Really? Medgar Evans?

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of the smartest woman in the world, Victor Davis Hanson thinks that Benghazi is the mother of all scandals.

[Mid-morning update]

Huma Abedin as the modern-day Alger Hiss?

It is increasingly common for the Left (and its reliable water boys in the loyal opposition like McCain) to demonize its opponents. In Hiss’s day, it wasn’t so common, but his case was the first big instance of it. It is now generally accepted among leftists that those who dare to stand against any aspect of the politically correct agenda are not only wrong. They are evil, morally bankrupt, and stupid to boot – except for the diabolical ingenuity they employed to frame their pure-as-the-driven-snow victims.

This is a pernicious tendency that conservatives should identify and reject whenever and wherever it appears, for the simple fact that even if all her accusers are terrible people who kick their Shih Tzus and don’t recycle, that would not in itself tell us anything about Huma Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. She could still be a Muslim Brotherhood operative even if her accusers were Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. And to hear the Left tell it, that’s exactly who they are: Alger Hiss and Huma Abedin are innocent, and if you don’t believe that, or even think the questions worthy of investigation, be ready to be bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness by an increasingly authoritarian and thuggish Left.

All the more reason to push back.

…by the federal government:

Any government employees that observe that Islamic terrorists themselves wrap themselves in the mantle of doctrinal Islam will quickly find themselves without a job. And when members of Congress have confronted senior administration officials as to whether elements of radical Islam have declared war on the U.S., those officials have angrily protested that Congress merely asking such questions puts them in league with al-Qaeda.

Then there’s the constitutional problem. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment requires the U.S. government to remain agnostic on these sorts of questions. It’s doubtful that Jen Psaki is going to be denouncing respective sides in Northern Ireland as “enemies of Christ,” especially when State can’t bring itself to even admit that attacks on Christians by Islamic groups are religiously motivated.

And of course, this is an administration that calls confessed killing in the name of Allah “workplace violence.”

Who made Jan Psaki an expert on who is and is not an “enemy of Islam”? The first thing I thought when I heard that news this morning is that the ACLU, if they wanted to maintain the slightest level of non-hypocrisy, would be filing a lawsuit. I won’t hold my breath.

Some thoughts from Mark Steyn:

Major Hasan is a Virginia-born army psychiatrist and a recipient of the Pentagon’s Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, which seems fair enough, since he certainly served in it, albeit for the other side. Most Americans think he’s nuts. He thinks Americans are nuts. It’s a closer call than you’d think. In the immediate aftermath of his attack, the U.S. media, following their iron-clad rule that “Allahu akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here,” did their best to pass off Major Hasan as the first known victim of pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “It comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers,” fretted Andrew Bast in a report the now defunct Newsweek headlined, “A Symptom of a Military on the Brink.”

Major Hasan has never been in combat. He is not, in fact, a soldier. He is a shrink. The soldiers in this story are the victims, some 45 of them. And the only reason a doctor can gun down nearly four dozen trained warriors (he was eventually interrupted by a civilian police officer, Sergeant Kimberly Munley, with a 9mm Beretta) is that soldiers on base are forbidden from carrying weapons. That’s to say, under a 1993 directive a U.S. military base is effectively a gun-free zone, just like a Connecticut grade school. That’s a useful tip: If you’re mentally ill and looking to shoot up a movie theater at the next Batman premiere, try the local barracks — there’s less chance of anyone firing back.

Maybe this Clinton-era directive merits reconsideration in the wake of Fort Hood? Don’t be ridiculous. Instead, nine months after Major Hasan’s killing spree, the Department of Defense put into place “a series of procedural and policy changes that focus on identifying, responding to, and preventing potential workplace violence.”

Major Hasan says he’s a soldier for the Taliban. Maybe if the Pentagon were to reclassify the entire Afghan theater as an unusually prolonged outburst of “workplace violence,” we wouldn’t have to worry about obsolescent concepts such as “victory” and “defeat.” The important thing is that the U.S. Army’s “workplace violence” is diverse. After Major Hasan’s pre-post-traumatic workplace wobbly, General George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff, was at pains to assure us that it could have been a whole lot worse: “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty.” And you can’t get much more diverse than letting your military personnel pick which side of the war they want to be on.

