Another long day of travel yesterday, with a late night and an early morning today.  There are occasions in this line of work when I have reason to doubt my own sanity.

Here’s an interesting tidbit from Mark Steyn, wherein he advocates a new “hashtag” (I had to look that up) #bringbackourballs.  Excerpt:

It is hard not to have total contempt for a political culture that thinks the picture at right (Michelle Obama holding up a sign stating “#Bring Back Our Girls”)  is a useful contribution to rescuing 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by jihadist savages in Nigeria. Yet some pajama boy at the White House evidently felt getting the First Lady to pose with this week’s Hashtag of Western Impotence would reflect well upon the Administration. The horrible thing is they may be right: Michelle showed she cared – on social media! – and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

Just as the last floppo hashtag, #WeStandWithUkraine, didn’t actually involve standing with Ukraine, so #BringBackOurGirls doesn’t require bringing back our girls. There are only a half-dozen special forces around the planet capable of doing that without getting most or all of the hostages killed: the British, the French, the Americans, Israelis, Germans, Aussies, maybe a couple of others. So, unless something of that nature is being lined up, those schoolgirls are headed into slavery, and the wretched pleading passivity of Mrs Obama’s hashtag is just a form of moral preening.

The problem isn’t moral preening, although this administration has done plenty of that.  The problem is America’s seeming impotence in the face of vicious, aggressive Islamic savagery.  Boko Haram took these girls, who are almost certainly irretrievably lost into slavery or worse, because they knew neither America nor any other developed Western nation would do anything about it.

The proper response by the Western world would be to hunt these savages down like animals and kill them, but that won’t happen.

And Boko Haram knows that.