WILL NOVEMBER 7 BE A CAPITULATION TO MASOCHISM?

If they were honest, liberal scientists who fanatically believe in the religion of anti-missile defense should band together and call themselves SFADA:  Scientists For A Defenseless America.

No matter what breakthroughs are achieved by the Pentagon in missile defense, you can depend on these guys to lie about them and claim they won't work.

Last week, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency reached an extraordinary milestone:  putting a "death-ray" high-energy laser aboard an airplane that can destroy at the speed of light an enemy nuclear missile aimed at the Unites States shortly after its launch.

If you read the detailed description of the Airborne Laser on military.com, I'm sure you'll be overwhelmingly impressed by the technical genius and competence of its designers.

Naturally, SFADA scientists immediately said it wouldn't work, that it could be "easily defeated by a simple countermeasure."  That was the judgment of Bill Clinton's chief weapons tester, Phillip Coyle, now being paid to lie for the left at the Center for Defense (Mis)Information.

"If a laser can be developed with enough power to penetrate the atmosphere and still be lethal once it reaches a target, an enemy would only need to put a reflective coating on the outside of its missiles to bounce off the laser beam, making it harmless," Coyle claimed in a CDI press release denouncing the Airborne Laser.

The "reflective coating" argument is so scientifically illiterate that Coyle cannot be stupid enough to actually believe it.

Such coatings are very expensive and very fragile – so fragile that they can be scraped off even by ice crystals in clouds the missile flies through.  Further, one coating is good only for reflecting off one frequency of the laser beam.  Multiple coatings at incredible expense would be necessary to ward off multiple laser frequencies.  A beam shifting through a sequence of frequencies would in nanoseconds find one for which the missile had no specific coating.

Then there is the power of "q-switching," a technique that produces a pulsed beam of gigantic power over a tiny fraction of time.  This is done by making very minute changes in the optical cavities of the laser, resulting in a beam of trillions, even quadrillions of watts for 20 nanoseconds (billionths of a second) or so, easily ablating any "reflective coating."  Then the laser returns to its normal continuous wave beam of around a million watts.

Coyle and other anti-missile defense ilk know this – it's that they don't want to know it.

It's yet another example of Why Liberals Are Incapable of Defending America.  This is the title of a speech I gave last year and featured in To The Point.  What could be more idiotic than opposing missile defense? it asks.  Yet, other than John Kerry, most liberals are not stupid.  It's they don't want their country defended.

I really encourage you to (re)read the speech now. For it explains why all liberal passions are frenzies of masochism, from global warming to abortion to homosexual marriage to DDT bans to anti-missile defense to surrender in Iraq.

The question of the moment is:  has the American electorate at large been so infected by this masochism that it will put people who don't want America defended in charge of Congress during a time of war?

It seems impossible that this be so – and yet it may be.  I can't bring myself to believe that it will happen.  If it does, it will be nothing less than America's capitulation to masochism.  We'll have a lot to talk about next week, won't we?