http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/11/13/medicalizing_mass_murder_99142.html
November 13, 2009
Explaining Away Mass Murder
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON — What a surprise — that someone who shouts “Allahu Akbar” (the “God is great” jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre downplaying Nidal Hasan’s religious beliefs.

“I cringe that he’s a Muslim. … I think he’s probably just a nut case,” said Newsweek’s Evan Thomas. Some were more adamant. Time’s Joe Klein decried “odious attempts by Jewish extremists … to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs.” While none could match Klein’s peculiar cherchez-le-juif motif, the popular story line was of an Army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Receive news alerts

Sign Up

Charles Krauthammer RealClearPolitics
media islamic radicalism

Joe Klein Evan Thomas
Fort Hood
[+] More
They suffered. He listened. He snapped.

Really? What about the doctors and nurses, the counselors and physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who every day hear and live with the pain and the suffering of returning soldiers? How many of them then picked up a gun and shot 51 innocents?

And what about civilian psychiatrists — not the Upper West Side therapist treating Woody Allen neurotics, but the thousands of doctors working with hospitalized psychotics — who every day hear not just tales but cries of the most excruciating anguish, of the most unimaginable torment? How many of those doctors commit mass murder?

It’s been decades since I practiced psychiatry. Perhaps I missed the epidemic.

But, of course, if the shooter is named Nidal Hasan, whom National Public Radio reported had been trying to proselytize doctors and patients, then something must be found. Presto! Secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, a handy invention to allow one to ignore the obvious.

And the perfect moral finesse. Medicalizing mass murder not only exonerates. It turns the murderer into a victim, indeed a sympathetic one. After all, secondary PTSD, for those who believe in it (you won’t find it in DSM-IV-TR, psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), is known as “compassion fatigue.” The poor man — pushed over the edge by an excess of sensitivity.

Have we totally lost our moral bearings? Nidal Hasan (allegedly) cold-bloodedly killed 13 innocent people. In such cases, political correctness is not just an abomination. It’s a danger, clear and present.

Consider the Army’s treatment of Hasan’s previous behavior. NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling interviewed a Hasan colleague at Walter Reed about a hair-raising Grand Rounds that Hasan had apparently given. Grand Rounds are the most serious academic event at a teaching hospital — attending physicians, residents and students gather for a lecture on an instructive case history or therapeutic finding.

I’ve been to dozens of these. In fact, I gave one myself on post-traumatic retrograde amnesia — as you can see, these lectures are fairly technical. Not Hasan’s. His was an hour-long disquisition on what he called the Koranic view of military service, jihad and war. It included an allegedly authoritative elaboration of the punishments visited upon nonbelievers — consignment to hell, decapitation, having hot oil poured down your throat. This “really freaked a lot of doctors out,” reported NPR.

Nor was this the only incident. “The psychiatrist,” reported Zwerdling, “said that he was the kind of guy who the staff actually stood around in the hallway saying: Do you think he’s a terrorist, or is he just weird?”

Was anything done about this potential danger? Of course not. Who wants to be accused of Islamophobia and prejudice against a colleague’s religion?

One must not speak of such things. Not even now. Not even after we know that Hasan was in communication with a notorious Yemen-based jihad propagandist. As late as Tuesday, The New York Times was running a story on how returning soldiers at Fort Hood had a high level of violence.

What does such violence have to do with Hasan? He was not a returning soldier. And the soldiers who returned home and shot their wives or fellow soldiers didn’t cry “Allahu Akbar” as they squeezed the trigger.

The delicacy about the religion in question — condescending, politically correct and deadly — is nothing new. A week after the first (1993) World Trade Center attack, the same New York Times ran the following front-page headline about the arrest of one Mohammed Salameh: “Jersey City Man Is Charged in Bombing of Trade Center.”

Ah yes, those Jersey men — so resentful of New York, so prone to violence.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/11/13/medicalizing_mass_murder_99142.html at November 13, 2009 – 06:55:14 PM PST

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/tea_parties_misunderstood_and.html

Return to the Article

November 12, 2009
Tea Parties: Misunderstood and Vastly Underrated
By Kyle-Anne Shiver

Elected officials of every political stripe ought to be shaking down to their Gucci loafers and pumps. History is forming and firming up harder than the proverbial brick wall right outside their congressional glass house. Yet they seem utterly oblivious.

Since last April, I’ve written a few columns on the Tea Parties, but I had never actually attended one in person. I harbored a few misconceptions, formed at a distance through the media’s drive-by lens. Being a woman who tends to cower in crowds and who loves the security and solitude of my little office-cloister, I had been content to write based on the observations of others. But an Alabama homemaker-turned-activist, Suzanne Green of Birmingham, pulled me into the bosom of the Tea Party movement along with the Rainy Day Patriots.

