Looks like our own Nicole isn't the only one slamming the Swiss for this. Jon Stewart takes a whack at them as well.

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Yesterday, during the Fox News broadcast of the memorial service for the victims at Fort Hood, Fox contributor Bill Sammon took this the next step: He began openly referring to the Fort Hood case as a "terrorist attack" and actually compared it to Oklahoma City and 9/11:

Sammon: I think it's really going to be key to see the tone and tenor of the Commander in Chief when he addresses this crowd. Because it's actually a very important moment in his presidency.

Think about this. This is the first time that he's going to be responding in a major way to, really the first major act of terrorism against the United States on our soil. And there's some similarities and some analogies to when President Clinton addressed the nation after Oklahoma City, to when George W. Bush went to address the nation from Ground Zero -- both of those times, just like this, were early on in the presidencies, and really, in those earlier two examples, to some extent, they were, uh, forums in which the presidents sort of found their voices, especially if you think about Ground Zero, where President Bush had trouble sort of presenting a real strong, uh, public face for the first couple of days, and then he went to Ground Zero and said, 'I can hear you, and pretty soon the people here are going to hear from all of us.'

So it's an important moment when a president addresses the nation in the wake of a terrorist act against U.S. interests.

Throughout the day Fox was running a logo calling the event "Attack on Fort Hood," and featuring investigative reports suggesting that the shooter, Nidal Hasan, was acting at the bidding of radical imams -- even though none of the evidence so far actually concretely shows that Hasan was acting as an Islamic terrorist.

Indeed, most of the evidence so far seems to indicate this was a militarized case of "going postal" -- which is always a horrific thing, but lacks the political/ideological component that always defines real acts of terrorism.

President Obama, in fact, has been urging the public not to leap to unwarranted conclusions about the shooter's motives. Looks like Fox News and Bill Sammon have decided to just ignore that advice. After all, they have an agenda to push.

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From This Week with George Stephanopoulos, an interview with Gen. George Casey in which (of course) we use the "terrorism" label, but the general also worries that speculation about the Ft. Hood shootings will fan the fires of bigotry in the military:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You say you can't talk too much about the investigation, but we are learning a fair amount about Major Hasan in the last couple of days. And it appears that there were several warning signs they either could have or should have been caught.

His fellow students and here in Bethesda, Maryland, say that he had anti-American rants at various presentations. The FBI has found some Internet postings by a man with Mr. Hasan's name, very inflammatory, praising suicide bombers.

And one of the major's fellow students has been especially concerned by what he said. He said that it was very clear to him, and his name is
Val Finnell, that -- and that he had complained to administrators at a military university about these anti-American rants. And the AP story that quotes him goes on to say that Hasan's fellow students complained to the faculty about Hasan's anti-American propaganda, but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept off the students from filing a formal complaint. Is that true?

CASEY: I think we need to be very careful here about speculating based on anecdotes like that. We are encouraging all of our soldiers and leaders that may have information pertaining to the suspect to come forward with that information to the criminal investigation division and to the FBI. So, I realize there is a lot out there. We all want to know what happened and what motivated the suspect, but I think we need to be very, very careful here in these early days to let the investigation take its course. These are professionals and they will sort through this.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So it's fair to say that right now, you can't rule out anything. We don't know if this was an act of premeditated political terror, or if this was a case of someone who just snapped.

CASEY: I think you are exactly right, and I don't think we should speculate on one or the other or any other possibilities.

STEPHANOPOULOS: One of the things this does raise, though, is the special challenge paused to all of you by Muslims in the military.

There are only about 3,000 Muslims in the military right now, and on the one hand, you want to recruit Muslims. There is a great need for Muslims in the military right now. On the other hand, this is not the first case we've seen of fratricide by someone with a Muslim background in the military. How do you deal with this challenge?

CASEY: Again, I think that's something else we need to be very careful about, and I think the speculation could potentially heighten backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. And what happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here. And it's not just about Muslims. We have a very diverse army. We have a very diverse society.

And that gives us all strength. So again, we need to be very careful with that.

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The right-wingers were out in force yesterday in their attempt to paint the Fort Hood shootings as an act of radical Islamist jihadi terrorism, and claiming that "political correctness" kept the military from screening him as a threat -- evidently simply because he was Muslim.

