“Yet the gunman and his motive remain an enigma. And there were few clues about what sort of defense Major Hasan, a 40-year-old Army psychiatrist, would mount in the face of such overwhelming evidence.”
– “At Hearing on Fort Hood Attack, Few Clues” offered by the New York Times this past Friday. It was spotted by blogger “Uncle Meat”, who dubs this a clear case of “Journalistic Malpractice.”
(H/T: Small Dead Animals, who’s not waiting for the asteroid; meanwhile, Matt Welch wishes newspapers would simply cut to the chase.)
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Journalistic malpractice? It’s their stock in trade!
To extend the Arthur C. Clarke allusion, I think this is an example of Clark‘s Law. Many people are familiar with Clarke’s Third Law (“A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”) and Heinlein’s dictum (“You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity”) … Clark’s Law combines the two:
A sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
Soon after the massacre, Jim Treacher tweeted this about the MSM’s seeming inability to comprehend Nidal Hasan’s motives:
“If this idiot had been wearing an I Kill Unbelievers 4 the Glory of Allah t-shirt, they’d still be going, ‘Whuh-whuh-why did he do this?’”