And, honey, I’m here to tell you, it’s a fiery hot bosom indeed.

Monday, I went to Birmingham and Atlanta and saw for myself. I asked and asked and asked questions of people of all ages, both black and white, male and female, former Republicans and former Democrats, seemingly of very diverse socioeconomic situations, and I even rode the Tea Party Express Bus to interview the insiders.

So what’s a Tea Party?

In a nutshell, the Tea Parties are a visible expression of the widespread rekindling of the love of liberty. This rekindling of freedom’s fires seems to be occurring among diverse individuals independently, and then they seek out fired-up others with whom to connect. Among Tea Party participants, there is a demonstrated willingness to actually do something tangible in order to claim those unalienable rights of which our Founders wrote, and for which so many have given their lives in battle.

This may be the movement Americans truly have been waiting for. It’s the real deal, the genuine article. It comes from the groundswell of the people, not from the power-broker elites in political, corporate, or religious America. It’s middle-class, thoroughly unpretentious, with a good sense of humor and a keen disdain for things like faux Greek columns, tacky props, and professionally written hyperbole. At a Tea Party, you won’t find puffed-up hubris or even a tad of the liberally popular it’s-all-about-me syndrome.

The Tea Party messages are clear and strident.

Party operatives? Not welcome. Political candidates? Keep your mouths shut and your ears open. Prefer a D or an R after your name? Not here, not on our time, or on our dime.

The clear message: This is the people’s movement. Outsiders, opportunists, and party pols are vehemently not invited. Want a voice in this groundswell, bottom-up oriented movement? Fine. All comers welcome to pitch in, get involved, stand up to tyranny, and do your own thing. Just don’t try to hijack the people’s movement for personal gain. Like our grandparents’ generation, these folks can spot disingenuousness a mile away. They don’t suffer fools or counterfeit passions.

I talked to over fifty Tea Partiers in Birmingham and Atlanta on Monday, and I can honestly say I’ve never seen such a variety of people from different walks of life, different types of livelihood, and different ways of speaking all in the same place, united in one cause: Throw the bums out.

Out of all the people I spoke with — every single one — I did not find a solitary person willing to identify with a political party. “Independent” was the only identifier with which people would agree to be labeled. Some said, “I used to be a Democrat,” or “I used to be a Republican,” but they invariably put a sharp edge on the words “used to be.” The sense of betrayal by politicians is palpable among Tea Partiers.

If there is a shared ideology among them, it is the one espoused by our Founders, simply put: God and Liberty. “Unalienable rights” was a phrase I heard over and over again.

The only political figures for whom there was a visible shred of professed admiration were Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Joe Lieberman. Sarah Palin was roundly regarded as a Ronald-Reagan-style “rogue.” Michele Bachmann was getting lots of kudos for two reasons: her stand against government overreach and her willingness to be public and visceral in her denouncements. Joe Lieberman is becoming the new hero to the Tea Partiers for his willingness to stand alone with the voice of freedom on the health care power-grab.

When I reminded one woman that President Reagan was a Republican, she declared, “No, he wasn’t. He was an American, and the only reason he had to put that R beside his name on the ballot was that they were the least off-the-rails party. But G. W. Bush ruined that for Republicans.”

When I asked her how he had done that, she didn’t hesitate. “He spent like he was using Daddy’s credit card and made the already-too-big federal government bigger.”

The uncompromising message in the Tea Party movement to politicians of all stripes is clear: You work for us, and you have betrayed our trust. The anger wasn’t only about the amount of money spent for unpopular causes, but also against the waste and fraud being perpetrated with hard-earned taxpayer money. Several angered taxpayers stressed the need for term limits to keep opportunistic pols from using public office to enrich themselves.

When I asked Tea Partiers about expenses for the events, I was hit with one resounding answer: “We pay for everything ourselves.” A point made over and over again by various responders was, “There’s no ACORN here. We don’t soak the taxpayers for our protests.” There seemed to be quite a lot of resentment over any groups of protesters using tax dollars to support their personal causes.

I decided to broach the social issues that have dominated so much of the national discourse over the past twenty years: abortion and gay marriage. I found only one opinion among all those I polled: they’re state and local issues. The federal government has no business telling all Americans what social standards they can have in their state laws and their schools and their hospitals. “Butt out!” was the ubiquitous answer on social issues from Tea Partiers.