Kicking things off bright and early on that front were the gang at Fox Friends, especially Brian Kilmeade and Gretchen Carlson. Kilmeade asked Geraldo Rivera early on the show:

Kilmeade: Do you think it’s time for the military to have special debriefings of Muslim Army officers — anybody enlisted? Because if I'm going to be in a foxhole, if I'm gonna be stuck in an outpost, I've gotta know the guy next to me is not gonna wanna kill me.

Actually, Brian, they wouldn't have to be Muslim, or anything else, to want that -- especially, one suspects, after more than an hour in close proximity to your charming personality.

Then Carlson chimed in:

Carlson: I want to ask this question another way. Could it be that the military, because our society -- let's face it, our society has become very politically correct -- could it be that the military was also exercising political correctness, even though he had a poor performance report, and even though he spoke openly about being a radical Muslim, and had those supposed postings online, could it be that the military was exercising political correctness in not approaching him as seriously as they would have had he not been a Muslim?

Rivera answers "Yes," of course, but the answer is actually, "Political correctness has nothing to do with it." After all, the Army allows neo-Nazis within its ranks to post online and does not treat them as a particular threat -- even though they pose a variety of problems, not the least of which is that they tend to become violent themselves. If the military is practicing "political correctness," it's a peculiar kind.

Moreover, as Spencer Ackerman put it, this is a spectacularly short-sighted bit of bigotry.

But this is the way it goes. We were told by Fox News that to blame right-wingers for the actions of George Tiller’s murderer or the anti-Semite who shot up the Holocaust Museum was out of line. But Muslim soldiers — people who guard the freedoms that Fox bleats about with jingoistic sanctimony — are to be slandered by association. This is a disgrace to the memories of Spc. Kareem R. Khan, Capt. Humayun Saqib Khan, and so many others who have given their lives for this country.

David Frum, notably, chimes in with a provocative reminder for the jingoes.

That was only the beginning. These same notes were repeated throughout the day. Ackerman also noticed Allen West, a former Army lieutenant colonel "promoted by the National Republican Congressional Committee," quoted in The Hill:

"This enemy preys on downtrodden soldiers and teaches them extremism will lift them up,” West said in a statement. “Our soldiers are being brainwashed.”

The release added that West claims “the horrible tragedy at Fort Hood is proof the enemy is infiltrating our military.”

Then there was Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey:

Retired 4-Star General Barry McCaffrey, who attended a fundraiser Thursdays night in Rochester for the Veterans Outreach Center, believes today's shooting could turn out to be an act of terrorism. “This is going to turn out to be a political act. People who are frightened of deployment don't murder their fellow soldiers. This was completely out of the ordinary, we've never seen anything like this. We have murders periodically in the armed forces, but it's somebody 20 years old, drunk, it's two o’clock in the morning, it's drugs, it's girls, it's cards its something so this was planned mass murder.”

Blue Texan at Firedoglake has a decent roundup from the wingnutosphere. Media Matters has the rundown of the insanity in the right-wing media.

Interestingly, later that morning on Fox and Friends, Kilmeade interviewed two real experts -- Dr. Paul Ragan, a former Navy psychiatrist, and Pat Brown, a professional criminal profiler -- who basically tried to explain that he was full of crap when he tried to paint the event as an act of Islamic jihad.

Kilmeade: It seems to me, Pat, religion plays a role. He perhaps was on a different mission.

Brown: Well, Brian, actually, I think religion does not play a role in this. What we're actually looking at is a typical mass murderer.

Mass murderers are either two age groups. They are either teenagers, who are disgruntled with where they are in life, and don't think they're going to be anything -- those teenagers that say 'I'm being bullied and nobody likes me, and so let me take everybody out -- or they're middle-aged men who are going downhill in life -- they're having problems with people, personality issues, you know, going up against authority. For whatever reasons, they're failing, and then when they start failing they have to find something to hang their hat on, they have to blame something.

So he happened to pick what he picked. But I don't think it really has anything to do with him being Muslim or any kind of "jihad." I think he just wanted to kill people and this was his excuse.

Kilmeade: Well, he did yell out, "Allah," that's kind of an odd thing to yell out for somebody who was just unhappy with his success in life.

Brown: But he was already going downhill. He's a psychopath, and that -- he's gonna say something.

