How Stupid Do They Think We Are?

Alton Nolen, a 30-year-old recent convert to Islam, had just been fired from his job at a food distribution plant in Moore, Oklahoma. There were reports that for some time he had been trying to convert workers at the plant to Islam, just as he had done. Shortly after his dismissal he walked back into the plant carrying a knife. He spotted one of the women who worked there, a 54 year-old grandmother named Colleen Hufford and put a knife to her throat – a knife he used to cut her head off.

If a manager at the plant had not shot Nolen, who knows how many other heads he would have cut off. He survived and has been charged with murder.

According to the district attorney, Nolen was uttering “some Arabic terms during the attack.” A local TV station reports that Nolen’s Facebook page had anti-American rants under the name Jah’Keem Yisrael. The station said there were also several photos of Osama bin Laden on the page and a picture of the 9/11 attacks.

Yes, it sure sounds like workplace violence to me. How about you?

That’s what the FBI is calling it. The New York Times quoted an unidentified agent as saying, “Beyond being fired, we haven’t found another motive.”

Let’s see if I understand this. A Muslim man utters Arabic words as he cuts the head off of a grandmother; the man’s Facebook page contains anti-American rants; the man reportedly had been trying, unsuccessfully, to convert fellow workers to Islam; and the man surely knew about the beheadings by Muslim terrorists in Syria given all the news about them … and the FBI says “Beyond being fired, we haven’t found another motive.”

This raises a question: How damn stupid does the FBI think we are? That very question, in fact, was raised by Joe Scarborough on his “Morning Joe” program on MSNBC.

"The FBI says there was no indication that [Alton] Nolen was copying ISIS? … Seriously? How stupid does the FBI really think we are? Who exactly are they afraid of offending? ISIS? Moderate Muslims? Because moderate Muslims are just as scared as moderate Methodists. And is political correctness now so pervasive through our government that the FBI can't tell Americans the truth of the beheading of a grandmother in the middle of America out of fear of offending Muslims? No, no, trust me -- Muslims are offended by this creep's actions. But if the FBI now is so weakly resorting to political correctness after the beheading on U.S. soil can they really confront the evil that America faces and the threat of copycat killers? I mean, come on."

But it’s not just liberal PC run amok, I suspect. The FBI, which comes under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice, which is run by the most political attorney general since John Mitchell and Bobby Kennedy, an attorney general who reports to his good friend the president … just might be covering for Barack Obama who doesn’t need any domestic terrorism incidents on his watch – especially with the midterm elections just a month away.

The mass murder by another Muslim terrorist – Army Major Nidal Hasan at Ft. Hood, Texas in 2009 – was also labeled workplace violence. No one in his right mind believed that, either. But by not calling it by its real name – anti-American Islamic terrorism – President Obama may think he can convince us that while Muslim fanatics are causing havoc over there, they are no threat to American citizens over here.

That agents of the FBI allow themselves to be used as political tools is disheartening. We used to have confidence in the FBI. And while we’re on the subject, we may have feared the IRS, but we didn’t think they’d actually go after Americans who disagreed with the president – while he was up for re-election, no less. Obama wasn’t supposed to be Nixon.

You get the impression that the people who work for Barack Obama don’t care much about the American people. The president’s press secretaries make Baghad Bob sound like Honest Abe. Their loyalty is to a politician – not us. Same with the head of the IRS who goes before Congress and no matter what he’s asked about scandals at the IRS, says “We’re looking into that” … but nothing ever happens. The exchange of Al Qaeda commanders for an army sergeant may have been justified but as I write this no one has bothered explaining whether Bowe Bergdahl  was a deserter or not. That investigation supposedly is also continuing. Do we know who was responsible for Fast and Furious? How about the VA scandal. They’re still looking into all of that too, I guess.

Who believes any of this?

And then there's the Secret Service, another American institution we used to have confidence in, until we didn't.  They told us that an intruder got through the front door of the White House before he was captured.  He got through the front door, all right.  But he got a lot further than that.  It's only because of leaks to the Washington Post that we know the real story -- that he overpowered a female agent and practically took a tour of the place before being captured.

And when the soon-to-be dumped head of the Secret Service testified before Congress the other day she had all the passion of a corpse, a zombie on sleeping pills.

Peggy Noonan brilliantly captured the brazenness of this administration in her latest Wall Street Journal column. “We’re all used to a certain amount of doublespeak and bureaucratese in government hearings,” she writes. “That’s as old as forever. But in the past year of listening to testimony from government officials, there is something different about the boredom and indifference with which government testifiers, skirt, dodge and withhold the truth. They don’t seem furtive or defensive; they are not in the least afraid. They speak always with a certain carefulness – they are lawyered up – but they have no evident fear of looking evasive. They really don’t care what you think of them. They’re running the show and you don’t like it, too bad.”

She’s right, of course.  And Ms. Noonan is also right when she tells us that, “A nation can’t continue to be vibrant and healthy when the government controls more and more, and yet no one trusts a thing the government says. It’s hard to keep going that way.”

Barack Obama promised us idealism but instead he and his acolytes have delivered a truckload of cynicism.  How stupid do they think we are?

We’ll find out on November 4.