Barack Obama A Moral Cretin

Abe Greenwald of Commentary (h/t Larwyn) comments on the strange statement of Barack Hussein Obama concerning the mass murder at Fort Hood:

>Barack Obama asked that we not “jump to conclusions” about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who is alleged to have killed 13 Americans at Fort Hood last Thursday. Forget “jump to.” If only President Obama would crawl toward, or flirt with, or even stumble upon a conclusion, I’d be overjoyed. On this you can rely: Obama will never express a conclusive opinion on last Thursday’s massacre.

I happen to have been reading a wonderful book by the University of Chicago philosopher and classicist, Martha C. Nussbaum, entitled The Fragility of Goodness. The book was written in 1986. My philosophy professor at Sarah Lawrence College, Elfie Stock Raymond, was likely an admirer of Nussbaum because I see many parallels between Nussbaum's ideas and Elfie's that we discussed in conferences back in the early to mid 1970s, especially her rejection of Kantian ethics. Reading Nussbaum, 35 years later, I am able to better grasp that position.

The book is about moral complexity as seen through the eyes of Greek tragedians and philosophers, notably Aristotle. The third chapter, that I have been working through, is about Sophocles's Antigone. One of the themes of Greek tragedy is conflict among moral duties, and Antigone is about this, the conflict between Creon's unitary commitment to the good of the polis and Antigone's unitary commitment to her duties toward her dead brother, killed in a war against the same polis. Nussbaum argues that moral richness and complexity are at the heart of Sophocles's and other tragedians' vision, and that they contrast with a much more narrow vision of ethics of Plato, who sees an optimal moral path. The idea of moral optimality is carried forward by Kant. If you read Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem you see that Eichmann used Kant as a moral defense. This is consistent with Nussbaum's argument. Simplistic moral solutions are impoverished (p. 75):

>...the statement of human triumphs through reason turns out to be also a compressed document of reason's limitations, transgressions and conflicts. It suggests that the richer our scheme of values, the harder it will prove to effect a harmony within it. The more open we are to the presence of value, of divinity, in the world, the more surely conflict closes us in. The price of harmonization seems to be impoverishment, the price of richness disharmony. It looks, indeed, like an 'unwritten law' that 'nothing great comes into the life of mortals without disaster'. It is at this point that the men of the Chorus say, appropriately, 'looking on this strange portent, I think on both sides'.

I am waiting to get to Aristotle, but clearly his philosophy emphasizes the importance reconciliation of competing moral virtues.

Perhaps you can see the message for corporate maangement here. So many of our business leaders have had unitary moral codes. In the case of Jeffrey Skilling, the emphasis on creativity or the image of creativity at the expense of all other moral values. In the case of Robert Moses an emphasis on transportation flow at the expense of uprooting hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. In the case of the management theorist Chester Barnard, an emphasis on the moral code of the corporation at the expense of all other moral codes, including filial loyalty. These views are Kantian in that they assume a singular optimal moral solution. Barnard speaks of leadership as the creative reconciliation of moral codes, but his creativity is unitary in nature and so Creonic and Kantian--the simple value of corporate profit maximization is the ultimate good in his view; creativity comes in just to convince employees to forsake their other codes.

Here we have Barack Obama. His problem is not the conflict among virtues or the reconciliation of belief, but rather the bankruptcy of belief. He has no values at all. There is no moral ambiguity in an army officer's turning traitor to his country, murdering 13 people and wounding 30 more. Only an ethical cretin would claim that there is a need to "reserve judgment". What are the alternative moral considerations when one faces mass murder?

Obama's moral sickness reflects a deeper malaise in America. The nation has allowed ignorant ideologues to take control of its education system and its culture. School teachers who can barely read are indoctrinated in education schools as to cretinous, politically correct ideologies of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education. As a result, Americans have increasingly become moral degenerates addicted to failed government solutions and incapable of thinking logically. Barack Obama's cretinous morality is a symptom, not a root cause, of American decline.