I’d like to think that this is the epitome of the absurdity and insanity of the government’s approach to the war. Sadly, though, I suspect that they will take it to greater heights.

Egyptians are enraged by it. They should be. I am, too.

And someone needs to primary McCain:

McCain’s remarks and actions in Egypt have further confirmed the popular narrative — as memorably displayed by countless anti-Brotherhood and anti-Obama placards raised during the June 30 Revolution — that U.S. leadership is aligned with the Brotherhood, and thus ultimately a supporter of terrorism.

What a fool. What an awful choice we had in 2008.

Gee, why won’t Baghdad Tim answer any questions?

Was it issued by Valerie Jarrett?

Is it wag the dog?

…the indefinite shutdown of 20 U.S. embassies in the Mideast and Africa after the announcement of a for-sure, impending terrorist mega-attack looks suspiciously gift-wrapped and well-timed.

For one thing, if we’re on the eve of a possible “9/11 junior,” what on earth is the president of the U.S. doing going on the Tonight Show for the umpteenth time?

Why is funny man Jay Leno the one who gets to ask Obama about al-Qaida, but he’s too busy for queries without punch lines from the Washington press corps?

The paradox is dizzying: The new “on its heels” al-Qaida, whose charismatic leader “Osama bin Laden is no more,” as Obama boasted during last year’s campaign, may no longer be as centralized, and CIA director John O. Brennan may claim al-Qaida has its eyes on regional preoccupations rather than on attacking us.

Yet this supposedly weakened “network of local-actor organizations,” as German Marshall Fund analyst Hassan Mneimneh described it to USA Today, has managed to shut down U.S. diplomatic facilities indefinitely in a strategically vital region stretching 6,700 miles by 1,700 miles, as the State Department frightens thousands of Americans out of traveling.

And apparently all because current al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri told a flunky in Yemen to “Do something!”

Who is really “on its heels” or “on the run,” to use the president’s campaign rhetoric last year — the terrorists or the U.S.?

When you shut down that many embassies, the terrorists win.

[Update a few minutes later]

The problem is that the administration refuses to admit we’re at war, instead insanely thinking that wars can be “ended” (the thought of actually winning one, against foreign, as opposed to domestic enemies, in anathema to them) by unilaterally declaring it over. And such a delusional attitude manifests itself like this:

Don’t look to Obama for leadership, especially in the area where his constitutional responsibilities are highest — protecting the nation’s security. In fact, Bagram is a problem of his own creation. Obama cannot reach an agreement with the Afghans to continue operating the base. No doubt Afghan president Hamid Karzai is none too happy about being abandoned in the middle of a fight. The administration cannot send the enemy prisoners to their home countries, such as Yemen or Pakistan, because these countries cannot be trusted to hold them. Obama will not move the prisoners to Guantanamo Bay because he has ordered that no prisoners be added there (which has reduced U.S. captures of al-Qaeda leaders to almost zero and cut off our most valuable source of intelligence on the enemy). He cannot bring them to the U.S. because of congressional opposition to his earlier attempt to move the Gitmo prisoners to the continental U.S.

Absolutely nuts.

[Update a couple minutes later]

This terror alert is “crazy pants“:

If ordinary Americans are confused, they’re in good company. Analysts who’ve devoted their careers to studying al Qaida and U.S. counterterrorism strategy can’t really make sense of it, either. There’s general agreement that the diffuse list of potential targets has to do with either specific connections authorities are tracking, or places that might lack the defenses to ward off an attack. Beyond that, however, even the experts are stumped.

Take this sampling of reactions from prominent al Qaida observers:

“It’s crazy pants – you can quote me,” said Will McCants, a former State Department adviser on counterterrorism who this month joins the Brookings Saban Center as the director of its project on U.S. relations with the Islamic world.

“We just showed our hand, so now they’re obviously going to change their position on when and where” to attack, said Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst who was part of the team that hunted Osama bin Laden for years.

“It’s not completely random, but most people are, like, ‘Whaaat?’” said Aaron Zelin, who researches militants for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and blogs about them at Jihadology.net

“I’m not going to argue that it’s not willy-nilly, but it’s hard for me to come down too critical because I simply don’t know their reasoning,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism specialist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington research institute.

I think he’s being generous in assuming that there is actual reasoning going on.