Peggy Noonan has a typically brilliant, incisive comment on all the commentary on the VA Tech mass murder and murderer. Read it here.
The thread throughout is the complete lack of common sense among those supposed to be in charge, which in-and-of-itself is a serious indictment. To quote:
There seems to me a sort of broad national diminution of common sense in our country that we don't notice in the day-to-day but that become obvious after a story like this. Common sense says a person like Cho Seung-hui, who was obviously dangerous and unstable, should have been separated from the college population. Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and taken him away. It is only common sense that if a person like Cho leaves a self-aggrandizing, self-celebrating, self-pitying video diary of himself to be played by the mass media, the mass media should not play it and not publicize it, not make it famous. Common sense says that won't help.And:
The literally white-bearded academic who was head of the campus counseling center was on Paula Zahn Wednesday night suggesting the utter incompetence of officials to stop a man who had stalked two women, set a fire in his room, written morbid and violent plays and poems, been expelled from one class, and been declared by a judge to be "mentally ill" was due to the lack of a government "safety net." In a news conference, he decried inadequate "funding for mental health services in the United States." Way to take responsibility. Way to show the kids how to dodge.This one was, to my mind, the most illustrative:
The anxiety of our politicians that there may be an issue that goes unexploited was almost--almost--comic. They mean to seem sensitive, and yet wind up only stroking their supporters. I believe Rep. Jim Moran was first out of the gate with the charge that what Cho did was President Bush's fault. I believe Sen. Barack Obama was second, equating the literal killing of humans with verbal coarseness. Wednesday there was Sen. Barbara Boxer equating the violence of the shootings with the "global warming challenge" and "today's Supreme Court decision" upholding a ban on partial-birth abortion.As I stated yesterday, in a Washington Times column, media hounds couldn't even wait for bodies to be counted before they started clammoring for new gun control measures.
There is a common thread through all this. As Noonan says, it is the complete abdication of common sense. But I say it is more than that. It is the complete loss of moral compass. It is the complete surrender to lawyered responses to everything under the sun. It is the Liberal answer to everything.
As the Bible says: "The letter [of the law] killeth, but the spirit giveth life" (2 Cor. 3:6). The Virginia Tech killings have brought home just how deadly this misunderstanding can be.
The "letter of the law" is that bureacratic human invention that attempts to apply rote, safe, solutions to every situation. It is the response of grandiose, ego-driven fools, who believe their puny, typically cowardly, tail covering solutions can solve all problems. And it usually does - for them. It is the grand passion of those who would make themselves as gods, the most supreme form of arrogance.
At VA Tech, the clear answers were there all along, as Noonan points out. Where were the authorities when it became clear ages ago that this guy was dangerously off his nut?
Answer: like all good, compassionate liberals, they were faithfully out their "protecting" Cho's "dignity" and "human rights." They were faithfully out their making sure VA Tech was a "Gun Free Zone."
Instead, what they created was a "Free Fire Kill Zone" for a pathological lunatic. 32 people paid with their lives because Liberals insisted on their way of doing things. How many more will have to die before we wise up?
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