Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan

When you buy a gun you may have a background check, depending on where you buy it from. Go to a local gun show and buy one from some fellow enthusiast there and chances are you won’t receive a background check, unless that person is registered as a federal dealer. That’s the extent of it.

So I am sitting here wondering why all these Republicans are screaming for profiling of darker skin men before they get on the airplane. Why didn’t we hear this after  Major Nidal Malik Hasan took his personal weapons into a building on a United States Army base and killed 13 people while wounding 30 others? Why didn’t one of these Republicans call for better “profiling” on potential gun owners? If you would even bring this up to a Republican they would yell and scream about you taking away their 2nd amendment rights, but profiling also violates our Constitution, and no where in the Constitution does it say one right trumps the other.

Take this picture:

That is the view of Newark airport today after the terminal was reopened. Bob points out how easy of a target it would be for a suicide bomber, which it would be, but imagine a Major Hassan going in there and opening fire. This is before any security checks and sneaking a gun, or 20 in would be very simple. If that happened I can guarantee that Republicans still wouldn’t talk about profiling potential gun buyers. They would rather see a law requiring everyone to be naked before that.

So the next time some Republican is on the television going on about profiling people who don’t look like them, then would the host of that show please ask them if they would support profiling potential gun buyers. It’s time to put them on the spot to see exactly how serious they are about terrorism.

We saw it after Ft. Hood and now we are seeing it again – a Republican Party that cares nothing about actual terrorism, but rather playing politics with it. A perfect example of this is Mary Matalin, who said on CNN yesterday that Bush “inherited” the 9/11 attacks.

Inherited to the point that Bush ignored a memo in August of 2001 stating “Bin Laden determined to attack the United States” and even that he was going to use airplanes.

But it’s interesting. I have heard numerous Democrats talk about the failures of the Bush administration and Clinton administration when it comes to the 9/11 attacks. That’s just like Ft. Hood and Detroit – both men were “on the radar” under the Obama administration and Bush administration, yet if you bring that up to Republicans you get accused of “shifting the blame” or “looking backwards”.

Instead of addressing the problems that allowed both men to slip through the system, the Republicans would much rather play politics. This is also evident when Republicans claim that Detroit was a terrorist attack, yet Richard Reid wasn’t. Both cases are extremely similar and to claim one was an attack and the other wasn’t is again, playing politics with the issue.

Adding….Something off-topic here, but Matalin also said that Bush inherited a recession and that he lowered unemployment to 5%. As Atrios points out, he lowered it to 5.7% and it eventually rose back up to 6.3%. What’s even more interesting is if anyone points out that Obama inherited this awful recession from Bush then people like Matalin accuse them of looking backwards. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Wow it didn’t even take a week for this to happen:

The ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee on Tuesday night accused the White House of withholding information on the Fort Hood attack.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) said administration officials delayed briefing members of Congress about the alleged gunman, raising "red flags" about what the White House was hiding.

"When they withhold information, you always start asking questions," Hoekstra told Fox News. "That's what raises red flags. What do they know that they don't want us to know?"

Maybe we should all take some time and tell Hoekstra that the politicizing of the horror that happened at Ft. Hood won’t be tolerated.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R - MI-2) Website http://hoekstra.house.gov/ Phone 202-225-4401 Fax 202-226-0779 Contact http://www.house.gov/formhoekstra/IMA/email.htm Additional Information

And they came out already, starting with Hannity, who is claiming that President Obama knew about Maj. Hasan.

As Cesca reminds us:

After 9/11, everyone -- everyone -- supported President Bush. But it's clear that the wingnuts and Republicans will never give our current president the same deference.

But what about George Bush – did he know? Maybe we can start a new form of “Ft. Hood truthers” here, ones that have a little more evidence on their side:

The FBI and the Army last year investigated contacts between a Yemen-based militant Islamist prayer leader and the Army psychiatrist accused of last week’s deadly shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, but they dropped the case after concluding that he didn’t pose a terrorist threat, a senior federal law enforcement official said Monday.

The disclosure on Monday that Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan communicated with an imam who had ties to Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers was sure to raise the question of whether U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies had information that, if properly shared and investigated, might have helped to prevent the attack.

So not only was this guy making contacts under Bush’s watch, but Bush’s FBI investigated him.

I would say there is more just in saying that Bush knew of Hassan than Obama. I mean this guy was brought up in the military under Bush’s watch and slipped through under Bush’s “totally awesome” interrogation and investigating techniques. I wonder what Dick Cheney will have to say about this?

A soldier shoots a bunch of people on a military base where the people are allowed to carry guns. It took a civilian police officer to finally take him down. Does that mean the argument of allowing teachers and anyone else to carry guns would reduce the number of school shootings or casualties?

Not 24 hours after the massacre at Ft. Hood, wingnuts have found a way to turn it into something political. In this instance, Maj. Hasan was an adviser to Obama, brought to you by birther in chief – Jerome Corsi. What a great way to honor the memory of those who perished yesterday – NOT.

There is still a lot of speculating going on, but the most reasonable sounding thing I have heard so far is this:

His cousin said Maj Hasan had been resisting such a deployment.

"He hired a military attorney to try to have the issue resolved, pay back the government, to get out of the military. He was at the end of trying everything," Nader Hasan told Fox News.

He also said that Nidal Malik Hasan had been battling racial harassment because of his "Middle Eastern ethnicity".

(emphasis added)

Even on The Today Show they were interviewing people who know Maj. Hasan and talked about how much he heard things like “sand nigger” or “terrorist” yelled at him.

While the right is trying to paint Hasan as some Islamic terrorist, just look at the guy. He was American born and just spent countless years going through school to become a Psychiatrist, MD. This wasn’t a man planning on doing something like this, this was a man who snapped.

So our question now is how to fix our relationship with Muslims. The military really needs to take a long, hard inner look at itself and come up with a way to limit incidents like this.

And the fix isn’t limited to the military alone – it also must include society. For example, look at this:

Here we have a guy who went on a rampage, and so far the one of the leading reasons is that he was constantly harassed about his ethnicity and religious beliefs, and then you add in a big voice of the right making wild claims like this. This isn’t a solution – it’s asking for more of the same.

Luckily Maj. Hasan is still alive. Now maybe we can get a better idea of what was going through his mind when he decided this was the route to take. Hopefully we can use that as a teaching moment also and try to instill a better sense of tolerance in both our military and society as a whole.

This could be a make or break moment for President Obama. How he takes the lead on this will really define him not only as our President, but also as a man. We can’t afford any cover-up of what really happened. We need full transparency here and for our Commander in Chief to insure the changes needed to help prevent future events like this from happening. The coming weeks and months should prove to be rather interesting as this story continues to unravel.