[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoA-wkwVU2M&w=520&h=300]

That short clip from “Fox & Friends” is like something off of “The Simpsons.” It shows the MOAB bomb dropping in Afghanistan. The intro music is “Courtesy Of The Red, White, and Blue,” a country song by Toby Keith. The female co-host Ainsley Earhardt says, “That’s what freedom looks like.” Geraldo Rivera said it gives him great pleasure to watch bombs fall on bad guys.

Man.

Look, I don’t mourn one bit for the ISIS fighters killed in that attack. ISIS are the Khmer Rouge of our time. We have to kill them. I am certain that the world is a better place for those ISIS berserkers having been removed from it by the big American bomb. But for God’s sake — I mean that literally — we should not take pleasure in killing. It may be our grim duty — killing ISIS fighters is precisely that, in my view — but to equate dropping bombs on people with “freedom,” and American ideals? It’s depraved.

The late Paul Fussell’s acerbic memoir of his time fighting Nazis in the US infantry, “Doing Battle,” is an important book to read. He had no doubt at all that the war he was fighting was just. But Fussell speaks bluntly about the waste and the cruelty of war. War is at best a tragedy. It is a terrible thing that the armed forces of civilized peoples have to wipe out as many ISIS fighters as we can, given the atrocities those evil berserkers wreak everywhere they go. But you don’t have to pity ISIS to recognize that killing is not what men were made for.

“That’s what freedom looks like.” Sick. I am not a supporter of the death penalty for capital crimes, but if I were, I could look at the body of an executed murderer, and say, “This is what justice looks like.” But the idea that a newscast would introduce video of the execution accompanied by a celebratory pop song, then feature newscasters talking about how happy the execution made them — well, I think this is sort of what barbarism looks like.