As a follow-up of sorts to our earlier post on Muzzammil Hassan, “Ft. Hood’s victims: sacrificed for PC,” Michael Walsh writes in the New York Post:

Lieberman and Collins put their fingers on the problem: “Despite Hasan’s overt displays of radicalization to violent Islamist extremism, Hasan’s superiors failed to discipline him, refer him to counterintelligence officials or seek to discharge him. One of the officers who reported Hasan to superiors opined that Hasan was permitted to remain in service because of ‘political correctness’ and ignorance of religious practices.”

It couldn’t be much clearer than that.

Since the Clinton administration, the military has been subjected to an unprecedented assault on its core values, its traditions and its honor. It’s become a laboratory for social experiment as its desk-jockey officer corps clamber up the greasy pole of promotion — and, just as in civilian life, getting people like Maj. Hasan promoted in the name of the dubious virtue “diversity” was one such path.

It’s time for that to stop. If anybody should be in the business of clear-headed threat analysis, it’s the US military. “Political correctness,” which literally seeks to make certain speech unthinkable, should have no place in a free society.

On Dec. 8, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress. We all remember his famous opening: “Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy . . .” But the words that followed were what rallied Americans:

“As commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense, that always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory . . . We will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.”

The men and women of our armed forces are fully prepared to die on the battlefield, when we ask them to. What we should never do is ask them to die on the altar of political correctness.

While Britain’s prime minster may have recently been cured of multi-culti blindness as Canadian TV journalist Michael Coren recently quipped, sadly, the era of “Better Dead than Rude,” as John Derbyshire quipped in mid-2002, will likely be with us for a long time to come.