From last night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On the murders at Fort Hood:
Surprise, surprise — that somebody who shouts “Allahu Akbar” as he shoots up a room of soldiers might have Islamist motives in doing that.
I think the real moral scandal is the attempt over the weekend to medicalize mass murder. All of a sudden we hear that he [Nidal Hasan] heard these terrible stories from soldiers who had suffered and he snapped.
Well, what about the doctors and nurses and counselors and physical therapists at Walter Reed who every day hear and live with the suffering of soldiers? How many of them have picked up a gun and shot up a room of soldiers?
What about civilian psychiatrists who hear every day tales of woe and suffering — the indescribable suffering of, say, a psychotically depressed patient — who don’t pick up a gun and shoot up people.
I was a psychiatrist. I can’t remember a single instance of a psychiatrist who went around shooting people. Maybe I missed the epidemic.
But all of a sudden if the shooter is called Nidal Hasan, all of a sudden everybody invents this secondary post-traumatic stress syndrome which had never existed until yesterday.
It is an example of political correctness. And all the warnings that people had had in advance and not reported is an example of how political correctness isn’t only a moral abomination, it’s also a danger.
On the passage of health care in the House:
In the Senate, Lieberman has said he will stand in the way of a public option. I’m not sure that will succeed, because all the Senate has to do is put in a trigger, and if a trigger is inserted, then Lieberman will be against it but Olympia Snowe will probably support it, and you will get Democrats like Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who have been on the fence on this, who will also [vote yes].
So I think it’s possible that a public option will come out of the Senate which could be under a trigger.
But I think the more general issue about the politics of this is that Pelosi has led her party over a cliff. If, as is less likely, it gets stuck in the Senate, then a lot of Democrats are way out on a limb the way they were after the cap-and-trade vote in the House. [And] if it passes in any form in the Senate, the Democrats are going to have a health-care proposal which I think will haunt them for a decade.
There is so much pain in here — increase in taxes, increase in premiums, extra bureaucracy, interference in the medical treatment of patients — which people will be able to feel and to see within months and surely within years. This will be a millstone around Democrats for years if it passes.