Almost before the echo of gunfire from the massacre at Ft. Hood had faded, the news media launched a pre-emptive rationalization for the slaughter committed by Muslim traitor Nidal Malik Hasan. To divert attention from the shooter’s inconvenient name (“I cringe that he’s Muslim,” said Newsweek’s Evan Thomas), the talking heads began speculating sympathetically about the fragile mental state of poor frazzled Hasan, who had never seen combat but nonetheless must have “snapped.” After all, surely there could be no rational, ideological motive for the mass murder, which President Obama labeled “incomprehensible.”  And “it’s certainly not about his religion, Islam,” denied Senator Lindsey Graham. Indeed, from listening to such “experts” as irrelevant diet book author Dr. Phil (“this is not a well act”), you’d think that Hasan was the victim, not the fourteen dead* and the nearly thirty seriously wounded that he left in his heartless wake. Even as a mountain of accumulating evidence irrefutably exposed Hasan’s act as premeditated violent jihad against the U.S. military, stubborn left-leaning commentators clung to their theory of mental derangement.

George Clooney in 2005’s  Syriana

Meanwhile the national discussion has segued to our own collective insanity, political correctness, which we are now discovering paved the very way for the massacre. It is this cultural and mental straightjacket that forced a U.S. Army general to say diversity is more important than losing American lives; that compelled our Homeland Security Secretary to reassure the Arab world that we’re doing everything we can to protect against a mythical Muslim backlash; that prevented people from speaking out about red flags that could have saved the lives of everyone murdered at Ft. Hood; and that prevents our officials from even naming the enemy. No such ailment afflicts the jihadists, however, who are celebrating Hasan as a hero, who have no problem acknowledging his ideological intent, and who recognize our political correctness as a self-inflicted fatal wound. Unlike our leaders and media elites, they don’t sap their wartime focus with hand-wringing and navel-gazing. (more…)

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” – Michael Corleone, Godfather Part III

True story:  As a young man just out of law school, I was consumed with politics.  I even went to work on the Hill (Capitol, that is, Washington, DC) and in journalism.  But at some point in the ’90s, my interest faded away.

Francis Fukuyama wrote a then-notorious book called The End of History, published in 1992, shortly after the Soviet Union’s collapse.  He argued that the age-old ideological struggles over what constitutes the best form of government were over, and the undisputed universal champion was Western liberal (in the classic, free-market sense) democracy.

I grew up during the latter stages of the Cold War, when the existential threat of nuclear war hung over and colored almost everything.  It made politics seem vital to one’s very survival.  And I found the debate between capitalism and communism hugely compelling. (more…)