From Calculated Risk. James Pethokoukis:
Remember in the early 1980s 7 straight quarters of avg. GDP growth of roughly 7% (!) lowered jobless rate by only 2.5 percentage points. Hard to see economy booming like that between now and Election Day 2010.
Reading Malkin, Dreher and Bawer and listening to Mark Steyn almost gloating on Rush today about how the Fort Hood shooting unmasks a Jihadist threat from within, one has to ask: what, even if this is true, do they expect the US government to do about it?
More vigilance toward troubled cases like Hasan – not unlike the greater vigilance that could have avoided the Virginia Tech massacre – is certainly and rather obviously a good idea. If political correctness is preventing this vigilance, it needs to be pushed back, and hard. But it is equally important not to do this crudely, to avoid impugning the overwhelming majority of Muslim-Americans who disdain violence, to sustain the civil, non-sectarian bonds that keep this country together. Because a failure to do so would surely only give Jihadism more strength, not less.
The one thing we can say about Muslim Americans this past decade is that they have not responded the way many European Muslims have.
Their more successful integration and their economic success have led to a remarkably puny number of instances in which actual Jihadists have tried actual terror attacks (and I don't mean the countless false leads pursued by Bush and Cheney and innocent people they rounded up and abused).
So to foment the notion that every Muslim-American is now suspect, or that the military, already disproportionately controlled by Christianist forces, should monitor Muslim servcemembers as rigorously as they do, say, gay ones, would surely hurt, not help.
What troubles me about the right at the moment is that they are becoming a pure protest movement. They know what they are against, and they keep describing one issue after another as a Manichean contest – freedom or slavery, good or evil, Muslim or American, libruls and "real Americans" – in ways that do nothing practically to move the country forward. It is pure rhetoric, talk-radio politics, and dangerously contemptuous of its social consequences. When they offer us plans to balance the budget, plans to insure the uninsured, strategies to defeat Islamism, we should listen with all ears. Until then … it's painfully immature.
Marc Lynch's take:
[If Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority, is serious about not seeking re-election], then it isn't necessarily a disaster. It could shake up a failing process on autopilot, it could offer the chance to finally renew Palestinian leadership, and it could offer a way for the Gaza-West Bank, Fatah-Hamas standoff to be defused. Nothing has changed in the last week to make me change my mind on those basic points.
Most of the Palestinian and Arab commentary I've seen since his announcement falls into three basic trends: the first thinks he's bluffing, attempting to leverage his weakness into pressure on the U.S. and Israel; the second thinks it's irrelevant, because the elections will not actually be held in January; and the third is cheering his departure, and hoping that it will lead to a collective admission that the PA's strategy has failed. The three perspectives are obviously not mutually exclusive. When I asked leading Palestinian academic Salim Tamari yesterday about the impact it would have on the peace process, he just looked at me quizically and said "what peace process?"
At least eight people were shot and four others wounded in another shooting spree in Orlando, Florida. This mass murderer is still at large.
Someone found some out-takes of an early photo-shoot rehearsal.
Jason Zengerle counters Fallows:
[T]o ignore the circumstances of this particular shooting would be like saying Oswald was just some random wacko whose actions occurred in a total vacuum, that the Cold War, his Marxist sympathies, the fact that he lived in the Soviet Union for a time, were all basically irrelevant. They weren't. And while the are are many things we don't yet–and may never–know about Nidal Malik Hasan and what drove him to commit such an evil act, we can't ignore the things we do know. If only because, by ignoring them, we allow others, like Malkin and her ilk, to try to define them for us.
Chait reads a recent editorial in the Weekly Standard and concludes:
A magazine like National Review specializes in making the case for conservative ideas. The Standard's contribution is to assert over and over that Republicans are succeeding, or at least doing better than you think they are. The idea is to buck up your side and encourage them to keep fighting, in order to ward off the self-defeating psychology of losing.
It's unclear to me why the subscribers of that magazine pay money to be the subjects of a disinformation campaign. To be sure, like any stopped clock, sometimes the Standard gets it right. But there's a distinctly Pravda-esque feel to the political coverage that makes back reading an enjoyable experience. With help from Noah Kristula-Green, I pulled together some examples:
Dish fave (on Palin, of course):
Date: 10/13/2008
Headline: Palin Comes Out Swinging: And keeps hope alive for McCain.
