Most of you are probably aware of the tragic shootings at Ft. Hood by now. We here at the cantina extend our deepest sympathies to the families, friends, and victims. What they're going through is unimaginable.
Steve Benen had a good rundown of the details we know so far. More, no doubt, will come out as investigations proceed. In a situation like this, the first few days are chaos - no one knows quite what happened, or why.
That, of course, didn't stop the dumbfucks from running wild, especially when they learned the shooter's name:
It is.On "Fox & Friends" this morning, the hosts speculated about the need for "special screenings" of Muslim officers in the U.S. military. It follows a certain child-like reasoning -- Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan went on a deadly rampage yesterday, shooting 43 people. Hasan is Muslim. Therefore, Muslims in uniform may be untrustworthy.
Soon after, Allen West, a top recruit of the National Republican Congressional Committee in Florida, announced his belief that, in light of the Fort Hood tragedy, the "enemy is infiltrating our military." West, one of 32 new members of the NRCC "Young Guns" program a congressional candidate in the Miami area next year, added, "Our soldiers are being brainwashed."
Now, at this point, we have no idea what led a 14-veteran of the U.S. Army to commit such a heinous crime, but there's a frightening ease with which too many conservatives embrace bigotry like this.
Spencer Ackerman gets this exactly right.
To make a point no one should have to make: earlier this year, a deranged Army sergeant named John Russell opened fire near a combat stress clinic -- sound familiar? -- at Baghdad's Camp Liberty and killed five of his fellow soldiers. No one speculated about any religious motivations. No one suggested he was part of an enemy "infiltration," or suggested that U.S. troops have been "brainwashed." Everyone understood that Russell was a deranged lunatic, not an advance scout for a conspiracy to subvert the military internally. It's funny how double standards work.
Actually, no. It's disgusting.
Geraldo Rivera, of all people, provided the lone voice of reason amidst a parade of Faux News fucktards:
I wish his colleagues would listen to him. He's right.On Fox and Friends this morning, Geraldo Rivera warned against casting “a gloomy cloud of suspicion over all the Muslim G.I.s who serve with great honor”:
RIVERA: I think that the great tragedy of this incident is that it will cast a gloomy cloud of suspicion over all the Muslim G.I.s who serve with great honor and who are an amazing assist to the United States in this conflict we’re having with radical Islam. This will, and also, I remember my dad, just very briefly. When we were growing up there would be a notorious crime and my dad used to gather the family. We used to say, like a little prayer, “please God” that it’s not a Puerto Rican. You know because we had, dealing with so many social pressures and prejudices, dealing with all the rest of it, we didn’t want one of these awful examples to cast aspersion and negativity on our group. And this is the same thing with American Muslims now, specifically American Muslim G.I.s.
C&L's Nicole Belle gave the rest of the media, who were scarcely more responsible than Faux News itself, a good hard spanking:
Dear MSM: Please print that last sentence out in very large font. Use it to wallpaper the newsroom. Have it tattooed on your foreheads. Recite it a hundred times every night before you go to bed, and a hundred times when you wake up in the morning, until you do get it. Most of you obviously don't.Dear 24 Hour Cable News Channels:
I understand your dilemma, I really do. You have 44 minutes on the hour to fill with content. And it has to be compelling stuff, so that the viewer isn't tempted to channel surf to your rivals. In the situation like the Fort Hood shootings, where news is coming scattershot and conflicting, it's even more difficult.
See? I get it.
But having said that--and I say this with love and respect--PLEASE, SHUT. THE. F#@K. UP. Don't spend time guessing on motivations when there is so little information available. Don't surmise terrorist intent when you can't possibly know. And for the love of everything holy, don't go to criminal profiler Cliff "A Hammer Sees Everything As A Nail" Van Zandt (a crime of which Keith Olbermann is also guilty) to make up utter bovine excrement.
At the time that Van Zandt was waxing rhapsodic over possible terrorist inclinations, remember, the news was that there were two or three shooters, one of whom was dead (Hasan, the single shooter, was alive and being treated at the time). That Maj. Nadil Hasan was of Jordanian, Arab, or Palestinian birth (he was born in Virginia of Palestinian immigrant parents), that he was a recent Muslim convert (he had been a practicing Muslim his whole life), that he was suffering from PTSD, or secondary PTSD from his work with returning vets in Virginia, that he was sympathetic with suicide bombers, angry at bad evaluations, upset at being deployed to Iraq, frustrated by the Army's dismissal of the harassment he got at Ft. Hood about his faith and/or desperate to get out of his upcoming deployment.
Bottom line: we didn't know enough.
[snip]
Don't you get it? "Terrorism" is not defined as "any violence by any Muslim anywhere at any time for any reason."
And remember, the WorldNut Daily has no fucking clue what it's talking about:
I guess this was bound to happen, but it doesn't make it any less annoying.
WorldNetDaily falsely claimed that alleged Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan "advised Obama transition" in the headline of an article by Jerome Corsi highlighting his listing as a "participant" in a report for the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University's Presidential Transition Task Force.
However, Corsi himself acknowledges that there is no evidence that "the group played any formal role in the official Obama transition" - indeed, the Task Force was initiated in April 2008; moreover, while Hasan was listed as one of approximately 300 "Task Force Event Participants" in the report's appendix, HSPI has reportedly said he was not a "member" of the Task Force, and was listed because he RSVP'd for several of the group's events."