Ragan went on to back up Brown's assessment. Kilmeade just didn't want to hear it.

Nobody on the right does. Because it's so much easier to bash Muslims when you have great cover like this, and the folks on the right aren't going to let it go to waste.

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Bill O'Reilly allows Fox News "Strategic Analyst" Lt. Col. Ralph Peters to go on a rant calling the shooting at Fort Hood "the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9-11" with little to no push back other than to say that Hasan may have had personal problems that had little to do with his religion and time will tell if his religion was the primary reason for the shooting spree. The race baiting manifested itself in full force when Peters made this statement which O'Reilly left un-countered.

Peters: Yeah, well first of all, the charge that you know, he was harassed and he broke, good god, I mean every soldier goes through a little harassment, but let me tell you from personal experience, if there’s harassment toward a minority or a religious minority in our military, man…your career is over for harassing. And this guy filed a charge that was found, there was no foundation to the charge. He’d been a trouble maker and a sad sack for a long time but because he was part of a protected species, a protected minority, the Army let him slide, just reassigned him, and what happened? 13 soldiers, fellow soldiers and civilian dead, 28 seriously wounded, a few more lightly wounded and what do we say?

Oops? No, it’s time to get rid of the PC culture in the Army, in society, in the media, and Bill I believe your viewers understand that this was an act of Islamist terror, and the media is not going to fool them and President Obama’s not going to fool them and at some point we need to quit focusing on “Oh how tormented this poor Maj. Hasan was, and remember, what…how many of the names do we know of the dead? What about the names of the wounded? Have the media covered the family lives that have been destroyed? The lives that have been destroyed? No. It’s all about poor Maj. Hasan and I am ready to puke.

O’Reilly: Alright Col. we appreciate that very much.

What sort of mindset does it take to be able to equate human beings to a "protected species”? This was truly just disgusting to watch. And while I do not disagree with some of what Peters said, such as paying attention to the fact that there are a whole lot of families out there going through what are some really horrific times right now because of this tragedy, calling this the “worst terrorist attack since 9-11” is utterly ridiculous. And I would hope that we are taking a better look at why this man snapped other than the cartoon-like stereotype that Peters attempted to paint here and using this as an excuse to demonize or dehumanize the Muslim community.

I have a lot of questions about just what happened to cause this tragic and very sad event. I don’t have a lot of faith that any of us will have those questions ever answered honestly any time soon. In the mean time, we can count on Fox News to draw their own conclusions if it means drumming up the fear factor and racial tensions in America for ratings.

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During some of the media's endless coverage of the Fort Hood shootings today, Larry King brought in former POW Shoshana Johnson, Dr. Phil McGraw and former JAG officer Tom Kenniff to speculate about what the mindset of the accused attacker Nidal Malik Hasan may have been. When Kenniff called some of CNN's previous coverage on the topic "psycho-babble", tried to say that a ranking officer could not be suffering from PTSD and asserted that Hasan's motivations looked more like an act of terrorism because he has a Muslim name, Shoshana Johnson and Phil McGraw both rightfully called him out for it.

When Kenniff while attempting to counter McGraw and Johnson asked Johnson if she had ever been to Iraq, she had to remind him that she was a POW:

KENNIF: I spent a year in Iraq, ma'am. Have you ever been to Iraq?

JOHNSON: I'm a POW. I got shot.

Kenniff was obviously unaware that Johnson was in fact the first female African American POW in U.S. history.

KING: We're back.

We are happy to be able to call on our friend, Dr. Phil, the host of his own show, "New York Times" best-selling author and a -- and a member of the fraternity that is from Texas.

In fact, do you know Fort Hood?

DR. PHIL MCGRAW, TV SHOW HOST: I do. I've been there and I've spent time working with some of the widows of soldiers and widows and widowers of soldiers that were lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I've spent time on Fort Hood. And it's a -- it's a wonderful...

KING: It's a huge base, right?

MCGRAW: It's 339 acres. It's a city within itself down there. And on any given day, you can have 30,000 or 40,000 people on the base. It truly is a city within a city and good folks. And, as the general said, it's -- it's their home. I mean this isn't a war zone, it's their home.

KING: I asked the FBI if he had -- the FBI agent if he had ever heard of a psychiatrist committing mayhem. He never had.

Have you?

