them.

Why not be a psychotic a-hole if you're going to be treated with kid gloves? In fact, you will only be treated with kid gloves if you do act like a psychotic a-hole. Here's why: Liberals assume that people who are insane don't mean what they say -- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, for example. Once those demented and evil people carry out their threats, liberals then revert to typical eggshell-skull theory -- they were crazy, so we should have left them alone. It's a win-win.

It's actually a win-win-win -- the psychotic a-holes avoid vengeance because, after all, they're lunatics. We don't want to punish people for being crazy. They simply can't control themselves!

The result of all of this is a world run by psychotic a-holes. We are supposed to cater to them, so as not to offend their sensibilities. We are supposed to avoid vengeance, since they're not responsible for their actions. And we're supposed to give them anything they want, to keep the nuts happy.

These people aren't nuts, though. They're evil, and they're opportunistic. When they see weakness, they strike. It's as true for everyday criminals as it is for Islamists around the globe. We cannot surrender to any of them. But our president already is.