I liked the Obama warning about coming Senate investigations into the Fort Hood shootings.  Don’t make political hay out of it.  Don’t play political football with this thing.  That would be untorrid and evil.  The chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security is Joseph Lieberman, who is facing a modicum of pressure from various points with a threat to take the chair away from him over his positioning in the Health Care debate.  He has put Homeland Security to use by investigating Obama’s “Czars”.

But I imagine he’ll balance out the sudden appearance of Rudy Giuliani on the Fox News programs to discuss these matters, and Obama is playing politics by squelching the discussion on how if this were 1940, Hitler would succeed, Pat Robertson pointing out what must be done to Islam.  (The good news with where Pat Robertson appears to be going on that score, is the result gets bandied about with the label “Hate Crime” instead of “Terrorism“.)

There is, back in the world of the living, a question about whether this counts as Terrorism.  It fits my definition, surely.  But then again, the government and people who make their careers out of studying Terrorism don’t define Theodore Kaczynski as a Terrorist, and I do.  The reasoning is something in Kaczynski’s motives being better understood as personal delirium as opposed to the political madness he blasted away from his Montana shack.

It’s the same vein some of the acts of Domestic Terrorism and/or personal vendettas we’ve had in these states in recent years — a Census Worker killed in Kentucky (probably more useful designation than with…), Edward Wycoff, 40, of the Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights, the murderer of an Arkansas politico, and … a few others sulking my archives.

Most of these acts of violence are better understood as individual distress leading to their horrid positions.  The ideology that lead them to kill infected them from personal breakdowns.  It’s difficult to know how to parse it out with the Fort Hood shooter as of now — and there appear to clearly be breakdowns in the bureacracy, but — for instance, it’s difficult not to read into the “encouragement” at the man looking into Islam as not being on par with the desire to get a person back to self improvement.  Obviously, the man’s suicidal mission was not what they had in mind.

But you can excuse Pat Robertson.  He’s just waiting around for something big to happen.

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