That, of course, brought me to ask about the Supreme Court and its role in deciding such matters for all Americans. One man, a doctor from Huntsville, answered matter-of-factly, “The Supreme Court has become a tyrant, using ideas not in the Constitution and turning them into a weapon of tyranny against the people.”

One table under a canopy was reserved for petition-signing. There were only two. One was a state sovereignty petition and the other was a gun rights petition. A return to the Constitution, as written, seemed to be the overriding demand of the Tea Partiers.

When I asked whether this was a person’s only involvement, nearly all responders said “no” and “not by a long shot.” Women readily proclaimed their citizens’ committees, their petitions, their phone calls, e-mails, and hand-written letters. Many said they were either precinct captains or otherwise involved in locally forming conservative parties. Others said they had signed up to work for Republicans, but only if they remained true to constitutional, limited government.

If anyone asked me to adequately describe the Tea Party movement, I would have to reach back into my American civics book to find its root.

Simply put, the Tea Party movement is 1776 brought back to life.

Liberty Boys abound, now both black and white, and led in many instances by Liberty Gals. Paul Reveres use hand-held microphones instead of lanterns. Hand-lettered signs replace tar and feathers. Minutemen use the vote in lieu of muskets. The Declaration of Independence is revitalized as a document of proclaimed anti-dependence on government to solve personal problems. The Constitution is celebrated, revered, and yes, thought to be the primary weapon against tyranny. God rests firmly in place as America’s only King.

Honey, if you love America and truly desire liberty, then these are the ones you’ve been waiting for!

It’s a movement, all right. A true red-white-and-blue citizens’ movement.

And it is not likely to fizzle the day after elections are held because these folks are entirely self-motivated. None were persuaded by political operatives or stipends. Nor were they given professionally manufactured signs and led by hand to show up at the rally.

Among the all-American individual ingenuity in the signage department, these were my personal favorites:
Congress get your resumes ready; send them to Chavez & Castro!

Can you imagine what a Fannie & Freddie Medicine would look like?

Vote Democrat; It’s easier than working.

It’s the Constitution, STUPID.

Drill damn it! Drill already!

Declaration of Independence, not the Declaration Dependence on Government

Give us liberty, not DEBT!!
And, my own contribution:
Don’t you dare tread on me, honey!!
The spirit of 1776 reigns at Tea Parties. It’s awfully hard to argue that there’s anything whatsoever un-American about this movement. And while President Obama mocks these crowds of independent American voters as “extremists” and the “tea bag, anti-government” people, he more and more resembles a petulant European monarch who is clueless about the strength of the people’s resolve.

When these staunchly independent men and women say, “Don’t tread on me!” they seem to mean they’re simply not going to stand for much more government tomfoolery and usurpations of power.

Office-holders beware! They’re onto you, and they don’t like what they see!

Americans are on the march. Like it or not, they’re a force to be reckoned with. And they’re here to stay.

If they succeed, then perhaps the slogan, “Free at last! Free at last!” will actually mean what it says. Free to succeed, free to fail, free to fall flat on our faces upon our own efforts, without the nanny government capriciously dictating outcomes. Freedom, say the Tea Partiers, means freedom — period. And to a man and woman, they seem ready to reclaim it, no matter the personal cost.

Now, does America have any leaders capable and humble enough to be led by the people? Answer I got from the Tea Partiers: God will provide.

Kyle-Anne Shiver is an independent journalist and a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She blogs at kyleanneshiver.com.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/tea_parties_misunderstood_and.html at November 13, 2009 – 08:55:29 PM EST

From: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/11/11/sometimes_an_extremist_really_is_an_extremist_99091.html

November 11, 2009

Sometimes, an Extremist Really is an Extremist

By Jonah Goldberg

Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan demonstrated many things when he allegedly committed treason in the war on terror.

For starters, he showed — gratuitously alas — that evil is still thriving. He demonstrated that being a trained psychiatrist provides no immunity to ancient hatreds and religious fanaticism, nor does psychiatric training provide much acuity in spotting such things in others.

For example, the London Telegraph reports that, in what was supposed to be a medical lecture, Hassan instead gave an hourlong briefing on the Koran, explaining to colleagues at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that nonbelievers should be beheaded, have boiling oil poured down their throats and set on fire.

His fellow psychiatrists completely missed this “red flag” — a suddenly popular euphemism for incandescently obvious evidence this man had no place in the U.S. Army.

He proved how lacking our domestic security system is.

According to ABC News, intelligence agencies were aware for months that Hasan had tried to contact Al Qaeda.

His colleagues reportedly knew he sympathized with suicide bombings and attacks on U.S. troops abroad, and one colleague said Hasan was pleased by an attack on an Army recruiting office and suggested more of the same might be desirable.