The National Enquirer is more credible than the fucking WorldNut Daily. At least the Enquirer got a story right once.
Of course, what would any tragedy involving a man with a Muslim name be without the batshit fucking insane Con in Congress ready to jump all over it?
Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC), who wrote the foreword to Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that's Conspiring to Islamize America, said today she is "very concerned" about infiltration of the military by jihadists.
"We can't continue to be so politically correct that we're going to say this wasn't religiously motivated," Myrick told the Charlotte, North Carolina, CBS affiliate. She noted the reports that Nidal Malik Hasan shouted "Allahu Akbar" before he allegedly opened fire in the shooting spree at Fort Hood Thursday.
Look, you stupid fucking bitch. No one - let me repeat that - no one - knows what Hasan's motivation was. The fact that a Muslim man with a Muslim name shouted an Islamic phrase used by every Muslim in the entire universe does not make him a fucking jihadist. It does not make his crime "religiously motivated." And to have a member of Congress spewing this wild-eyed frothing fundie right-wing Teabagger bullshit, to have an actual member of Congress, who should be a responsible fucking adult, stand up and, on the strength of absolutely no evidence at all, claim the military's being infiltrated by evil Muslim jihadists, is outrageous in the extreme. It's irresponsible, reprehensible, and it should be the kind of behavior that makes you immediately ineligible to hold public office of any form at any time, starting fucking immediately.
I hope I've made myself clear. There is no place among our elected leadership for this kind of idiocy. None.
It's too bad so many of my fellow Americans are too stupid to realize that, and vote for these asshats anyway. It'll be up to the rest of us to counter that stupidity come election day.
Moving on. Yesterday, the Teabaggers descended on D.C. to prove that they're disgusting dipshits who have no idea what health care reform entails. We'll be having some fun with them in Your Daily Dose. For now, I just want to ask a simple question that's nearly impossible to answer: why the fuck do Cons find it so motherfucking hard to count?
On G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show today, producer Franklin Raff, who was on the ground at the rally, told guest host Joseph Farah that the crowd is “just as big or bigger than” the 9/12 rally, which Raff estimated “at about a million.”
Eric Cantor talked of "tens of thousands." And I'm sure we've seen Cons spout every number in between. I'm surprised we haven't heard "billions and billions" yet. Let's just have a tale of two pictures, shall we?[snip]
Capitol Hill police told NBC’s Luke Russert that the crowd was about 4,000.
Obama's Inauguration - 1.8 million:
Nov. 5th Teabagging:
Maybe Teabaggers are just reely small.
But the really important question is this: why do the Cons want Americans to all die in their beds? This is the only conclusion we can come to, since they ditched important national security votes to go tea partying:
And guess what? A bunch of amendments beloved by Cons, absolutely vital to our national security and the only things standing between us and eeviiil Mooslim terrurists murdering us all, failed to pass because some Con fucktards couldn't bother to show up to vote. Priceless.Several Republican members of Congress yesterday blew off votes on the signature anti-terror legislation of the post 9/11 era to attend Michele Bachmann's Tea Party rally against health-care reform.
Reps. Steve King of Iowa, Trent Franks of Arizona, Randy Forbes of Virginia, Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Louie Gohmert and Ted Poe of Texas all took time out yesterday for the "Super Bowl of Freedom," as Bachmann has called it. And all missed votes in the House Judiciary committee on Republican-sponsored amendments to the reauthorization of the Patriot Act -- measures that would have toughened the Act, but narrowly failed. Those votes took place, a committee staffer confirmed, between noon and two -- the very time when Republican lawmakers were rallying the Tea Party troops on the Capitol steps.
Speaking of priceless, don't miss Kos pwning Tancredo.
And on the fear manufacturing front, the IAEA inspected Iran's super-secret nuclear site and found nothing to worry about. Nothing. It's a site set up for generating nuclear energy, just as they've always claimed, and buried in a bunker because they know Americans and Israelis are awfully trigger happy. But (and you knew there was a but coming):
But, let's not let you get too comfortable about Iran...GuardianUK's Julian Borger comes up with a new scare:
The UN's nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, the Guardian has learned.
That's probably because so many of them pander to right wing fucktards, who really are that dumb, and seem to have a compulsive desire to shit themselves with terror.The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as "breathtaking" and has added urgency to the effort to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.
Ooooh...booga booga booga! Two things that glare out for me: one, Borger cites the IAEA unpublished report without one single quotation. Two, Borger claims the "two point implosion" is "officially secret" in the US and UK, but how secret can it be when it has its own Wikipedia page?
The media really does think you're dumb and can't figure out teh Google.
Our public discourse, ladies and gentlemen. I'll understand completely if you decide to weep.
The outlandish speculation about the motives of this man have been a sad thing to watch. It's molestus hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning.
ReplyDeleteWell, the fun thing about 'officially secret' things is that a whole lot of them get onto the internet without any real way of knowing who the hell put them there.
ReplyDeleteI was reading P.W. Singer's "Wired for War" a while back, and he noted that, with astonishing frequency, he would be able to find out something through internet research that the scientists themselves weren't allowed to talk about. They would frequently ask him where he managed to find it, and were generally mortified to hear that hey, it was somewhere in the tubes.
But yeah. Scaremongering about it is just dumb. Screw nukes, I'd be more worried about the fleet of killbots that they're making in [country of foreigners]!