MCGRAW: Well, no, I have not. But, Larry, we're dealing with a very different kind of war here. And, you know, this is a man that, from what I understand, was doing all kinds of drug and rehabilitation counseling with -- with soldiers and returning soldiers. And we know that there is a tremendous degree of stress with this war. And I think the military will tell you that it's a new animal and nobody knows exactly what to do with it. And I don't know -- everything is speculation at this point. But he was apparently scheduled for deployment, did not want to go. I think he has maybe seen the problems that some of these soldiers were experiencing when they come back to try to reintegrate into society, and maybe the fear got him, and he just snapped.

You can't make sense out of nonsense. And you have to stop and think about this, Larry. How far out of touch with reality and reason do you have to go to actually pick up a weapon and kill your friends, kill your fellow soldiers, your fellow warriors? This is a major mental event. This guy was not just having a bad day. This is a serious, serious --

KING: Joining us in New York is Tom Kennif a commissioned officer with the Army National Guard's Judge Advocates General Group. He is a general with the war in Iraq, and a criminal defense attorney. In Washington, our old friend Shoshanna Johnson, former POW, U.S. Army specialist, now serves on the Advisory Panel for the Veterans Administration.

Dr. Phil is with us here in the studios in Los Angeles.

Tom, what do you make of this?

TOM KENNIFF, FMR. ARMY JAG: Look, Larry, you know, with all due respect to Dr. Phil, you know, having been through the war in Iraq, and having seen what these soldiers go through, you know, with respect to this incident, I need to take a giant step back from all the psycho-babble I've been hearing for the last few hours.

Let's take a look at the facts of this situation. This is not some lower enlisted soldier. This is a major. He is a high ranking field grade officer. That means that he outranks approximately 95 percent of the military.

He has a medical -- he is a medical doctor. He is an MD. That means he occupies a position of prestige, not only within the military, but also within society at large.

He is paid well for the job he does. You know, this looks a lot less like PTSD, and a lot more like the Hassan Akbar case in 2003, where another soldier who has an Islamic last name, throws grenades randomly into tents occupied by his fellow officers, and by his fellow soldiers, for no other reason but to commit acts of terror, and to instill fear on the military installation, and to bring attention to himself.

SHOSHANA JOHNSON, FORMER POW: Hello.

KING: Are you doing, Tom -- by mentioning Islamic last name, are you doing speculating of your own?

KENNIFF: I am speculating. . That's true. We have very limited information right now. But we're all speculating. And what I'm saying is my speculation seems to fit a lot more in with the reality of this case.

JOHNSON: No. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. I think you're talking --

(CROSS TALK)

KING: Hold it. Let's --

MCGRAW: I don't think you can say that. I think that's a terrible innuendo here.

(CROSS TALK)

JOHNSON: As someone who suffers from PTSD, I know exactly what I say to my psychiatrist. And if he is sitting back and hearing this day in and day out, the fear may get to him. The fact of the matter that he is a major, or the fact that he is a doctor doesn't excuse that he is a human being and he feels.

You're saying because he is a major in the Army that he is not going to feel the way a private does.

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No sooner was the identity of the Fort Hood shooter released -- a man with the Arab name Nadal Malik Hasan -- than the wingnuts sprang into predictable action: Of course he was a jihadi embarking on a murderous terrorism spree!

Pam "Atlas Barks" Geller immediately proclaimed it "an obvious act terrorism" and ran big all all caps heads declaring: "IT'S THE JIHAD STUPID." Elsewhere in the right blogosphere, people like the folks at HotAir jumped all over the "news" that Hasan was a convert to Islam.

Then Shepard Smith interviewed Hasan's cousin, and we found out that this was all so much tripe:

-- Hasan was American born and educated, but raised Muslim. He was not a convert.

-- He had never previously been deployed to Iraq or anywhere overseas, for that matter. So much for the theories he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

-- He was regularly abused by his colleagues in the military for being Muslim -- called a "raghead" and other such terms -- and had been seeking to get out of the military because the environment had become so hostile.

Another interview, on just before this one, that Smith had with a former colleague of Hasan's indicated that Hasan was prone to making outrageous remarks about Muslims "defending themselves," particularly in reference to last summer's shooting of two military recruiters in Arkansas by a Muslim convert.

There are also reports that he had recently been the victim of a hate crime: His car was vandalized, with the word "Allah" scratched into the paint, and he was reportedly extremely upset by it.

