If the crew hadn't landed in China, I am willing to bet we STILL wouldn't know about this incident. It would have been too embarrassing for the Chinese.

I pointed out on February 17, 2001, in THE BRASS IS WIMPING OUT ON AMERICAN SERVICEMEN, that Soviet ships regularly swerved against American ships all through the Cold War, and the American ships were ordered to back off.

I have no information on air incidents, just as we had no information that air incidents of this kind that have been taking place near China for the past year.

The Chinese were well aware that American conservatives would never publicly object to their aggressiveness because business loves cheap Chinese labor. And liberals are loath to criticize a Loving Democratic People's Republic.

So the Chinese pilot did what had become routine: he was being a bully. His Mach 2 jet flew too close to an American surveillance (not spy) plane with a 460-mph maximum speed. That 460-mph is less than a third of Mach 2.

But this time he got caught at it. The Chinese pilot hot-dogged a plane that couldn't hit back and he got himself killed.

That is about as childish a death as one can imagine.

What's more, the bully got what he deserved and all the Americans survived. How much face can one lose at one time?

When the Iranians seized the American embassy and took Americans hostage in 1979, the media called those people "hostages" almost from the word go. But they kept calling the Iranians who took and held them "students." It wasn't that Iran approved this, you see, it was just a bunch of unruly students who had stormed the Embassy.

It took the press a long time to finally stop calling those Iranians "students."

In the 1979 case, the problem was that the media did not know which side to be on. In Vietnam, only a few years earlier, they had been solidly on the side of those killing Americans. Until the American people made it clear they wouldn't stand for that this time, the media did a lot of pussyfooting. All that is forgotten today.

In 1979, when the Iranian hostages were taken, Teddy Kennedy had already announced that he was challenging sitting Democratic president Jimmy Carter for the nomination in 1980.

What you hear today is that the Iranian hostage crisis beat Teddy, which is true. But they also say that was because of the way Carter handled the hostage crisis early on, which is not true.

Teddy Kennedy reacted to the taking of our hostages in Teheran in the old Vietnam manner. He loudly attacked the United States and blamed the whole situation on us. In other words, he was a standard liberal. It didn't take long for that to destroy his bid for the presidential nomination.

You won't hear about that anywhere but here.