That’s treason, even if you’re a Muslim. Which raises the most troubling revelation: For a very large number of people, the idea that he is a Muslim fanatic, motivated by other Muslim fanatics, was — at least initially — too terrible to contemplate.

How else to explain the reflexive insistence after the attack that the real culprit was “post-traumatic stress disorder”? The fact that PTSD is usually diagnosed in people who’ve been through trauma (hence the word “post”), and that Hasan had never in fact seen combat, didn’t seem to matter much.

Apparently the “P” in PTSD can now stand for “pre.” A few months ago, an anti-Semitic old nut named James von Brunn allegedly took a gun to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to get payback against “the Jews” and killed a black security guard in the process.

In response to this horrific crime, the leading lights of American liberalism knew who was to blame: Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the GOP. One writer for the Huffington Post put it succinctly: “Thank you very much Karl Rove and your minions.”

The fact that Von Brunn was a 9/11 “truther” who railed against capitalism, neocons and the Bush administration didn’t matter. Nor did the glaring lack of evidence that Rove et al ever showed antipathy for the museum. It was simply obvious that Von Brunn was the offspring of the “right-wing extremism [that] is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment,” wrote columnist Paul Krugman.

If only Hasan was a fan of Glenn Beck! President Obama was right when he said, in the early hours after the shooting, that people shouldn’t “jump to conclusions” (a lesson he might have learned when he jumped to the wrong conclusion about a white cop who arrested Henry Louis Gates, a black Harvard professor). But just as we should not jump to conclusions, we shouldn’t jump away from them.

Despite reports that Hasan had shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he opened fire, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews insisted that “we may never know if religion was a factor at Ft. Hood.” Thursday night, NBC and CBS refrained from even reporting the man’s name.

Meanwhile, ABC’s Martha Raddatz’s reporting on the subject reflected a yearning for denial: “As for the suspect, Nadal Hasan, as one officer’s wife told me, ‘I wish his name was Smith.’ “

We have a real problem when much of the political and journalistic establishment is eager to jump to the conclusion that peaceful political opponents are in league with violent extremists, but is terrified to consider the possibility that violent extremists really are violent extremists if doing so means calling attention to the fact that they are Muslims.

I am more sympathetic toward this reluctance to state the truth of the matter than some of my colleagues on the right. There is a powerful case to be made that Islamic extremism is not some fringe phenomena but part of the mainstream of Islamic life around the world. And yet, to work from that assumption might make the assumption all the more self-fulfilling. If we act as if “Islam is the problem,” as some say, we will guarantee that Islam will become the problem. But outright denial, like we are seeing today, is surely not the beginning of wisdom either.

I have no remedy for the challenge we face. But I do take some solace in George Orwell’s observation that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Copyright 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc. Page

Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/11/11/sometimes_an_extremist_really_is_an_extremist_99091.html at November 11, 2009 – 05:08:57 PM CST

NOVEMBER 10, 2009

His terrorist motive is obvious to everyone but the press and the Army brass.

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

It can by now come as no surprise that the Fort Hood massacre yielded an instant flow of exculpatory media meditations on the stresses that must have weighed on the killer who mowed down 13 Americans and wounded 29 others. Still, the intense drive to wrap this clear case in a fog of mystery is eminently worthy of notice.

The tide of pronouncements and ruminations pointing to every cause for this event other than the one obvious to everyone in the rational world continues apace. Commentators, reporters, psychologists and, indeed, army spokesmen continue to warn portentously, “We don’t yet know the motive for the shootings.”

What a puzzle this piece of vacuity must be to audiences hearing it, some, no doubt, with outrage. To those not terrorized by fear of offending Muslim sensitivities, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s motive was instantly clear: It was an act of terrorism by a man with a record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments. All were conspicuous signs of danger his Army superiors chose to ignore.

What is hard to ignore, now, is the growing derangement on all matters involving terrorism and Muslim sensitivities. Its chief symptoms: a palpitating fear of discomfiting facts and a willingness to discard those facts and embrace the richest possible variety of ludicrous theories as to the motives behind an act of Islamic terrorism. All this we have seen before but never in such naked form. The days following the Fort Hood rampage have told us more than we want to know, perhaps, about the depth and reach of this epidemic.

One of the first outbreaks of these fevers, the night of the shootings, featured television’s star psychologist, Dr. Phil, who was outraged when fellow panelist and former JAG officer Tom Kenniff observed that he had been listening to a lot of psychobabble and evasions about Maj. Hasan’s motives.