Hasan: Murderous Therapy for an Irate Muslim

My neighbor has been after me to watch Glenn Beck on Fox and I tried to watch yesterday for the first time. I had given up television news after the 2008 election coverage, which was the worst, most incompetent partisan exercise I could have imagined, and do not believe I have missed anything by limiting my news consumption to e-mails from friends and bloggers. Most, if not all of what's in television news is diversionary drivel. The main question for America is the St. Louis Fed's money supply statistic, and that is rarely if ever mentioned on television news. It should be mentioned and analyzed for a minimum of two prime-time hours per month on every television news station. Instead, one can rely on lots of partisan and pro-Wall Street propaganda and few if any important facts.

Sadly, Beck was not on yesterday despite my honest effort to watch because of the mass murder at Fort Hood. The story is tragic and the loss of 13 lives and wounding of 30 is a matter of great sorrow.

There are a number of interesting questions about this incident, not only involving what seems to have been the Army's incompetent response to Nidal Malik Hasan's increasing militancy and vocally traitorous reluctance to go to Iraq. If you were listening to the coverage on Fox yesterday, even Hasan's cousin said that he was openly saying that he would refuse to go. This is fine for a hippy in Phoenicia, New York, not acceptable for a Major in the US Army.

Several of his colleagues in Fort Hood described ongoing statements that to my mind were aggressively disloyal, possibly going back to his problems at Walter Reed Medical Center. One of the callers to Fox News who knows Hasan said that Hasan was openly saying that he did not think he should have to fight another Muslim and that his loyalty to Islam was greater than to the United States. The way this caller was describing various statements Hasan had been publicly making at Fort Hood suggests that the Army was remiss in not investigating and removing him much, much earlier. One must wonder if political correctness played a role.

I am a Jew. But the minute I say that my allegiance to Israel takes any kind of precedence to my loyalty to the United States, I should leave the country.

There appears to be no reason to believe at this point that there was a conspiracy. Rather, Hasan had joined the military right out of high school; the military paid for his extensive education, including medical school; Hasan was a practicing psychiatrist; and about six or seven years ago Hasan publicly announced that he was a traitor to his country, preferring to insist on his cultural attachments to Islam over his oath of loyalty to the United States, even given the massive material benefits he has taken. Just on a material level, the man was amoral scum long before he killed all those people. Of course, his lack of virtue and willingness to accept material benefits from a nation to which he was disloyal all along are small vices compared to his horrific willingness to murder.

Hasan was a psychiatrist entrusted with the job of helping returning veterans cope with stress and readjustment. Yet, Hasan handled stress in a way that goes beyond incompetence. A butcher. A mass murderer. Yet, he had the training of a psychiatrist.

Might we conclude that psychiatric therapy is garbage, a bullshit discipline whose practitioners have no more claim to helping people than their exemplar, Nidal Malik Hasan? If so, might it be time for the American government to scrap all federal subsidies to this quack profession?

I do not claim that medical psychiatry is junk or that the advances made with respect to psychiatric drugs are. Rather, therapeutic psychiatry has never worked, yet due to political pressure they have cornered large public sums to subsidize their incompetent work. It is time this charade stopped.

The guy giving psychiatric advice on how to handle stress turned out to be a mass murderer. Think about it. It's your dime, people.

Second, it appears that there were no organized groups behind Hasan. Rather, he arrived at his violent response simply from his understanding of Islam. It seems to me that this evidence of an embedded impulse toward violence in the Islamic faith. I do not claim that most Muslims are violent. Just the opposite. Most are peaceful. But it is a lie to say that this pattern has not repeated itself over and over.

CAIR took a good first step in condemning this violence. A good second step is to begin to ask what are the assumptions in the Koran and the Islamic faith that have led repeatedly to this kind of bizarre behavior and how do we correct it through public utterance and religious exhortation.