Allen West Explains How Crimea Made Obama Do The Fort Hood Shootings

See if you can follow the logic on this one, kids: On Fox's Hannity Wednesday night, automated mobile grievance unit Allen West suggested that the Fort Hood shootings were the inevitable result of Barack Obama's failure to recognize that America has international enemies. Now, by the time the program aired, it was pretty clear that Ivan Lopez wasn't connected to any terrorist group, but why not drag terrorism into the equation anyway? "If your only tool is a hammer," and you're a tool yourself, etc. Hannity asked the disgraced former torturer if Fort Hood resulted from forgetting that there's evil in this bad old world:

Let me go to the big picture about combatting evil in our time and this goes back to “man-caused disasters, overseas contingency operations,” that Major Hasan was “workplace violence.” Have we gotten too far away from 9/11 that we don’t remember the impact of that day?

We're frankly rather surprised he didn't shoehorn Benghazi in there, too.

West replied with some prime, grade-A bullshit about, naturally enough, the way that Obama's "weak" response to Crimea somehow gave the green light to a disturbed person in U.S. America to grab a gun and start shooting people:

I believe that’s a part of it and I believe also we have a civilian leadership that does not want to recognize that the enemy exists. You know, you look at what is happening in the Crimea when the president says that Vladimir Putin is “operating from a position of weakness.” So if you don’t want to admit that there’s evil, if you don’t want to admit that there’s an enemy, then you don’t have the right type of security protocols in place.

So in Allen West's analysis, Barack Obama is personally responsible for the security arrangements at domestic military bases, which are of course weak because Barack Obama didn't send the 82nd Airborne to fight the Russians in Crimea?

West didn't explain what "security protocols" he thinks would have prevented the Fort Hood shooting; the current favorite fantasy on the right is that if only military personnel were allowed to carry their sidearms at all time while on base, someone would have immediately shot Lopez. And so, of course, the real killers are Bill Clinton, for having "disarmed our soldiers" in 1993, and Barack Obama, for not having rescinded the policy after the Maj. Nidal Hasan's mass killings at Fort Hood in 2009. Except, of course, that's bullshit, too.

In another instance of Credit Where It's Due, let's take a moment to thank Glenn Beck's The Blaze for debunking that narrative after the Washington Navy Yard shootings last year: First off, the directive to restrict on-base carrying weapons was initiated by George H.W. Bush's Department of Defense in 1992, not under Bill Clinton -- the 1993 regulations during Clinton's term simply implemented a policy that had already been set under GHW Bush. (Yes, keep that link handy to confound your wingnut coworkers -- and be sure to tell 'em Glenn Beck sent you. It won't persuade them at all, but the moment of cognitive dissonance it triggers may be fun to watch.) And secondly, in the same article, Steven Bucci, an Army veteran and military expert at the Heritage Foundation -- you know, one of those liberal, gun-grabbing groups -- debunked the very assumption that the Clinton-era policy "disarmed our soldiers":

“I think you are barking up the wrong tree if you are looking to put blame on someone for disarming the military,” said Bucci, when asked if Clinton was responsible. “I think that’s kind of a bogus story.”

“We have never had our soldiers walking around with weapons all the time, other than in combat zones,” he added, noting only Military Police have had that authority.

Of course, that simply speaks to the weakness of GHW Bush and Bill Clinton, whose refusal to recognize that all soldiers need to be armed at all times probably encouraged al Qaeda to attack on 9/11.

[ Media Matters / Newshounds / The Blaze ]

 Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. Whenever he misses a deadline, he cites the cost overruns and production delays in the making of Apocalypse Now. Coppola is a terrible role model.