A shocked Dr. Phil, appalled that the guest had publicly mentioned Maj. Hasan’s Islamic identity, went on to present what was, in essence, the case for Maj. Hasan as victim. Victim of deployment, of the Army, of the stresses of a new kind of terrible war unlike any other we have known. Unlike, can he have meant, the kind endured by those lucky Americans who fought and died at Iwo Jima, say, or the Ardennes?

It was the same case to be presented, in varying forms, by guest psychologists, the media, and a representative or two from the military, for days on end.

The quality and thrust of this argument was best captured by the impassioned Dr. Phil, who asked us to consider, “how far out of touch with reality do you have to be to kill your fellow Americans . . . this is not a well act.” And how far out of touch with reality is such a question, one asks in return—not only of Dr. Phil, but of the legions of commentators like him immersed in the labyrinths of motive hunting even as the details of Maj. Hasan’s proclivities became ever clearer and more ominous.

To kill your fellow Americans—as many as possible, unarmed and in the most helpless of circumstances, while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), requires, of course, only murderous hatred—the sort of mindset that regularly eludes the Dr. Phils of our world as the motive for mass murder of this kind.

As the meditations on Maj. Hasan’s motives rolled on, “fear of deployment” has served as a major theme—one announced as fact in the headline for the New York Times’s front-page story: “Told of War Horror, Gunman Feared Deployment.” The authority for this intelligence? The perpetrator’s cousin. No story could have better suited that newspaper’s ongoing preoccupation with the theme of madness in our fighting men, and the deadly horrors of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, than this story of a victim of war pressures gone berserk. The one fly in the ointment—Maj. Hasan had of course seen no war, and no combat.

Still, with a bit of stretching, adherents of Maj. Hasan-as-war-victim theme found a substitute of sorts—namely the fears allegedly provoked in him by his exposure, as an army psychiatrist, to the stories of men who had been deployed. The thesis then: Maj. Hasan’s mental stress, provoked by the suffering of Americans who had been in combat, caused him to go out and butcher as many of these soldiers as he could. Let’s try putting that one before a jury.

By Sunday morning, Gen. George Casey Jr., Army chief of staff, confronted questions put to him by ABC’s George Stephanopolous—among them the matter of the complaints about Maj. Hasan’s anti-American tirades that were made by fellow students in military classes, as well as other danger signs ignored by officials when they were reported, apparently for fear of offense to a Muslim member of the military.

These were speculations, Gen. Casey repeatedly cautioned. We need to be very careful, he explained, “We are a very diverse army.” Mr. Stephanopolous then helpfully summarized matters: This case then was either a case of premeditated terror—or the man just snapped.

The general was not about to address such questions. He was there to recite the required pieties, and describe the military priorities . . . which are, it appears, a concern above all for the sensitivities of a diverse army, a concern so great as to render even the mention of salient facts out of order, as “speculation.’” “This terrible event,” Gen. Casey noted, “would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty.”

To hear this, and numerous other such pronouncements of recent days, was to be reminded of all those witnesses to the suspicious behavior of the 9/11 hijackers who held their tongues for fear of being charged with discrimination. It has taken Maj. Hasan, and the fantastic efforts to explain away his act of bloody hatred, to bring home how much less capable we are of recognizing the dangers confronting us than we were even before September 11.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

November 09, 2009

Fatal Correctness

By Bob Weir

The brutal massacre of thirteen unarmed soldiers and the wounding of dozens more at Fort Hood, Texas is another terrorist act on American soil that could have been prevented if not for an insidious cloud of political correctness that has taken this country hostage.

The victims of this horrific tragedy died at the hands of an enemy masquerading as a friend. Those soldiers had every reason to believe they were safe on an army base, surrounded by their patriotic brothers and sisters. They volunteered to serve their country, knowing full well that they might lose their lives on a battlefield in a foreign land. Could any of them have imagined that the end would come at the hands of a Muslim extremist wearing the uniform of an Army Major?

Evidently, it wasn’t enough of a red flag to read this lunatic’s anti-American bitterness, which he proudly posted on the Internet with no fear or compunction about using his own name.  This is a guy who regularly wore the fundamentalism uniform of the enemy he was supposedly training our troops to defeat. This is a guy who wrote in laudatory terms about suicide bombers as he condemned US policies in the Middle East. This is a guy who reportedly told his military classmates that he was a Muslim first and an American second. Hello? Is there anyone out there with common sense? If this is national security, we are in more trouble than we realize. How many more savage time bombs do we have walking and stalking among us?

