With thanks to Jonah Goldberg, check out this excellent post by writer Oliver Kamm in which the ridiculous liberal Eric Alterman gets his ass kicked. In reaction to the recent death of Gen. Paul Tibbets, the man who piloted the mission in which we utterly destroyed the city of Hiroshima, Alterman wrote in The Nation:
When Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets died November 1, the New York Times repeated Tibbets’s contention that “It would have been morally wrong if we’d have had [the atomic bomb] and not used it and let a million more people die.” That virtually no reputable historian would put the casualty figure for a US invasion of Japan anywhere near that high (leaving aside the question of whether an invasion would have been necessary) was not mentioned in the story.
To which Kamm replies:
What can you say? The most charitable explanation I can give is that Alterman is (unlike the late General Tibbets) sufficiently ethnocentric not to take into account the deaths of Japanese civilians that would have resulted from a conventional invasion and blockade of the home islands, sufficiently casual not to distinguish between deaths and casualties, and entirely unaware of research by American and Japanese historians published in the last 20 years concerning the conclusion of the Pacific War. I can name off the top of my head at least a dozen leading historians in this field who would concur with Tibbets’s judgement, owing to their knowledge of Japanese military preparations on Kyushu, the Americans’ experience of battle at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the casualty estimates used by the Truman administration, the number of American medals struck in anticipation of the appalling costs of a conventional invasion, and other factors.
At the turn of the 20th Century, people who called themselves progressives believed in —and unreservedly supported— a robust foreign policy that said America’s ideals were universally desirable and that what we stood for was worth committing our bravest to make possible. That belief and support persisted for many decades until Communist subversion and other degeneracies began to weaken the patriotic spirit of the classic American liberal.
Today, Leftists and liberals presume to call themselves “progressives” and “the reality-based community” when, in fact, they are incoherent liars motivated solely by hatred of their own country.
Mrs. Tibbets’ son was an American hero. Harry S Truman was absolutely right to use the atomic bomb. And there are a great many liberal assholes out there today —arrogant, ignorant laptop Leftists— who owe their very grandfathers’ lives to those two men and countless others.
Remember Pearl Harbor.
