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Chris Christie's plan to bomb Port St. Lucie*

Chris Christie's idea to use the military to strike terror where it lives -- when the recent lone-wolf terrorists have all been born in the United States -- epitomizes the vapidity of GOP ideas on mass shootings.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie took a short break from picking up Donald Trump's McDonald's orders (which he denied, hilariously, in an official statement!) and possibly throwing his "Bridgegate" cellphone off the Tallahatchie Bridge to give a radio interview.

Appearing on New York's WFAN (like our WIP, except that a) they talk about wretched New York teams and b) the popularity of baseball vs. football is reversed...just my observation) was a chance for the embattled never-will-be-president-lucky-he-wasn't-indicted governor to sound off on something insipid like his beloved Mets and Matt Harvey's dead right arm. But then he had to spoil it by saying something stupid about the Orlando massacre.

The proper response to a sexually confused native New Yorker who exploited the weak gun laws of Florida and the United States to buy an assault rife and commit an anti-gay hate massacre in a night club, according to Christie, is to bomb a foreign country.

He hasn't decided which one yet.

"It's unacceptable to allow this kind of stuff in our country and for us not to fight back, and we need to fight back, and that's all these people understand," Christie told the radio show. When the hosts smartly pressed the New Jersey governor on exactly where that fight should take place, he responded: ""You gotta get over there and start making them pay where they live. It's an ugly and difficult thing but if we don't get over there, they're coming here, and they showed it again this weekend."

So, unless I'm misunderstanding Christie, he wants the U.S. military to drop bombs on Port St. Lucie, Florida, since that's where the American-born gunman has lived for the past few years. (A particularly odd choice since Christie's Mets train there every spring, but I digress...)

OK, to get a little more serious here, as CNN's Peter Bergen (not exactly a bleeding heart liberal) notes in this piece, the last three terror-style attacks on U.S. soil by gunman spouting warped Islamic theology were led by native-born U.S. citizens. Christie's plan is reminiscent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq that was baked into America's response to 9/11, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

But Christie still thinks the U.S. projects strength by sending flying death robots to kill goat farmers in some faraway land with a majority Muslim population. Unfortunately, that's already been a big part of what we've been doing since 2001. Indeed, we currently are fighting ISIS in both Iraq and Syria with a ton of bombs and some "military advisers" on the ground, with (wisely) little evidence of political will to go any further.

As Bergen and others have noted, Trump's only actual policy idea, to bar Muslims from migrating to or even entering the United States, would have had zero impact on the attacks by U.S. citizens at Fort Hood or San Bernardino or Orlando. The only other Republican "plan" I've heard this week is to repeatedly utter the magical phrase "radical Islam," which must cast some sort of Harry Potter-like spell if you wave the proper wand.

Look, it was clear even before Sunday morning that lone-wolf terrorists absorbing various kinds of hate speech -- and, yes, especially radical Islamist hate speech -- on the Internet and then exploiting America's lax weapons laws is a problem. The rising din on the Right that nothing is more important than giving that terror a Muslim face obscures that fact that they have few actual solutions, and that when pressed their only solutions are dumb, or vague, or unconstitutional, or counter-productive -- and usually two or three of those things at the same time.

The only actually useful ideas that I've heard are using that whole "well-regulated" part of the 2nd Amendment to a) prevent those on the terror watch list from buying guns and b) end the sale of the kind of assault rifles that don't do much for sportsmanlike deer hunting but are incredibly effective at killing lots of human beings.

You got a better idea? We'd all love to hear the plan.

* OK, I'm extrapolating on the Port St. Lucie part, but what else could he have meant?