The blood of this massacre had hardly stopped flowing before members of the media were cautioning us not to view all Muslims as terrorists. That should go without saying, but what should not go without saying is that we’d better get serious about the obvious danger of excusing Muslims who make it clear that they hate this country. Discriminating against people because of their race or religion is a description of bigotry, but keeping a close eye on people who give every indication that they’re dangerous is more than sensible — it’s a vital cog in the survival instinct.

In Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid, the great city of Troy was invulnerable until the Greeks devised a strategy in which a huge figure of a horse was left outside Troy’s gates. Naïvely thinking it was a trophy delivered by their vanquished foes, the citizens of Troy (Trojans) pulled the towering figure into their city. They didn’t know it was hollow and contained dozens of enemies who waited until the city slept before creeping out and opening the gates for the Greek army.

Like many great societies before and since, Troy was defeated from within. Greek mythology? Yes, but a lesson to be learned. Have we become naïve enough to believe that people who seem bent on destroying us should be protected, that we should allow them the freedom to carry out their nefarious plots? I don’t care if the guy’s name is Hasan or Henderson; if he evinces hostility toward our country or a propensity to harm us, he should be treated like the enemy he purports to be.

We must rid ourselves of the foolish notion that we’re being broadminded when we ignore vitriolic loathing of our culture and our lifestyle. Refusing to take action against evil for fear of being guilty of stereotyping has resulted in flag-draped coffins for thirteen of America’s finest. What occurred at Fort Hood is even more stunning because it exposes a weak-willed mentality that has become woven into the fabric of the mightiest military force in the history of the world.

When we think of political correctness, we usually view it as confined to the Hollywood crowd and other assorted leftists. The fact that it has invaded the ranks of those who defend our freedom, here and around the world, is more than a bit alarming. We must not let the death of those soldiers count for nothing! If this unspeakable horror invokes a new paradigm in our approach to the enemies within, those who lost their lives will rest in peace, knowing that their sacrifice has taught us a lesson that will save countless other lives in the future. On the other hand, if we don’t view this as a wake-up call and take appropriate action, the date of our destruction can’t be far off.

Bob Weir is a former detective sergeant in the New York City Police Department. He is the executive editor of The News Connection in Highland Village, Texas.  E-mail Bob.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/fatal_correctness.html at November 10, 2009 – 06:26:26 PM EST

A price tag of $1.3 trillion… and counting

$730 billion in new taxes

$500 billion in cuts to Medicare

118 new office, bureaus, commissions, and programs

5.5 million lost jobs

Coverage for 2.5 million more illegal immigrants

43 entitlement programs created, expanded, or extended

If this shocks you then you are naive about Progressivism.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/thde_great_mystery.html

Return to the Article

November 05, 2009

The Great Mystery

By Steve McCann

One of the great mysteries in today’s United States is how a country founded on the principle of individual freedom, having achieved great wealth and world influence, could have developed a political class bent on transforming the nation into a collective dominated by a powerful central government.

The history of man is replete with the rise and fall of major civilizations. The downfall of these societies inevitably stemmed from a prolonged period without adversity, which in turn generated internal strife and political and monetary greed. In due course, these empires were easily conquered or dominated by others.

John Adams wrote in a letter to his wife of his need to study politics and war so his sons could study mathematics and philosophy and his grandchildren could study poetry and music. Surely this grand new experiment known as the United States, based on the rights of the individual and not the state, could avoid the pitfalls that plagued other nations.

The peace, prosperity, and lack of national adversity Adams envisioned came to pass, and future generations were able to study subjects other than war. Unfortunately, destructive modern political philosophies, such as Marxism and socialism, manipulated by the self-absorbed to achieve political power, were matters John Adams and his fellow founding fathers could not have anticipated.

The inherent basis of Marxism and socialism is no different from that of earlier monarchies — the domination of a state by a select class or individual. Today’s believers in these “-isms” are no different from those in the past who believed they were preordained to rule the masses. Modern society will not accept the concept of an authoritarian dictator or monarch; thus, a powerful central government, with its trappings of public legitimacy, serves as a substitute.

In order for this strategy to succeed, the public must be manipulated into accepting the premise that only government and not they can provide economic and personal security.

This can best be done in a country such as the United States not in an era of adversity, but one of prosperity and good fortune.

The last period of what could be called true national adversity was the 1930s and the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow travelers were unable to fully realize an all-powerful central government despite their best efforts. While he certainly made inroads, the people and circumstances were such that FDR could not achieve his ultimate goal.

However, in the nearly seventy years since, during which the United States became the most powerful economic and military force the world has ever seen, there has been an inexorable march to government domination of the citizenry at all levels. Parallel to this track has been the rise of the socialist Left, the most influential group of all political entities.

