The Right Wing Phrase of the Day Is “Political Correctness”

While scrolling through my RSS feeds this morning, I noticed a trend developing in that just about every right-wing column on the tragic killings at Fort Hood seemed to lay the ultimate blame on “political correctness.”

Martha Zoeller – Human Events:

Ralph Peters, a retired Army officer and military analyst, said, “It’s not a question of security per se, but of political correctness gone haywire. Had Major Hasan been a white Christian or Jew, his butt would’ve been out on the street years ago. But Muslims are a protected species in our military.” Peters went on to say, “Radical Muslim chaplains? Still on duty. Muslim psychiatrist (of all things) praises suicide bombers on the web and tries to convert his patients to Islam? Hush-hush. And so we have 51 patriots (not merely 44, as previously reported) gunned down, with 13 dead. And our president and his generals won’t even use the word “terror,” let alone the phrase “Islamist terror.” Political correctness killed those Americans at Ft. Hood as surely as did the Muslim fanatic who pulled the trigger.”

Rowan Scarborough – Human Events:

The FBI failed to intercede against Fort Hood terrorist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as a result of its politically correct strategy of reaching out to suspect Islamic groups and clerics instead of combating head-on the Muslim radicalization movement in the United States.

Cal Thomas – World Magazine:

If you were an enemy of America, not only would you fight overseas and develop nuclear weapons (Iran), you would also engage in an even more effective strategy by striking at America’s underbelly. This is our most vulnerable region because we now tolerate virtually everything, indulge in political correctness, and subscribe to a bogus belief that if radical Islamists can see we mean them no harm, they will mean us no harm.

National Review Symposium:

Is the Fort Hood massacre a deadly example of political correctness run amok? National Review Online asked a few of our experts for their observations on how the shooting happened and what we can do to prevent similar incidents in the future.

National Review Editorial:

We see the operation of the same political correctness that cocooned Major Hasan in his Army career. Fellow soldiers noticed his strident and unbalanced behavior, but did not report him, lest they discriminate against him (or — their more likely fear — be rebuked for discrimination). He was invited to attend a conference of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University in 2008. (Major Hasan, as it turned out, had a lot to say — not that he would have said it all, or that his plump-minded peers would have listened, even if he had.) We should not be surprised that journalists and pundits are no smarter than our defense and security bureaucracies.

David Limbaugh – WorldNetDaily:

Even as more and more realize oppressive political correctness is damaging our nation and killing our people, we still hold ourselves hostage to it. We can’t criticize Obama on his policy agenda without absurd accusations of racism, and now our authorities’ first instinct after the mass murder at Fort Hood is to victimize the identified shooter – Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan – rather than to protect our soldiers.

The military is the last place we should expect political correctness to flourish. We recognize, after all, that our armed forces exist primarily to safeguard our national security, not as a laboratory for social experimentation. Or do we?

Dennis Prager – WorldNetDaily:

Another classmate told the AP that he complained to five officers and two civilian faculty members at the university. He also wrote to Pentagon officials that fear in the military of being seen as politically incorrect prevented an “intellectually honest discussion of Islamic ideology” in the ranks.

David Kupelian – WorldNetDaily:

Political correctness” – which is basically a low-grade Stockholm syndrome playing out on a broad societal stage – is actually a subtle form of brainwashing. Even establishment mouthpiece Newsweek, in its famous Dec. 24, 1990, cover story on the then-new phenomenon of political correctness on college campuses (titled “Thought Police”) conceded this truth when it reported: “PC is, strictly speaking, a totalitarian philosophy.”

This inordinate fear, implanted in us by the lords of politically correct attitude, the subtle brainwashers of modern, secular society, is to blame. … The evil of “political correctness” – the totalitarian manipulation of thought, foisted on us by twisted elitist sociopaths who hate America and everything our soldiers have fought and died for over the last two centuries, and continue to fight and die for – has to end. Now. It’s over. This nation must rise up and defy the insane thought control that is destroying our country right before our eyes.

Chuck Norris – Town Hall:

And the questions that keep coming to my mind are: Have we become so tolerant and politically correct that we can’t see or confront a rotten apple when it’s right in front of our eyes? When our fear of discrimination enables our enemies, can’t we see something is grimly amiss? … Why would the commander in chief even take up his precious media time immediately after this brutal rampage to encourage tolerance and political correctness concerning this psychotic killer? As a veteran of the Air Force and honorary Marine, I am appalled.