Barnett bitchslaps Krauthammer

Intellectually that is.

Great post by Barnett criticizing Charles Krauthammer (as a perpetual "grad student"....ouch).

The post counters CK's attacks on Obama for Obama's answers about willingness to meet with dictators and the first step in a hypothetical attack on American soil is protecting the victims and making sure you know who actually committed the attack.

I mean who else can write the following (italics in original):

So let me get this straight in this, the great asymmetrical struggle of our age: our strength is not found in our ability to withstand and mitigate attacks but in symmetrical--and often knee-jerk--retaliation against state-less enemies? Talk about a grad student answer right out of the 20th century! Somebody is definitely beyond his analytical expiration date. Our resilience is our deterrence in the 21st century. If you don't get that, you shouldn't be anywhere near the levers of power in a moment of danger. If your answer is just to pull triggers to get your rocks off as quickly as possible, you might as well hand over power to the bin Ladens right now, because our future foreign policy will consist merely of those guys plucking our strings. I say, go to the back of the class and write Robb's book out in chalk a couple of times til something different sinks in. Krauthammer ends this embarrassing display of sophomoric analysis with the specter of America sharing the stage--unwittingly--with a "malevolent clown like Hugo Chavez." Good God Almighty! That's what we've come to after 8 years of Bush? Living in fear of Chavez? Nixon sits down with Mao, a guy who killed about 80 million, but we're supposed to fear treading anywhere near the fantastically evil Chavez? What kind of midget superpower does Krauthammer fear we've become that he's so entranced by such imagery? Just chalk it up to another Boomer (and former Mondale speechwriter) infatuated with visuals over reality, armed with his graduate-level understanding of both history and the complexity of the world we now live in.