Dorothy Rabinowitz

Dr. Phil and the Fort Hood Killer His terrorist motive is obvious to everyone but the press and the Army brass.

Down with Escapism - Caleb Weintraub For years I maintained a subscription to the WSJ for, as much as anything, Dorothy Rabinowitz columns.  I will describe her as someone with common sense (a none too common attribute today) who writes good. Tenacious too. Her 1995 story [A Darkness in Massachusetts] about the insane prosecution of the Amirault family in the Fells Acre Day Care case, sparked a nine-year crusade to win their freedom.   To read that saga today will help us understand how, if not why, a national hysteria can lead to an Obama. Here's a snippet of the bitch slap she lays on the Dr. Phils who've Oprah-nized a whole society. “ A shocked Dr. Phil, appalled that the guest had publicly mentioned Maj. Hasan's Islamic identity, went on to present what was, in essence, the case for Maj. Hasan as victim. Victim of deployment, of the Army, of the stresses of a new kind of terrible war unlike any other we have known. Unlike, can he have meant, the kind endured by those lucky Americans who fought and died at Iwo Jima, say, or the Ardennes? The quality and thrust of this argument was best captured by the impassioned Dr. Phil, who asked us to consider, "how far out of touch with reality do you have to be to kill your fellow Americans . . . this is not a well act." And how far out of touch with reality is such a question, one asks in return—not only of Dr. Phil, but of the legions of commentators like him immersed in the labyrinths of motive hunting even as the details of Maj. Hasan's proclivities became ever clearer and more ominous. [Article] ”