The Good News: "Sarah Palin's scintillating success in last week's vice presidential debate with Joe Biden has made her an enormous asset (again) to John McCain's bid for the presidency. …"McCain should feel vindicated. His choice of Palin as his running mate has turned out extraordinarily well. There's never been a national candidate like her, a mother of five from the boondocks who grins as she skewers her opponents. More important, she's given a significant gift to McCain. She's improved his chances of winning."
Killeen, Texas – where Fort Hood is located – was the victim of another mass shooting 18 years ago:
The Luby's massacre was an incident of mass murder that took place on October 16, 1991 when George Jo Hennard drove his pickup truck into a Luby's Cafeteria and shot and killed 23 people, wounded another 20 and then committed suicide by shooting himself. It was the deadliest shooting rampage in American history until the Virginia Tech Massacre.
On October 16, 1991, Hennard drove his 1987 Ford Ranger pickup truck through the front window of a Luby's Cafeteria at 1705 East Central Texas Expressway in Killeen, yelled "This is what Belton did to me!", then opened fire on the restaurant's patrons and staff with a Glock 17 pistol and later a Ruger P89. He stalked, shot, and killed 23 people and wounded another 20 before committing suicide. About 80 people were in the restaurant at the time.
The first victim was local veterinarian Dr. Michael Griffith, who ran up to the driver's side of the pickup truck to offer assistance after the truck came through the window. During the
shooting, Hennard approached Suzanna Hupp and her parents. Hupp had brought a handgun to the Luby's Cafeteria that day but had left it in her vehicle because laws in force at the time forbade the carrying of firearms. According to her later testimony her father charged at Hennard in an attempt to subdue him but was gunned down; a short time later, Hupp's mother was also shot and killed.[1][2][3] One patron, Tommy Vaughn, threw himself through a plate-glass window to allow others to escape.[4] Hennard allowed a mother and her four-year-old child to leave. He reloaded several times and still had ammunition remaining when he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head after being cornered and wounded by police.[5][6][7]
Unemployment is over 10 percent; economic insecurity is profound; we have been occupying two deeply Muslim countries for eight years with no end in sight; we are grappling with massive debt and an attempt to provide some basic health insurance for the working poor. There are perfectly reasonable and important debates to have about all this – whether this is the time to expand health insurance, whether we should have done it years ago, whether a public option is a good thing, whether Medicare can be cut enough to save enough to make this affordable. But the Republican right has not engaged such a debate in a meaningful way. And yesterday, the House GOP leadership gave their blessing to a raggedy bunch of extreme anti-government fanatics whose rally contained the following elements:
The angry folks at the protest — which attracted several thousand conservatives — held up signs with messages of hate: "Get the Red Out of the White House," "Waterboard Congress," "Ken-ya Trust Obama?" One called the president a "Traitor to the U.S. Constitution." Another sign showed pictures of dead bodies at the Dachau concentration camp and compared health care reform to the Holocaust. A different placard depicted Obama as Sambo. Yes, Sambo. Another read, "Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds" — a reference to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory holding that one evil Jewish family has manipulated events around the globe for decades.
This kind of rhetoric – on the same day that the Fort Hood massacre took place – is gasoline on a fire of atavistic hate. Someone in the GOP leadership needs to call it out – before its logic propels us toward more violence and social division.
This kind of rhetoric is simply unacceptable for a major political party to institutionally embrace in a civil democracy:
Boehner, for one, declared that the health care bill is the "greatest threat to freedom that I have seen." That's some statement … And at one point during the rally — call it a Bachmannalia — when John Ratzenberger, a.k.a Cliff Clavin from "Cheers," claimed that the Democrats were turning the United States into a land of European socialism, the audience shouted, "Nazis, Nazis." No Republican legislator left the stage in protest. Boehner and his fellow GOP leaders should be asked how they feel about mounting a rally that attracted intense hate-mongering.
(Photo: People from across the country protest the health care bill at the West Front of the U.S. Capitol November 5, 2009 in Washington, DC. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)
Robert Mackey is live-blogging Ft. Hood. Fallows:
In the saturation coverage right after the events, the “expert” talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre “mean”? A decade later, do we “know” anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.
We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They’ve got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don’t mean nothing.
No matter how badly the media try to spin it another way, or to ignore the religion ghost in this story, Hasan’s religion was to all appearances a key factor in the mass murder he committed. You don’t have a Muslim shouting “Allahu akbar!” as he executes people one by one, and conclude that religion is incidental to his crime. You have to be a moral idiot to draw that conclusion, a politically correct nitwit.
