After the Bill Sparkman incident, in which the left-wing blogosphere immediately blamed tea party attendees and conservatives for Sparkman’s (as yet unsolved) death, even this shocked me. Digby at Hullabaloo:
I have no idea what happened at Ft Hood. They’ve confirmed that the perpetrators were military. They don’t know the reason for the killings. CNN’s military correspondent Barbara Starr says there an incredible amount of stress and PTSD at the post, the biggest in the Army, although she has no particular information.(And since most soldiers have some level of PTSD after multiple deployments, it’s far too broad of a category to mean anything in this context.)
Regardless of motivation one would certainly hope, above all, that this [note added by LI: this link is to an “Oathkeepers” website] had nothing to do with it. It’s pretty awful that one’s thoughts would immediately turn in that direction when something like this happens. But after Tim McVeigh, you have to consider it. (If the shooters were civilians, my thoughts would go in a different direction.)
Let’s see how this plays out, what the specific motives were, and who else, if anyone, was behind it. But this stuff is ridiculous.
It turns out that the shooter has a Muslim name, but that proves nothing other than that he has a Muslim name. Fox News is interviewing a soldier who knew the shooter, and who is attributing anti-U.S., religious comments to the shooter, but we’ll see what an investigation proves.
It may be that this has a religious or political motive, or it may be that the person was just crazy, or some combination of the two.
If the evidence is that this was a political and religious shooting, we should not hesitate to say so. But don’t engage in the sort of politicized speculation we saw in the Sparkman case.
UPDATE: The partial mea culpa:
I regret speculating about the Oathers in the early minutes of the story. It was the first thing that jumped to my mind when I heard about it being multiple shooters who were members of the military. Obviously, that speculation was wrong and it cast aspersions on the Oathers who had nothing to do with this. It’s hard for me to see how that little link, along with all the disclaimers that went with it, puts me in the same category as the lunatics, but if it does, so be it. Just call me Atlas…. 11.05.09 – 10:18 pm.
UPDATE No. 2: Jules Crittenden, says Jackass 101
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