It's been weeks since eyewitnesses reported that Maj. Nidal Hasan shouted "Allahu akbar" before spraying Fort Hood with gunfire, killing 13 people.
Since then we also learned that Hasan gave a medical lecture on beheading infidels and pouring burning oil down their throats (unfortunately not covered under the Senate health care bill). Some wondered if perhaps a pattern was beginning to emerge but were promptly dismissed as racist cranks.
We also found out Hasan had business cards printed up with the jihadist abbreviation "SOA" for "Soldier of Allah." Was that enough to conclude that the shooting was an act of terrorism -- or does somebody around here need to take another cultural sensitivity class?
And we know that Hasan had contacted several jihadist Web sites and that he had been exchanging e-mails with a radical Islamic cleric in Yemen. The FBI learned that last December, but the rest of us only found out about it a week ago.
Is it still too soon to come to the conclusion that the Fort Hood shooting was an act of terrorism?
Alas, it is still too early to tell at MSNBC. For Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews -- at least two of whom would be severely punished under Shariah law -- the shooting of George Tiller was an act of terrorism, no question. The death of a census taker in Kentucky was also an act of terrorism. (We learned this week that it was a suicide/insurance scam.) But as to Maj. Hasan, the jury is still out -- and will be out for many, many years.
Actually, according to Keith, the Fort Hood massacre may not have happened at all. He has argued persuasively, on several occasions, that it is impossible, literally impossible, to commit mass murder at a military base.
Like many on the left, Keith loved to sneer at all terrorist plots allegedly foiled by the Bush administration. He was particularly contemptuous of the purported plan of six aspiring jihadists to sneak onto the Fort Dix army base and kill as many soldiers as they could.
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On Nov. 11, 2008, he explained why the Fort Dix terrorist plot was a laughable fraud, saying the "morons" apparently didn't realize that "all the soldiers have these big guns."
Keith, the moron, apparently doesn't realize that on military bases on U.S. soil only MPs have guns. (Special authorization is required for soldiers to carry a firearm, which can be granted only in the case of a specific and credible threat against military personnel in that region. Thank you, Bill Clinton.)
Again on May 21 this year, Olbermann ridiculed the Fort Dix terror plot, pointing out that the six alleged terrorists seemed to be "forgetting that every man there was armed."(Curiously, even though ROTC was offered at the ag school Keith attended, he appears not to have investigated it.)
But it was not until Aug. 21 of this year that Olbermann hit upon the true reason for the Bush administration's hyping of this implausible terror plot. According to Keith -- and I'm not kidding -- it was to distract from Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' announcement that her state had been unable to respond adequately to a tornado because Bush had diverted the National Guard to his crazy war in Iraq!
The Bush administration, you see, had revealed the arrest of the Fort Dix conspirators the day after Sebelius' world-reverberating bombshell about Kansas' decimated National Guard! Eureka!
This little theory of Keith's, adorable though it is, has problems apart from his insistence that it would be impossible to kill army personnel on "a closed compound full of trained soldiers with weapons." The other problem is Gov. Sebelius was full of crap.
First, Sebelius wasn't in much of a position to know how well Kansas responded to the tornado, inasmuch as she had been partying at New Orleans' Jazzfest the day after the tornado hit -- while Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts and both local congressmen were on the scene, helping the rescue efforts.
Second, the manager of the actual rescue team soon contradicted Sebelius, saying: "We have all the staff that we need and can manage at this time. If we had more people right now, it would just start being a cluster."
The Kansas National Guard had 352 Humvees, 72 dump trucks and more than 320 other trucks, which would seem to be sufficient for the town hit by the tornado, Greensburg, Kan., population 1,574. That's almost one National Guard truck for every two people. (This is the same tornado that Obama claimed had killed 10,000 people. He was off by 9,988.)
Third, it turned out that Gov. Sebelius had rejected offers of additional help from neighboring National Guard units.
Consequently, the day after her dramatic cri de coeur for more National Guard resources, Sebelius' office completely reversed course, telling The Associated Press that the rescue efforts were going "just fine."
What the governor had meant, her office explained, was that Kansas' National Guard might be stretched thin if, hypothetically, another natural disaster were to strike immediately after the tornado.
Keith, unfortunately, was unaware of Sebelius' humiliating about-face, as it was not carried on Daily Kos.
Last December, five of the Fort Dix plotters were found guilty by a federal jury of conspiring to kill American soldiers. The sixth had already pleaded guilty.
Still, compare the macho posturing of the Bush administration over thwarting the Fort Dix terror plot to the masterful handling of domestic terrorist plots since the angel Obama has taken the helm. Why, the Obama administration managed to capture and arrest Maj. Hasan without violating a single American's civil liberties!
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