The lack of national adversity over these years allowed the adherents of Marxism and socialist philosophies to recruit among the college-aged and the middle class by citing the so-called inequities of American society and the need to remake the country. They fanned the egos of these gullible individuals by convincing them of their individual superiority and ability, not to mention the necessity that they govern and educate the huddled masses.

One need only watch many in the committed American Left make pilgrimages to those second- and third-world countries controlled by Marxist governments and fawn over their

rulers. The diminished standard of living, the loss of liberty, and the bleak future for the people of these nations are ignored while the power achieved by the head of state is

celebrated.

It is that acquisition of power which motivates the self-named “Progressives,” not the welfare of the general public, as they so loudly proclaim.

A strategy was needed on how a faction that represented less than 20% of the citizenry could elicit this endgame with a people overwhelmingly against the concept of powerful central government and within the framework of a written constitution.

Using the backdrop of overwhelming prosperity, the Left seized upon the concept of “fairness” to promote their agenda and intimidate the populace. This “fairness” strategy was further reinforced by the incessant promotion that the United States as a civilization was responsible for all manner of evils throughout its history.

On the surface, it appeared that there was nothing this country did not have the money for, nothing it could not accomplish. To make up for past sins by guaranteeing equal outcomes was the least that could be done. The argument became that with so much wealth, the United States could afford to (fill in the blank).

As a result, much of the citizenry quietly accepted the argument and simply dropped out of active participation in government. They assumed the nation was in reasonably good hands with the two political parties, whose motives or agenda were never questioned. Most did not realize that by the mid 1980’s, the Left had a stranglehold on the Democratic Party, and the Republicans, unable or unwilling to fully warn the population of the future consequences of an all-powerful central government, were only able to slow down the march to socialism — and that only when they were in power. 

This march was not at gunpoint, but rather by the destruction of the economy and self-determination through massive spending programs which were unsustainable but became woven into the fabric of society.

In the 2008 election, the Left, with its ideal stealth candidate for President, actualized the culmination of their grand strategy. We now have the most radical government in our history. These people are unabashedly brazen in their triumph. While still assuming that the general public is asleep, they do not hesitate to openly advocate policies not wanted by the electorate, such as Cap and Trade and Health Care Reform. They do so not as a benefit for the country or its people, but to enhance and make permanent government power, regardless of the long-term consequences to the nation.

It is, however, this same megalomania, and the long-awaited awakening of the American people, that will be the downfall of this political class. The seizure of power for the sake of power is doomed to failure.

It is often claimed that the Left in the United States is simply trying to copy European socialism. However, the grand experiment of Euro-socialism, while now proven unsuccessful, stemmed from the unimaginable devastation of World War II. Victor and vanquished alike suffered a near-total loss of economic and social infrastructure which took nearly twenty years to overcome.

The motivation of the European political class was to promote the general welfare of the population, not self-aggrandizement. The failure of their brand of socialism was due to a determination to never repeat the circumstances which brought about two World Wars in the twentieth century. However, the political class and the populace did not fully appreciate the long-term economic consequences of the many social programs enacted. Many European societies, having realized their error, are moving back from the abyss and adopting more free-market principles.

Here in the United States, there has never been a similar devastating factor to justify a turn to a socialist state and a powerful central government. What is happening now is driven purely by arrogance and manipulation. It has the potential to end in national economic and social disaster, similar to so many empires of the past.

The American people are starting to understand the true motivations of those now in power. As shown in the 2009 elections in Virginia and New Jersey, the people can, by their participation in the electoral process, halt or stall the progress made by the Progressives to realize their socialist dream.

The country can return to the path of economic and social prosperity and relegate the Left to the background of the nation’s politics, where they belong, once and for all. The key is time, and time is something we have little of. The 2010 elections will be the most important midterm election in our history.

While John Adams and his fellow founders could not have anticipated what has happened to the country they established, they did give it a framework — a constitution — which can enable us to avoid the same egocentrism that led to the downfall of other major civilizations.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/thde_great_mystery.html at November 08, 2009 – 08:38:02 PM EST

http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/fort_hood_xjP9yGrJN7gl7zdsJ31vnJ

Updated: Fri., Nov. 6, 2009, 2:50 PM

Fort Hood’s 9/11

By RALPH PETERS

On Thursday afternoon, a radicalized Muslim US Army officer shouting “Allahu Akbar!” committed the worst act of terror on American soil since 9/11. And no one wants to call it an act of terror or associate it with Islam.

What cowards we are. Political correctness killed those patriotic Americans at Ft. Hood as surely as the Islamist gunman did. And the media treat it like a case of non-denominational shoplifting.