So: how should we regard the role of Hasan’s religion in this infamy?
Ft. Hood’s commander, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, said today that there are unconfirmed reports that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shouted “God is great” in Arabic before opening fire yesterday at the Army base. Again: we will soon be able to hear Hasan’s motivations in his own words. Even if he shouted such a thing, it would no more reflect on his co-religionists than does the fanatic who murdered Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller and who happened to consider himself a devout Christian does on his co-religionists. It’s worth remembering that nearly all mass shootings in this country are committed by white men. Do we have a white-man problem on our hands?
This was jihad.
Enlightened Americans — at least those who trace their patriotism to Thomas Jefferson, a man fascinated by and respectful of Islam whose library contained copies of the Koran — should be unsettled by the rush to judgment regarding not just this one Muslim but all Muslims.
More will be revealed. From where I stand, much of this looks like religion-inspired terror. We need to know who his spiritual advisors are (one account is that his chaplain was the same guy who counseled Hasan Akbar, the Army sergeant who killed his fellow soldiers). Last, many soldiers I have spoken with are deeply concerned about the President’s response. The President spoke for minutes about the Tribal Conference before addressing the tragedy on Fort Hood. What was THAT about?
According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 45 percent of Americans know a Muslim. Of those who have a high level of familiarity with Islam, 57 percent view Muslims favorably while 25 percent view them unfavorably. For those with a low level of familiarity, 21 percent have a favorable view, 35 percent have an unfavorable view, and 44 percent, a significant plurality, have no opinion. The Pew survey also found that 58 percent of Americans believe that Muslims face a high level of discrimination, while 64 percent believe the same is true for gays and lesbians. These numbers suggest that a large majority of Americans are open-minded about Muslims. And though there are pockets of distrust, far more Americans worry that Muslims face discrimination than hold negative views of Muslims. The danger is that Hasan’s despicable crime will subtly and slowly change these perceptions for the worse.
[S]houldn’t there be some standards governing what gets reported and what is held back? Particularly in a case like this — which, for obvious reasons, has the potential to be quite inflammatory on a number of levels — having the major media “report” completely false assertions as fact can be quite harmful. It’s often the case that perceptions and judgments about stories like this solidify in the first few hours after one hears about it. The impact of subsequent corrections and clarifications pale in comparison to the impressions that are first formed. Despite that, one false and contradictory claim after the next was disseminated last night by the establishment media with regard to the core facts of the attack.
EXPLOSIVE: Ft. Hood suspect reportedly shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’.…On NPR I heard — I can’t find the story on their website yet — that he had given a presentation on the Koran at a professional conference where he claimed that unbelievers should be beheaded, burned, etc. to the discomfiture of the attendees.
[T]he above would seem to confirm what many on the wingnut right seemed to positively hope was the case last night—that Hasan’s rampage was an act of Islamist terrorism, as opposed to the result of a breakdown or mental illness or the garden-variety insane rage and alienation that has inspired what seems like a mass killing every other month. We all know what first came to mind when Hasan’s name was released yesterday. But we suppose a handy guide for finding the line that divides the Glenn Becks of the world from the rest of us is whether you reacted with dread at the idea that it may have been related, however murkily, to Islamism, or if you were filled with smug delight.
I always thought Bush’s response [to 9/11] was fine. It was also very different than Obama’s [response to Fort Hood], at least as I understand it. Obama was briefed on the shooting before he went out. He opted to do the schmoozy stuff. Bush was presented with staggering news and kept his cool. Not that these readers disagree, but this example works in Bush’s favor and against Obama. And it makes a lot of Bush’s critics look even worse for politicizing that moment on 9/11.
Michelle Malkin, whose book In Defense of Internment advocated for the use of racial profiling against Arabs and Muslims, quickly recycled a 2003 column suggesting that there was something wrong with allowing Muslims to serve in the armed forces. “Political correctness is the handmaiden of terror,” Malkin tweeted. Don’t you see? If we had just listened to her, and treated those people as enemies to begin with, this would never have happened. There are thousands of Arab-Americans serving in the armed forces, and many have given their lives defending this country–Malkin would have us see all of them as potential traitors.
Frum passes along some pictures to keep in mind today.
The Dish 