President Obama’s radio address today is on the Fort Hood massacre. Byron York has the full text.
Yesterday, Obama warned us against jumping to conclusions. Now, as we predicted, it’s pretty clear that Obama has no intention of coming to any conclusions, ever. He ponders the deep mystery of why Nidal Malik Hasan, whom he refers to only as “an Army psychiatrist,” thought it was a good idea to murder American soldiers:
We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.
There may be some cosmic sense in which that sentence is true; who can ever plumb the depths of the human heart? But we didn’t elect Obama our novelist in chief. He is our commander in chief, and as such his prime responsibility is to protect and the defend the Constitution. And us. We make judgments about other people’s motivations all the time; to take just one obvious example, juries in both civil and criminal cases are frequently required to decide “what leads a man to do such a thing.”
In this particular case, Hasan seems to have left a pretty good trail of clues. But Obama has no interest in following them. Instead, the lesson he draws from the “tragedy” at Fort Hood is a paean to the diversity of our armed forces:
They are Americans of every race, faith, and station. They are Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and nonbelievers. They are descendents of immigrants and immigrants themselves. They reflect the diversity that makes this America. But what they share is a patriotism like no other.
That’s generally true, of course. But one soldier who didn’t share that “patriotism like no other” was Nidal Malik Hasan. And, based on the fragmentary information available so far, it appears that there were pretty clear indications, well before Thursday’s massacre, that Hasan had no business serving in the armed forces. One of the subjects that needs to be investigated is what set of assumptions, values and perhaps political pressures led responsible officials to allow Hasan–at best, an obviously troubled individual–to continue serving as a psychiatrist to wounded servicemen. That, along with “what leads a man to do such a thing,” are questions that need to be investigated honestly and objectively, not viewed through the fog of Obama’s politically-motivated agnosticism.
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