The internet, and particularly the left side of it, is a never-ending source of head-scratchers, headdesks, and headaches. Among all the possible topic areas for such fails, foreign policy may be the worst and within that, global terrorism especially. It’s an area the left is notoriously bad at understanding, famously disinterested in as compared to domestic policy, and one in which their thinking can obviously be disastrous and dangerous. See Obama, Barack.

After the terror attacks in Paris the utter ridiculousness of Twitter was, as you might expect, multiplied tenfold. There were dumb hashtags and stupid pronouncements and even a truly staggeringly dumb Democrat who messed up so badly he dropped out of his race for a state senate seat in Minnesota.

Into that sea of stupid waded a once-again triumphant Salon, with this tweet that was so bad it was even worse than this one. But following closely in Salon’s wake was CNN’s Sally Kohn, who promoted what is probably the single dumbest objections to responding to terror, or to war or combat in general. It is not unique to Kohn, and this post is not about her specifically but she certainly made a splash with it so we’ll use her tweet as the example.

The argument is that going to war or doing battle or fighting terror with weapons and violence is “what the terrorists want” and, therefore for some reason, something we should avoid.

First of all, even if it is something they want … so what? We didn’t go to war in Europe because Hitler got enough signatures on a Change.org petition. It had nothing to do with his wants. Who cares what the enemy wants? We have our own interests, and we make decisions based on those interests. I can’t imagine a more juvenile excuse to back out of a fight than “you’re not the boss of me.” So they want it? Fine! They’ll get it.

Second of all, where does someone like Sally Kohn get the idea that this is something the terrorists want? Did she take a poll? Was there a focus group? How does she know that “going to war” is exactly what the terrorists want? I think she just thinks it sounds right.

You know what sounds right to me? War is incidental. They want submission. They want to throw infidels off of buildings. They want to murder Christians. Whether we kick them before being beheaded is of no consequence. They will martyr themselves, and do, whether we respond or not.

But here’s another thing: People like Sally Kohn and President Obama are constantly, constantly saying that the reason the terrorists hate us is that we won’t leave them alone. Oh if only George Bush hadn’t ruined the Middle East, which spent all of history until 2002 in a state of total blissful peace. If we would just pull our troops out of the region and leave then terror would vanish into the mists of history, extremely recent and post-Bush though that history may be.

So which is it? Do we play into their fondest wishes by responding with war? Or do they really want peace and all we have to do is leave? Which is their fantasy future?

The truth is, it’s a totally ridiculous question anyway. That ISIS and other terror groups bring war to the West is not hypothetical. It is something that actually happens. We saw it this weekend. We can only deal in what we can deal in, and we can only react to what we can react to. Yes, when someone goes to war with you, you go to war back. That is what you do. What you don’t do is try to clever your way out of it saying “ha HA! You thought I would fight back, but I shall trick you by placing your blade upon my neck.” All that gets you is one hell of a headache.

An even worse headache than the left’s bad ideas give me. But not by much, friends. Not worse by much.