If I hear the term "disproportionate response" one more time, I'm gonna lose it!

That is the line that Laura Ingraham has been saying all week on her radio show (that's what is nice about summer break, I actually get to listen to her). She has been saying this in response to the rote mantra about how Israel should be able to defend herself, but that its reaction to Hezbollah's raining of rockets on Israeli cities has just been too heavy-handed and "disproportionate" to the circumstances. After all, all Hezbollah did was cross the Israeli border, kill eight Israeli soldiers, and kidnap two more. How does that justify killing hundreds of poor innocent Lebanese civilians in airstrikes and blowing up multiple bridges in buildings?

Hmmm... how indeed? I didn't have to think very hard about this scenario to find countless examples of "disproportionate" response. The best example was the very one used by Charles Krauthammer in an excellent op-ed that ran in the Sacramento Bee yesterday. I also found his column online at Townhall.com. I highly suggest you read it, and here are a couple teasers to get you started:

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is ``disproportionate," as in the universally decried ``disproportionate Israeli response."

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel ``proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a cinder, and turned the Japanese home islands to rubble and ruin. Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right -- legal and moral -- to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.

Britain was never invaded by Germany in World War II. Did it respond to the blitz and V-1 and V-2 rockets with ``proportionate" aerial bombardment of Germany? Of course not. Churchill orchestrated the greatest land invasion in history that flattened and utterly destroyed Germany, killing untold innocent German women and children in the process.

Pearl Harbor was the very example that immediately came to my mind when I began thinking of this disproportionality crap. Next Krauthammer snippet:

The perversity of today's international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral asymmetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides.

In perhaps the most blatant terror campaign from the air since the London blitz, Hezbollah is raining rockets on Israeli cities and villages. These rockets are packed with ball bearings that can penetrate automobiles and shred human flesh. They are meant to kill and maim. And they do.

Which brings us back to this cartoon:

Does anything look disproportionate here?

I know that this is all a big game. The pro-Hezbollah side is quite aware that they are the aggressors in this fight. But they know that there are too many anti-semitic haters of Israel who are going to believe their blubbering B.S. about Israeli "aggression" and "disproportionate response." The pro-Israel side knows its B.S., Hezbollah knows its B.S. - the problem is with the rest of the people out there who still get their news from the big three networks on television who don't come near to getting the whole story, and are much more likely to swallow this whole moral equivalency/cycle of violence malarkey that we see over and over again on the news where the defensive actions of Israel and the actions of the Arab terrorists who want to annhilate Israel are put on an even keel. On a lark, I watched the NBC Nightly News tonight, and was sickened by what I saw. Every story had to do with how Israel is beginning to look more and more like the bad guy in this fight. Damage to Lebanon from Israeli airstrikes - both infrastructure and people - was shown again and again. Meanwhile, not one mention of Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel was made, nor was any damage to Israeli buildings or people by Hezbollah's Katyusha rockets ever shown. This is where I just have to say it: I want to grab that pompous asshat, David Gregory, by his blow-dried hair and sock him in his simian-like face. He stood there for three minutes straight and did nothing but bash Israel.

Enough of my ramblings; read the Krauthammer column. The truth shall set you free!

Good Day to You, Sir

***By the way, I know the cartoon shows a Palestinian terrorist (Hamas), and not a Hezbollah terrorist, but these two terrorist organizations are equally guilty of using civilians and especially children as human shields.