Us being Americans.

President Obama’s first reaction to the Ft Hood shooting was to caution Americans “against jumping to conclusions.” Does this guy ever have a reaction where he defends America with something other than tepidness? Please don’t include Afghanistan as an example, he was outmaneuvered by the military on that one, properly calculating that he had less desire to fight them than not to fight the Taliban.

Sorry but a heavily armed Muslim shooting — while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great) — unarmed innocents means we don’t need to ‘jump’ to anything, it’s already there. Our government needs to inform us of the who, what and where? The why we can figure out for ourselves, without his Hyde Park sensibilities. Here’s the one conclusion President Obama really wants us to avoid: We are still in a war against Islamofascism.

Along the lines of ‘not jumping to conclusions,’ Bernard Glodberg’s blog makes an interesting point about how this story would have been covered if the evil-doer had a different profile:

I got an email from a journalist friend this morning, about the big news of the day, the massacre at Fort Hood in Texas. Here’s what it said:

“While the mainstream media is busy downplaying the shooter’s religion, just think if an O’Reilly or Goldberg book was found in his home or, God forbid, there was a talk station pre-set on his car radio or he once knew a guy who had a cousin who attended a tea party. There would be endless, mindless speculation and convoluted banner headlines about [how] the evil right-wing is sowing hatred and inspiring death.”

He’s right, of course. A lone gunman kills a late term abortion doctor in Kansas and if you watched liberal television or read liberal papers you’d think Bill O’Reilly pulled the trigger. When Timothy McVeigh blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, liberals blamed conservative talking radio for fomenting an anti-government frenzy. Now we have another catastrophe, but this one is a tad inconvenient for liberals in the media. It turns out the gunman was a Muslim. Uh Oh!

This particular Muslim was a psychiatrist in the United States Army, whose name appears on comments posted on a radical Muslim Web site waxing favorably about suicide bombings; and who allegedly told a friend — as a retired army colonel told Fox News — that, “Muslims had a right to rise up and attack Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.” So, what’s the storyline? Muslim fundamentalism? Try, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

You see the media don’t want to jump to any conclusions in this case, especially when they’re politically incorrect conclusions. But they’d jump to conclusions, wouldn’t they, if a white guy with a crew cut and overalls from the rural south walked into a local NAACP office and shot up the place. They’d conclude the guy was a racist. And they’d almost certainly be right. With the Fort Hood story there was sound reason to suspect the killer’s religion played a part in the massacre, and all we got was drivel about how stressed out soldiers are these days.

Finally John Podhoretz deconstructs the absurdity of the politically correct nonsense about stress:

Can it really be that anybody seriously believed a career Army psychiatrist would deal with the “stress” of his own deployment to a war he opposes by opening fire and shooting 43 people? Evidently, the answer is yes, as Noah Pollak and others have noted. This is a particular American madness, as far as I can tell, the invocation of ludicrous pop psychology to explain acts that can only properly be described as evil. Recall the case of Paula Yates, the Texas mother who murdered her five children? Before the world could even spend a moment mourning the children, Paula Yates herself was turned into a Rorschach test—of the perils of having too many children, of a traditional marriage, of postpartum depression. The problem is that tens of millions of women go through the same experiences and do not murder their children. Yates represented nothing but, at best, psychosis and, at worst, the face of pure evil.And so it is with Nadal Hasan. Obviously, there are a great many people in the military who would rather not be deployed to a war zone; for whom such deployments cause stress; and who may indeed be philosophically opposed to the fight they are obliged as a matter of law and duty to wage. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that there are 10,000 such people. Only one has actually taken a machine gun and mowed down his fellow soldiers. The argument that Nadal Hasan was somehow sent round the bend by his orders is not only bizarre but also deeply and profoundly insulting to those in the military who live with all the same pressures and do good rather than evil.