BETSY NEWMARK: IS NICE THE NEW NORMAL?

How heartbreaking the stories and pictures out of Nice are. I’m so afraid that this is our new normal. I remember in the 1970s when it seemed as if plane hijackings were happening all the time, but eventually airports built security and those became a thing of the past. But if evil people can just find places and times when crowds are gathered for a celebration or a club or a restaurant, how do we stop this? And, if this is indeed an ISIS attack, as they suffer more attacks in the Middle East, they must feel that their best way to maintain their status is to launch attacks elsewhere. As Charles Krauthammer said last night, such attacks serve two purposes,

And the other thing — the conjunction of one other horrible development — which is this terror organization that thrives, glorifies brutality. And what it does for them is the idea that you can terrorize your enemy, and you can recruit the more disturbed and sadistic people in the world who want to follow this into their own distorted promised land.

Add in the possibilities of social media and instantaneous news, they can magnify the power of any attack. I don’t know what the answer is. Krauthammer recommends fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them at home, but as long as they can find people willing to die while killing people in other countries, it may not matter how many of them we kill on their home turf.

It’s obvious to everyone not named Barack Obama, Ben Rhodes or Hillary Clinton that the current strategy of hashtags, tasteful Photoshops, James Taylor and allowing Iran to develop the Bomb has been a disaster. Oceania isn’t besting Eurasia or Eastasia, and the chocolate ration has been rapidly spiraling downward. As a result, if headlines such as this seem increasingly acceptable: “Newt: Deport Muslims in America who fail Shariah test,” the administration and its palace guard media (aka, “The Blob” as Rhodes describes his MSM lackeys, with the appropriate contempt) have only themselves to blame.

Update: “The local paper reports that the terrorist was ‘of Tunisian origin,’ which surprises no one, of course. But since he was killed by police, President Obama may never know his real motive,” NRO’s Mark Krikorian writes from Nice, where he and his family were vacationing. Read the whole thing.