Chickenhawks Sean Hannity and Mark Steyn talked oh so tough about rescuing the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls – complete with a #BringBackOurBalls hashtag designed to also conquer their domestic enemies: the Obama administration and Jon Stewart. I’m surprised the Boko Haram didn’t surrender immediately. But maybe the Nigerian kidnappers knew how full of ignorant hot air Hannity and Steyn were. As for Stewart – well, let’s just hope he takes notice and gives these two exactly what they deserve.

If you ask me, the whole 9:37 discussion seemed an answer to Stewart’s eviscerating smackdown last night of Rush Limbaugh’s vicious attack on Michelle Obama’s #BringBackOurGirls placard (video below). And maybe the hilarious twitter backfiring against Ann Coulter’s attempt at mockery, too. But, as Media Matters noted, the right-wing has been on fire attacking Mrs. Obama over it so maybe it was a conservative trifecta.

Plus, it was another opportunity for Armchair Generals Hannity and Steyn to indulge their bloodlust. I’ve written many times about Hannity’s love for war. It’s worth reposting this telling paragraph from the Guardian about Steyn:

Weeks after the invasion of Iraq he assured his readers that there would be “no widespread resentment at or resistance of the western military presence”; in December 2003 he wrote that “another six weeks of insurgency sounds about right, after which it will peter out”; and the following March he insisted that: “I don’t think it’s possible for anyone who looks at Iraq honestly to see it as anything other than a success story.”

Steyn’s “#BringBackOurBalls Column

The pretext for the segment was the above-titled column by  Steyn (also seen on Fox Nation) in which he wrote:

It is hard not to have total contempt for a political culture that thinks (the #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.

Tough guy Hannity (just don’t ask him to fulfill his pledge to undergo waterboarding) announced, “Terrorists, they likely don’t read Twitter and even if they did, it would have zero impact on them. And the only thing that they’d react to is a bullet in their brain.”

Steyn took it a step further. This badass  announced, “There’s a danger of communicating to the world the United States is not a serious power any more. …If you’re gonna say bring back our girls, somebody has to bring them back. … So unless you’re actually doing something to bring them back, this tweet is less than useless because it communicates to the world that you’re not a serious power.”

But the U.S. is involved in the rescue. The Washington Post reported yesterday that we are already conducting surveillance flights, we have sent a team of kidnapping and negotiation experts to advise the government and we may deploy drones as well.

Furthermore, as The Daily Show segment shows, the abductions story only gained international prominence after two Nigerians tweeted “BringBackOurDaughters.” Michelle Obama’s hashtag campaign was part of an already successful effort to raise international awareness and pressure – not the be-all and end-all of U.S. assistance.

But maybe Hannity and Steyn were too busy dreaming up their next armed conflict – for others to fight and die in - to report the full picture. After all, it’s been a few years since we started a new war. Just pay no attention to the pesky detail that “Nigeria has rejected U.S. offers of military-type assistance.”

Hannity And Steyn Look Forward To A Killing

Steyn said he hoped the British, working with Americans and French “actually go get these girls and kill the guys who took them!”

General Hannity laid down his military strategy:

I would suggest we only use overwhelming force. We’d need the element of surprise somehow – and that means our intelligence, which is already, as I understand it now, being used there. And (if) we had a reasonable (expectation) that our guys aren’t gonna get hurt in the process, I think it would be a worthwhile exercise because it is a battle against terrorists that are not only against these Nigerian schoolgirls, they are declaring war on the entire world, advancing their ideology. But that understanding seems to be missing in the administration.

…It’s pathetic but so is America’s reaction in the Ukraine and in Crimea and the Iranians don’t seem particularly nervous about the United States and the utter hypocrisy of arming the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt with F-16s is astoundingly stupid to me.

Somehow, Hannity left out Benghazi!

The Jon Stewart angle

As bad as all this was, it was not as bad as the vicious rant by Rush Limbaugh that Stewart played. He called Limbaugh “the quivering rage heap who is apparently desperately trying to extinguish any remaining molecule of humanity that might still reside in the Chernobyl-esque Superfund cleanup site that was his soul.”  He urged viewers to tweet with the hashtag #F*@kYouRush.

Hannity played that clip. “Is Jon Stewart gonna support the idea of special forces going in to rescue them?” Hannity asked, suggesting Stewart was some kind of pussy.

Steyn, a Limbaugh substitute, said, “I’d like to get those 276 girls back, Sean, and hire them as replacement writers for Jon Stewart ‘cause they couldn’t do a worse job than his writing staff if that so-called hashtag is the best that he can come up with. …Jon Stewart should get serious. It’s not about Rush. It’s not about you. It’s not about me. It’s about the president of the world’s superpower reducing himself to a tweet because that’s cool. Well, a tweet works for Alec Baldwin and a tweet works for Beyoncé and Jay Z. A tweet does not work for the foreign policy of the United States."

Oh, if only the Obamas were as tough as these guys!

Watch this jaw-dropping display and Jon Stewart's takedown below.