It's obviously a complicated story. We'd all be well advised to reserve the speculation to actual hard facts about the case as they emerge. But it certainly appears this is much a matter of Columbine-like backlash to bullying as it is anything ideological.

And no, it's not the Jihad, stupid.

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Rep. Sue Myrick, the crazy Republican from North Carolina, is an Islamaphobe's Islamaphobe. She's been at it since Day One, bashing Muslims and concocting paranoid theories about their nefarious intentions. Who can forget the time she wondered whether there was something to all those strangely accented people who run the nation's convenience stores?

Now she has fresh meat for that grill, torn straight from the pages of WorldNetDaily:

A group of House Republicans is calling for an investigation into whether a leading American Muslim advocacy group tried to "spy" on congressional offices by placing interns on key security committees.

Rep. Sue Myrick, North Carolina Republican, cited an internal January 2007 memo in which the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) discussed placing Muslim interns on Capitol Hill to "focus on influencing congressmen responsible for policy that directly impacts the American Muslim community."

As Steve Benen explains, this is classic right-wing paranoia -- mixed with its usual underhanded criminality:

The book Myrick, Shadegg, Broun, and Franks are relying on was published by WorldNetDaily, a radical fringe website that recently "reported" that the Obama administration is considering Nazi-like concentration camps for dissidents.

The book's co-author's son pretended to be Muslim to infiltrate the not-so-nefarious organization as an apparent intern. (Put another way, "the dastardly plot to plant Muslim interns as spies on the Hill was uncovered by an intern acting as a spy.") The book's co-author's son alleges that CAIR -- an entirely legitimate, mainstream advocacy group, that is not "connected to" terrorists -- is secretly plotting, using fake interns as pawns in some elaborate scheme.

So, do Myrick, Shadegg, Broun, and Franks know of any intern/spies CAIR has sent to Capitol Hill? Actually, no, but they heard about this book and want an investigation anyway.

Honestly, I get the sense that some of these guys are getting dumber as time goes on.

As for "infiltration" of CAIR, the man who pretended to be a Muslim and an intern apparently took as many documents from the organization as he could during his time there, and discovered that the lobbying group intends to do "ordinary lobbying work on Capitol Hill." When Myrick, Shadegg, Broun, and Franks released an internal CAIR "strategy" document yesterday, they unveiled "a fairly straight forward public relations and lobbying strategy."

Media Matters has more context. Think Progress has details on the criminal aspect of it all:

Now, CAIR has filed a criminal complaint against the authors of the book, alleging that the memo they are using to attack CAIR was stolen. Indeed, Sperry was interviewed by Radio America yesterday and admitted that the planted intern “collected whole boxes of evidence marked for shredding” and took documents that “he felt he needed to preserve as evidence [of illegal wrongdoing].” ...

According to DC law, the authors could be guilty of conspiracy to commit theft with a “bias-related crime” specification, meaning that they could face up to 15 years in prison if the stolen document is deemed to have a value of $250 or more, or only 270 days if it is deemed to have less value.

Glenn Greenwald has more.

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(Class of '78 - Voted Most Likely To Succeed)

Another case of history repeating itself. We all like to think the troubles in Afghanistan began in December 1979, when Soviet troops massed on the Afghan border and invaded.

Nope, 'fraid not. It actually got started in 1973 with the initial overthrow of the monarchy, during a staged coup when the King was in Italy having eye surgery. But that's another report (as soon as I dig up the tapes). That particular coup was given support by the Russians (and the U.S. it should be noted) in the area of arms and ideology, the regime under Muhammad Daud having distinct Marxist leanings. It was in April of 1978 when another coup was staged, overthrowing the Daud regime which got the Russians attention that led to the 1979 invasion.

The breakdown goes a little like this:

With Muhammad Daud's death, the government of Afghanistan was run by a divided, dilettante Marxist clique that launched a train of events eventually leading to the disintegration of the state. They named their regime the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA).

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(h/t Andy K)

Erik Prince's company Blackwater (now known as XE) has been embroiled in controversy for years. Company employees have posted videos online of their own ruthless behavior and abuses against Iraqi citizens, and can be heard laughing off camera. We're now finding out that this brutality most likely came from the top, down from Prince himself -- former employees are finding their consciences and telling horrifying stories about their former boss:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct. Read on...