This was a terrorist act. When an extremist plans and executes a murderous plot against our unarmed soldiers to protest our efforts to counter Islamist fanatics, it’s an act of terror. Period.

When the terrorist posts anti-American hate-speech on the Web; apparently praises suicide bombers and uses his own name; loudly criticizes US policies; argues (as a psychiatrist, no less) with his military patients over the worth of their sacrifices; refuses, in the name of Islam, to be photographed with female colleagues; lists his nationality as “Palestinian” in a Muslim spouse-matching program, and parades around central Texas in a fundamentalist playsuit — well, it only seems fair to call this terrorist an “Islamist terrorist.”

But the president won’t. Despite his promise to get to all the facts. Because there’s no such thing as “Islamist terrorism” in ObamaWorld.

And the Army won’t. Because its senior leaders are so sick with political correctness that pandering to America-haters is safer than calling terrorism “terrorism.”

And the media won’t. Because they have more interest in the shooter than in our troops — despite their crocodile tears.

Maj. Nadal Malik Hasan planned this terrorist attack and executed it in cold blood. The resulting massacre was the first tragedy. The second was that he wasn’t killed on the spot.

Hasan survived. Now the rest of us will have to foot his massive medical bills. Activist lawyers will get involved, claiming “harassment” drove him temporarily insane. There’ll be no end of trial delays. At best, taxpayer dollars will fund his prison lifestyle for decades to come, since our politically correct Army leadership wouldn’t dare pursue or carry out the death penalty.

Maj. Hasan will be a hero to Islamist terrorists abroad and their sympathizers here. While US Muslim organizations decry his acts publicly, Hasan will be praised privately. And he’ll have the last laugh.

But Hasan isn’t the sole guilty party. The US Army’s unforgivable political correctness is also to blame for the casualties at Ft. Hood.

Given the myriad warning signs, it’s appalling that no action was taken against a man apparently known to praise suicide bombers and openly damn US policy. But no officer in his chain of command, either at Walter Reed Army Medical Center or at Ft. Hood, had the guts to take meaningful action against a dysfunctional soldier and an incompetent doctor.

Had Hasan been a Lutheran or a Methodist, he would’ve been gone with the simoon. But officers fear charges of discrimination when faced with misconduct among protected minorities.

Now 12 soldiers and a security guard lie dead. 31 soldiers were wounded, 28 of them seriously. If heads don’t roll in this maggot’s chain of command, the Army will have shamed itself beyond moral redemption.

There’s another important issue, too. How could the Army allow an obviously incompetent and dysfunctional psychiatrist to treat our troubled soldiers returning from war? An Islamist whacko is counseled for arguing with veterans who’ve been assigned to his care? And he’s not removed from duty? What planet does the Army live on?

For the first time since I joined the Army in 1976, I’m ashamed of its dereliction of duty. The chain of command protected a budding terrorist who was waving one red flag after another. Because it was safer for careers than doing something about him.

Get ready for the apologias. We’ve already heard from the terrorist’s family that “he’s a good American.” In their world, maybe he is.

But when do we, the American public, knock off the PC nonsense?

A disgruntled Muslim soldier murdered his officers way back in 2003, in Kuwait, on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Recently? An American mullah shoots it out with the feds in Detroit. A Muslim fanatic attacks an Arkansas recruiting station. A Muslim media owner, after playing the peace card, beheads his wife. A Muslim father runs over his daughter because she’s becoming too Westernized.

Muslim terrorist wannabes are busted again and again. And we’re assured that “Islam’s a religion of peace.”

I guarantee you that the Obama administration’s non-response to the Ft. Hood attack will mock the memory of our dead.

Ralph Peters’ latest novel is “The War After Armageddon.”

NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc.

nypost.com , nypostonline.com , and newyorkpost.com are trademarks of NYP Holdings, Inc.

Copyright 2009 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved. Privacy | Terms of Use

November 05, 2009

By James Lewis

Dick Morris thinks Mob-O-Care is dead after the Democrat electoral fiascos in the last week. I sincerely hope that Morris is right, but I’m not so sure.

The trouble is that Obama and the Democrats have no other game plan — their other ideas, like the suicidal Carbon Tax, are even more likely to get them tossed out of office. Obama’s power has peaked — and judging by the Clinton backlash of 1994, when the GOP won the  House for the first time in forty years, it’s downhill from here on out. Nothing in politics is certain, and Obama will certainly try to recover power, as Bill Clinton did in the ’90s. But Obama and his dead-enders have to reckon with the likelihood that they will never have more power than right now.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/will_the_left_try_a_kamikaze_r.html at November 05, 2009 – 05:35:40 PM EST