-By John Armor
Until the mass murder at Fort Hood intervened, I’d intended to write about Thursday’s bingo night to benefit the Girl Scouts.
It was a cold and stormy night. Almost all of the summer visitors are gone. We thought there’d be sparse attendance at the monthly charity bingo game put on by the Rotary Club. But the place was packed, wall to wall. Dozens of Brownies and Girl Scouts in uniform were scurrying about, serving the players.
Final figures weren’t available on the spot. From prior experience, however, I’m sure more than $1,000 was raised for the Scouts.
How ordinary is that? Rotary sponsoring bingo to benefit the Girl Scouts in a small town 12 miles south of Nowhere? And yet, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his1831 masterpiece, Democracy in America, we are a nation of joiners. We get active in thousands of organizations to help ourselves, and each other. That is the ordinary majesty woven into the fabric of our nation.
Events intervened. A devout Muslim, or a radical Muslim, take your pick, went onto the Fort Hood base Thursday and shot 43 people, killing 13. The shooter was an Army officer and an Army-trained psychiatrist. But the most important thing in his life, when he started shooting people, was that he was a Muslim.
In a press conference, the Secretary of the Army gave an incredibly inappropriate speech about “policies and programs” to “prevent things like this.” The press coverage was equally inane. The very first question was whether this shooting “shows that the Army was to small to deal with the crises facing it?”
There’s no excuse for the Secretary’s remarks. There’s no excuse for the press on scene. But there is especially no excuse for what President Obama said about the shootings in his weekly radio address, a day later. Keep in mind that all Presidents have speech writers and advisors tasked with making the words of the President appropriate to events. Plus, the President had a full day to think about this before saying it.
President Obama praised “Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and nonbelievers” as serving equally and well in the armed forces of the United States. That statement of equality is patently false. Only Muslims have been charged with killing their fellow soldiers, for religious reasons. This is not the first time. (Look up the incident years ago where a soldier rolled a grenade into his officers’ tent.)
But the Obama comment that jumped off the page was this: “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.” An enemy of the United State shoots almost four dozen Americans, mostly soldiers, and the President of the United States is concerned with understanding what was going on in the murderer’s mind?
Doesn’t the Army have security personnel who deal with possible threats from soldiers or officers who go off the rails? Doesn’t anybody pay attention to what active duty personnel post on the Internet? I’ve read this Muslim’s internet posts. Anyone who merely glanced at those would realize this Muslim was about to go off.
Put President Obama’s comment in historical context to see what a failure it was. When General George Washington discovered that General Benedict Arnold was about to betray the garrison at West Point, did he say, “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.”?
When the British commander captured and burned Washington during the War of 1812, did President Madison say, “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.”? After John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln, did anyone in Lincoln’s Administration say, “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.”?
Did President Roosevelt say of Admiral Yamamoto, after Pearl Harbor, “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.”? You get the idea. In fact, Yamamoto is an especially instructive example. After the Americans broke the Japanese naval code, they tracked Yamamoto. When they found him making a transfer by air, they sent out long range fighters to kill him.
The job of the military in time of war is to identify the enemy and stop them in advance if possible, or kill them after the fact if not possible. The President is the Commander in Chief whether he is good at the task or not. He should be leading this process, rather than pretending it does not exist.
Do we really have a President now? Or merely someone who plays the President on TV?
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John Armor is a graduate of Yale, and Maryland Law School, and has 33 years practice at law in the US Supreme Court. Mr. Armor has authored seven books and over 750 articles. Armor happily lives on a mountaintop in the Blue Ridge. He can be reached at: John_Armor@aya.yale.edu
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