From The Daily Show:

President Obama delivers a sensitive speech in the Middle East, and it doesn't play well with the extremists at Fox News.

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I know most of America understands this, but let me say it anyway. President Obama's speech to the middle east was not meant for the neocon, warmongering fringe psychos like Charles Krauthammer. He was apoplectic on Brett Baier's show today on FOX because Obama's team didn't craft a speech that the AEI would approve of. It was meant to reach out to the Muslim population and try to repair some of the damage caused by war hungry neocon fanatics that got their wish under George Bush with disastrous consequences.

Kauthammer: The damage in policy was rather small. The damage to our position philosophically was large. On policy the speech was small because the speech was so abstract and vapid in self absorbed that it didn't touch on a lot of policy except on Iran. Here he was exceedingly weak, that was the weakest statement on Iran on Nukes in at least eight or nine years from anyone in the west....there was once again apologies over and over again. Apologies in moral equivalence....

Moral equivalency was his theme and he gets crazier as he goes on...What he obviously means is that George Bush and Cheney are no longer in power to incite violence around the world...

President Obama's message has a much greater chance to start influencing some hearts and minds in the middle east where we need to do exactly that. I hope they realize that we all don't want to invade their countries and turn them into Christians. On that major point he succeeded. To all the neocon pundits that unfortunately dominate our airwaves I think I speak for many liberals when I say: Go Cheney yourself.

I want to give some props to Ed Morrissey (who I disagree with on most issues, but met and like personally) for not taking the usual conservative line as he called the speech: Quite Good. The readers on Hot Air were not too please with Ed on this one. I doubt you can read many of their comments because you'll constantly read teabagger nonsense about Obama like this: 'The first Muslim president,' and so forth...
And Malkin's comment section is much different then ours because we don't pre-screen and then approve people like they do.

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[H/t to Gordon Skene at Newstalgia for the archival footage]

Yesterday was one of those anniversaries many of us try to put out of our minds. Conservatives these days seem to be trying especially hard.

But for some of us, those memories still burn:

It was 14 years ago when Doris Battle's parents were killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, just two of the 168 people who died during the nation's worst domestic terrorist attack.

Battle was among 400 people who gathered Sunday to observe the 14th anniversary of the bombing of the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, an attack that also injured hundreds of people. The explosion of a truck loaded with 4,000 pounds (1,800 kilograms) of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil tore the face off the building and caused millions of dollars in damage to other downtown structures.

"I can't go home and see him anymore," Battle said of her father, Calvin Battle, who died with her mother Peola when the Oklahoma City federal building was bombed on April 19, 1995. And Battle said the passage of time has not diminished the loss she still feels.

And yet, erasing the very memory of the worst act of homegrown terrorism ever committed on American soil -- and until 9/11, the worst such act ever -- seems to be what movement conservatives have been doing all week.

Ever since word emerged earlier this week about the Department of Homeland Security's internal-assessment bulletin about domestic terrorism, the mainstream right has been wallowing in paranoia about the possibility the report might have meant them.

Moreover, no amount of rebuttal -- even from the DHS secretary herself -- is good enough for them.

Yet if you read the report, it couldn't be clearer that it is concerned almost exclusively with far-right extremists: neo-Nazis, skinheads, anti-abortion bombers, and their assorted fellow travelers. What the teeth-gnashing from the right suggests is that they recognize themselves, and their influence, all too readily in the thugs and terrorists who take their beliefs and twist them into something violent.

Guilty conscience, much?

Prime example: There was Bill Bennett, that right-wing moral icon, telling John King's "State of the Union" panel yesterday on CNN that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano's clear explanation wasn't good enough.

It's bad enough that he can't even get his facts straight. What's especially noteworthy is the way he airbrushes out the very real existence of actual domestic right-wing terrorist groups:

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KING: Bill, she says they have intelligence and active investigations of this possibility. Do you take her at her word?

BENNETT: She wouldn't give you one bit of evidence. You asked her for the names of any groups, any organizations. You pressed her on it -- nothing.

When they put out a report on certain left-wing organizations back in January, there were some specifics. There are no specifics here, except they target veterans. They say look out for veterans being recruited and look out for people who are opposed to abortion and immigration.

Of course, as we explained recently:

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