CBS Headline: Faisal Shahzad's Motive Shrouded In Mystery

At Hot Air.

It's amazing to me how the media is so confident in the accuracy of their speculations about right-wing motives-- racism, hatred, anger, etc. -- and yet never seems to be able to turn this talent for psychological profiling towards Islamic terrorists.

I guess it's like the various Force telepathy tricks -- this only works on the weak-minded, and we all know, we have weak minds. I guess it's just so much easier for them to dig around our skulls than Islamists.

In related news, CNN is considering filing a suit against CBS for plagiarism. CNN ran a very similar headline just a half year ago:

Army honors dead, searches for motive in Fort Hood shootings

But then, a lot of people were running that headline:

Sunday’s New York Times “Week in Review” article about Nidal Hasan was titled “When Soldiers Snap.” The gist of the article was that Maj. Hasan had snapped — even though he had never been in combat. He snapped in advance. Just two sentences in the article were devoted to the possibility that his motives were in any way relatable to his Muslim faith.

As Chris Matthews put it, “it’s unclear if religion was a factor in this shooting.” To Matthews, not only was it unclear if Hasan’s Islamic faith was “the” factor, it was unclear if it was even “a” factor.

Likewise, on NPR, Tom Gjelten offered the novel explanation that Hasan, who has never been in combat, may have suffered from “pre-traumatic stress disorder” because he anticipated having traumatic distress. “Was he an example,” Gjelten seriously asked, “of these soldiers who are literally freaked out by what they are likely to face when they are deployed?”

And on Fox News, Geraldo Rivera, said, “I don’t know what motivates him … as far as I know … he’s a sociopath; he’s a criminal. He could have had a toothache and gone off because of that.”

Geraldo, of course, was eerily prescient -- we all know now, with the benefit of hindsight, that it was in fact due to a toothache.

We really need to enlist Chris Matthews and Dylan Rattigan and Contessa Brewer and Keith Olbermann and the rest of the MSNBC line-up -- nay, the entirety of the media firmament -- to a secret Islamist mind-reading unit. We could have this war won in days if only we put these Ninja Psychics to work scanning the minds of Islamists.

Seriously, it's scary how they so perfectly report to me my motivations and intent for every single thing I say and every single thing I do and even every single thing I merely hope for. They're in my brain so much I should charge them rent.

We've got to get the ESP A-Team into the war effort. It's just that important. Everything turns on this.

posted by Ace at 03:43 PM

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