At the end of the day

Let’s have a little fun with the U.S. military and government and its most important talking points about the Fort Hood massacre.

The New York Times published this story.

I am going to take a page from Geert Wilders and assume that the Koran and Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, are equally odious in that they tell people to go out and kill other people who don’t agree with them and who belong to some identifiable class; in the case of the Koran it is Infidels, Jews and Christians, and in the case of Hitler’s bible, it is Jews, and that both books are political ideologies.

So in the Times story instead of Muslims, we will substitute Nazis, and pretend that we are back in the 1940s combating Nazism in Europe. We’ll cut out some superfluous reporting, and pretend that the shooter was a German American, and see what this looks like.

Army Chief Concerned for Nazi Troops

General George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, said on Sunday that he was concerned that speculation about the political beliefs of the officer accused of killing 12 fellow soldiers and one civilian and wounding dozens of others in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, could “cause a backlash against some of our Nazi soldiers.”

“I’ve asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that,” General Casey said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union. “It would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

General Casey, who was appeared on three Sunday news programs, used almost the same language during an interview on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” an indication of the Army’s effort to ward off bias against the more than 3,000 Nazis in its ranks.

“A diverse Army gives us strength,” General Casey, who visited Fort Hood Friday, said on “This Week.”

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” said that as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee he intended to investigate the officer’s suspected motives and whether the Army “missed warning signs that should have led them to essentially discharge him.”

“If he was showing signs, saying to people that he had become a complete and committed Nazi, and not just a half-assed, laissez-faire Nazi, the U.S. Army has to have zero tolerance,” Senator Lieberman said. “He should have been gone.”

Asked whether he thought the Army “dropped the ball” in not responding to warning signs that the officer was increasingly radical, General Casey replied that he was encouraging soldiers to provide information to criminal investigators. But he added that the Army needs to be careful not to jump to conclusions based on early tidbits of information.

“The speculation could heighten the backlash,” he said on “This Week.” “What happened at Fort Hood is a tragedy and I believe it would be a greater tragedy if diversity became a casualty here.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican of South Carolina, and Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat of Rhode Island, took also pains on Sunday to say that Nazis have served honorably in the military and at risk to their lives.

“At the end of the day this is not about his politics — the fact that this man was a Nazi,” Senator Graham said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“At the end of the day, maybe this is just about him. It’s certainly not about his politics, German National Socialism.”

He added: “To those members of the United States military who are Nazis, thank you for protecting our nation, thank you for standing up against Hitler who is trying to hijack your political beliefs.”