There was quite a free for all on Twitter this week. Some religious nutcase tweeting on behalf of Al Qaeda suggested using an Arabic hashtag for suggestions about how to best leverage terrorism. At which point the twitterverse erupted in a magnificent fever of trolling as the hashtag was copied and added to every kind of sarcastic suggestions imaginable, thus both mocking AQ and rendering the effort worse than futile. Fortunately, the bad guys have good guys on our side working for them, or something:

Media-ite — “There’s only one challenge in it,” Deutsch said. “Problem: we have a woman, but our enemies are still on the opposite side of the equation. I don’t think the al Qaedas of the world are going to be headed by women, so it falls apart a little bit. Women plus women equals a win to me. Women and still men on the other side of the table? Theoretically the world would be a better place with women running it. It doesn’t solve the problem.” “Nobody is assuming women are going to parachute into Afghanistan,” Alex Wagner replied.

“If you have two women down to negotiate something, it’s going to get done without bullets,” Deutsch said. “On our side of the equation, we solve it, but there’s a world that’s still century behind in our evolutionary state or progressive state in how we feel about women.”

“I’m trying to decide whether to ask you to explain yourself,” Mika Brzezinski said.

“I’m talking in this idealistic utopian place of women getting together and making the world a better place, which I agree with,” Deutsch explaind. “The problem is what we’ve learned throughout history is unanswered aggression breeds more aggression. So we’re going to tack on this more maternal—”

I think it’s fair to say Deutsch might have thought he was trying to make a salient point, he just used offensive stereotypes and quickly found himself hopelessly entangled by his own clumsiness. But that’s a generous take in my opinion, because I’m not entirely sure what his point was supposed to be in the best of circumstances. If Al Qaeda was run by a woman, and we had a woman president, a breakthrough in negotiations would occur? Or we should avoid a woman president as long as Al Qaeda is run by male clerics, because they won’t think we’re tough and will therefore try to kill innocent people?

If it was the latter, that’s kind of stupid. These guys don’t hit the weakest nations, they specifically target the strongest they can find for PR and religious reasons. Being macho doesn’t scare off suicide bombers willing to blow themselves and everyone around them to bloody bits in the belief they’ll soon be in a fresh dimensional plane banging dozens of eternal virgins, presumably aided by a divine ED script. If anything it motivates them.