A rogue nation targeted a multinational corporation and won.  North Korea has almost certainly ordered the massive cyber-attack on Sony Pictures, stealing and publicly dumping enough data to make a dent in the company’s stock price.

North Korea cannot challenge the United States militarily, despite what movies have portrayed.  Regardless of their saber-rattling, and America’s reduced presence on the Korean peninsula, a real attack of any substance against our ally South Korea (or Japan for that matter) would bring a suicidal level of retribution on the North, and they know it.  But they’ve found a vein where they can draw blood, and draw it they have.  Somehow, Kim Jong Un realized that America has an achilles’ heel and discovered how to exploit it.  When Dennis Rodman can visit Kim with impunity and only minor mocking, and strike up a friendship, the North Korean autocrat found a hole in the fabric of his nemesis’ armor:  we’re moral cowards.

The scenario depicted in the now-slain film The Interview turns a Maxwell Smart bumbler into a very pellucid Dennis Rodman character intent on murdering Kim, resulting in a version of Edward Snowden meets Dumb and Dumber.  This didn’t sit well with the absolute ruler of North Korea, who takes himself a bit more seriously than American politicians take themselves.

The problem isn’t that Sony once again was embarrassed by a data hack; it’s likely that most corporate IT security would wither in the face of a sustained operation led by a rogue government, whose resolve, assets, and ability to navigate the criminal world probably exceeds even the most sophisticated independent hackers.  The problem is, rather, that America hasn’t taken this nearly as seriously as we should.

And the people who take it the least seriously are the biggest cowards and hypocrites in the room:  progressive liberals.  The same liberals who cheer Snowden and Julian Assange’s release of sensitive U.S. intelligence data, the ones who cheer Bradley a.k.a. Chelsea Manning’s document dump of classified Army documents, who rush to their TOR and BitTorrent networks to download the latest pirated movies, shrink before the North Korean threat against their own wellbeing because they might go see a movie in a theater.

The Interview will not be released on Christmas Day, because North Korea threatened us.

The administration’s sudden urgency came after a new threat delivered this week to desktop computers at Sony’s offices warned that if “The Interview” was released on Dec. 25, “the world will be full of fear.”

“Remember the 11th of September 2001,” it said. “We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time.”

Sensing the jellyfish response of our government, Regal, AMC, Cinemark and Carmike theaters refused to show the movie.  Nobody wants to have another Aurora event, and it only makes sense to be safe rather than sorry.  The problem with this is that we are pretty safe, if only our government would step up in more than a lip-service, tummy-rubbing way.

The Interview will not be released on Christmas Day, but neither will over 30,000 Christians being held in North Korean concentration camps.

The same liberals who lecture us on the morality of post-9/11 waterboarding have no problem with North Korea’s daily torture regimen for political dissenters, homosexuals, and, especially, Christian missionaries (click on the link to see it).  These world-change-hope-mongers say how awful it is that North Korea treat humans like a sociopath tears the wings off butterflies, but they do nothing to stop it.

Not only do they do nothing, they cower in fear when presented with the least threat to their own safety, convenience, or lifestyle.  They have no problem when a man walks into the Family Research Council office, with a printout of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate groups” list, a bag of Chik-Fil-A sandwiches and a gun (they blame the gun), and is only stopped from committing an atrocity by a brave security guard who is shot in the process of stopping him.

Yet they call a beheading in Oklahoma “workplace violence”, and grant military prisoner Nidal Hasan his “religious right” to wear a beard (but no facial hair is allowed in military prisons) and ask for “citizenship” in the ISIS “caliphate”, without calling his shooting of U.S. soldiers while shouting “Allahu Akbar” an act of Islamic terror.

The very liberals who make movies like The Interview are moral cowards, and even more than that, they are physical cowards.  They are more worried about the private emails of Sony chief Amy Pascal exposing her thoughts about A-list celebrities and President Obama’s favorite movies than the lives of soldiers and intelligence officers who are in more danger because of Snowden, Assange and Manning.

They are more concerned with the “press” such as Gawker, Buzzfeed and their fellow muckrakers combing through potentially embarrassing documents from Sony’s hacked files than the fact that a criminal state is threatening the lives of U.S. citizens on our own soil.  As Aaron Sorkin wrote in the New York Times.

“Because the minor insults that were revealed are such small potatoes compared to the fact that they were revealed. Not by the hackers, but by American journalists helping them…If you close your eyes you can imagine the hackers sitting in a room, combing through the documents to find the ones that will draw the most blood. And in a room next door are American journalists doing the same thing. As demented and criminal as it is, at least the hackers are doing it for a cause. The press is doing it for a nickel.”

Mr. Sorkin, you are a stupendous a**hole.

Instead of turning on the press, why don’t you grow a set of huevos and stop referring to criminal and evil regimes as “hackers with a cause”.  But then again, you are a coward too.

We as a nation need to react to aggression, not placate the aggressors.  What North Korea has done to Sony Pictures is not just a corporate data raid or a random hack.  It’s casus belli—an act of war.  Treating it as less than that is surrender to an enemy who is now writing the book on how to defeat the United States of America.

(crosspost)