How much do we really know about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the 39-year-old Army psychiatrist who went on a killing spree yesterday at Fort Hood, Texas?
Not much. He was born and raised in Virginia, was medically trained by the Army, became disillusioned with his career and employer when ridiculed by fellow soldiers about his religion -- Islam, and had psychologically counseled returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan and was resisting his own deployment into a war zone.
"He was doing everything he could to avoid that," his cousin told the press. "He wanted to do whatever he could within the rules to make sure he wouldn’t go over," which included retaining legal counsel to find a commission-releasing loophole, but the attorney couldn't. (The Army might want to rethink that reg, not for the benefit of future Maj. Hasans, but for their colleagues.)
Other than that, we know that an Army spokesman, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, doesn't know much, either. He informed the press that "terrorism was not being ruled out, but that preliminary evidence did not suggest that the rampage had been an act of terrorism."
So, we really don't know. It seems that the man simply snapped. But "seems" is about the best we can do for now -- unless, of course, we go to the source of all human wisdom: right-wing Web sites.
And not just the main sites themselves. No, no, no. To arms, to arms, to the Comments Sections! -- where rarely is a qualifier employed, where rarely there surfaces any expression of self-doubt, and where rarely is even the slightest hesitation encountered in "Telling it like it is," which, after years of reading the main right-wing sites and listening to Rush Limbaugh and watching Fox News, the commenters appear to have a very capable handle on.
Naturally, The (otherwise unspoken) Truth is bound to come across as a trifle demented -- it dares to go, you see, where the cravenly thoughtful do not -- which, just as naturally, is why I never visit Comments Sections; they are generally bathed in the warm, rabid saliva of unmoderated hostility and unsophisticated snarkiness. Except in cases like this -- then I visit, since learning The (Unknown) Truth behind such a prominent story is something I just can't resist.
So this morning I journeyed to the absolute El Dorado of online Comments Sections: Michelle Malkin's site. And after culling the real gems, I give you, The Truth:
From (12:14am):
If ever a case for internment as in WWII. Don’t know of anything during that time like this for that very reason. Profiling? Damn right, no other way to do it!! We’re talking about national security.
(12:23am):
We should not allow Muslims in our military.... Why are they allowed to enlist? Especially if they are practicing Islam, which vows to destroy all we stand for?
(12:29am):
One thing is for sure, he is a Muslim and had accomplices, so this is a terrorist attack against a U.S. Army base, and is absolute proof that President Obama has NOT kept America safe from terrorist attacks.
(12:51am):
We all know why he shot up American soldiers: Because he was a Muslim who joined to infiltrate our military and to kill American soldiers. Even though he was born here, he was a typical Muslim: not at all American and who sympathized only with his barbarian fellow Muslims abroad.
(1:41am):
On the 6:30pm CBS evening news, neither Katie Couric or any correspondents would say that the killer is Muslim. Instead, the whole CBS news team blamed the whole thing on the claim that under George W. Bush, the US military did not properly treat people for post traumatic stress disorder.... It won’t be long before Mo Dowd at the NY Times blames Dick Cheney and Haliburton for what happened.
(2:34am):
PC/Gun free zones get people killed. How much of this crap are we supposed to take? Enough is enough!
(2:53am):
We can thank the liberal pc elitists for a society that avoids the truth. His superiors would have addressed this malfunction earlier but, were afraid of the PC police.
And my favorite, being so short and sweet, and, from 3:08am, quite possibly intoxicated: The Mass Media news are leftist idiots!
There you have it. All the Truth that's unfit to print, but can always be found in cyberspace.
Next: Less an obsession with Muslims and their congenitally terrorist ways and more of a fresh concentration on President Obama's "pet goat moment" -- that comes to us from Linda Chavez, of "Commentary" -- which has already begun to make its tee-heeing way through the right-wing blogs' main-content sections.
Wrote, as just one more example, Clarice Feldman, of the rightest "American Thinker," about Obama's post-killing-spree televised address to the nation: "Study it and pass it on because the media is already cutting the tape to make the man look presidential instead of clueless and immature." Added, for reasons unknown, a colleague of Clarice's at the "Thinker": "Notice him looking down at the podium as he’s making the comments." Oookay.
This sort of matchless brilliance will take a day or two to trickle down and throughout the right-wing blogosphere -- and then the commenters will know The Truth (which of course they already suspected), and they shall reinforce it in numerous Comments Sections and then pass it along, via email, to friends, family, and coworkers.
And that's the way it works these days.
Buzz this on Buzzflash.net
Well, now, it’s not like
Well, now, it’s not like these attitudes are new; it’s more like that they are easier to notice. I remember when events in Canada might as well have happened in Michele Bachmann’s district on Pluto, and when a long distance call to the next state required shouting into the phone.
Right Wing Dementia
Contrary to what Republican talking heads are currently spewing, some immigrants are more equal than others in America. On 4/23/07, DemocracyNow reported that the immigrant Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung Hui had a sister who worked as a contractor for the Bush State Department's Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, which was a much higher level of security clearance than an immigrant can usually expect in our nation. The 'Visa Express' program of the Bush State Department, which began in Saudi Arabia in May of '01, allowed at least 5 of the 9/11 hijackers to enter the US despite security objections by lower level consular officials. Convicted spies Aldrich and Rosario Ames were immigrants who lived for years in a mansion in the same neighborhood as their bosses in the CIA, and the bosses never wondered how these lower-paid underlings could afford the payments. Immigration is not the issue.
Republicans are currently fighting to make sure immigrants are not included in the census (to reduce blue state representation in the government). U.S. congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (R-Pluto) tells the country to resist the census, because it is a conspiracy to re-enact internment camps (one census worker has already turned up dead in a rural Southern area, perhaps by coincidence). Simultaneously, the web-site of another high-profile Republican named Michelle uses this current shooting to tell us America needs internment camps.
The Republican response to an incident where one shooter was able to fire at least 43 rounds (assuming 100% accuracy in shooting) is to advocate that we arm a lot more people. That will solve this problem. The only conclusion that can be drawn from this mass shooting is that yet again, the Republicans don't have a leg to stand on, in their stated beliefs and goals. But this won't stop them from attempting to advance the policies that they have constructed, according to their 'world view'.
One more point: Mr. Hasan, as a major, was not subject to insult or attack by the vast majority of military personnel, because he outranks 90% of them in the chain of command. And while the media natters on about his felonious assault on his 'comrades' or 'colleagues', factually speaking they are his underlings.
Are We Devo?
On first reading this post, I was speechless. It's as if we as a society are reverting to mindless barbarism and there is nothing rational thinking people can do about it.
Then I came across The idiot monster and the news by Douglas McGill of the Twin Cities Daily Planet. The article was written before the Ft. Hood shootings, but it asks some deep questions while examining what is happening with the no-minds on the right and proposing what might be done about it. Just by offering a more analytical view of the issue that Carpenter presents, I felt like there just might be hope for the future. There just might be a way to deal with this vicious moronity.
I don't know how well this proposal could be applied, but it beats moaning about the morons of the right and having to fight the battle on their ground and on their terms. Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War would deem this strategy doomed to defeat. We need another way, and McGill offers one. He should be given a careful read and maybe be thoughtfully applied.