A little love for the unloved virtues of political correctness. How they can help us mitigate the consequences of Nadal Hasan's attack, if properly used. And how they can blind us to the naked truth, if not.

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Political correctness has few friends these days. There was almost as much anger directed at the politically correct response to the Fort Hood massacre as there was to the shooter (I can't bring myself to say “alleged” about this guy), Nadal Hasan.

I hold no brief for Nadal Hasan. I'm not a fan of the death penalty either, but if the victims' families wanted him killed 13 times and revived 12, I wouldn't be holding a sign trying to stop them. But I do rise here in (partial) defense of political correctness.

Why did Major Hasan do what he did? Was he motivated by a deep hatred for the country he was supposed to be serving, or was he crazy? If I had to guess, I'd say both.

He was pretty clearly intoxicated with hate, driven by Jihadist rage against the nation that had nurtured, raised, employed and educated him beyond his wildest dreams, had his family stayed in Ramallah.

And he was pretty clearly crazy to throw away his cushy life on a pointless mass murder mission that nearly was, and probably will yet be, a suicide mission.

Then again, he's a psychiatrist, and I've always thought people go into psychiatry to figure out what's wrong with them.

But, whatever demons drove Nadal Hasan to mass murder, whether perverted religious zeal or certifiable paranoid schizophrenia, there is no doubt that to some in the world, he's a hero.

That's what's important about the Fort Hood massacre on the world stage. His deepest motivations may never be known, but our real enemies don't care. They have claimed him as one of their own.

But a little political correctness, properly applied, can neuter that weapon. We can make Nadal Hasan useless as a martyr, if we don't pay him that honor.

If we're a little politically correct, we won't buy into the Jihadist narrative that pits them as the champions of 1.3 billion Muslims—they're not—and us as the enemy of same—we're not.

We do have enemies, radical Islam is one, and no amount of willful blindness can make that go away. The overly politically correct have a hard time accepting that truth.

But, in their rage against anyone who doesn't scream “terrorist” five times a sentence when discussing Hasan Nadal, the anti-political correctness gang is inadvertently doing our real enemies a real service.

If we unequivocally label Hasan a terrorist, we acknowledge that a Jihadist successfully attacked the Great Satan in the heart of his lair, an army base in Texas.

But if we use a little political correctness and say maybe this was the work of a sick lunatic after all, we deny our foes that victory.

Political correctness can be a useful kind of hypocrisy in a civilized society. It's a game we play and everybody knows the rules. When someone breaks them, like, say, Don Imus, there are prescribed consequences. And since harsh punishment is politically incorrect, they eventually get their jobs back, when penance is paid.

That beats the punishment for violating convention in a society that doesn't practice political correctness. Usually death by stoning for insulting the Prophet, or the Supreme Leader, or your family's honor because you allowed yourself to get raped.

Believe too much in political correctness and you'll fool yourself into thinking you don't have any enemies, only friends you haven't apologized obsequiously enough to yet.

Believe too much in political incorrectness and you'll turn a hundred-thousand real enemies into a billion-three potential enemies. You'll insult the only people who can defeat the real enemy, others like them.

Whether that's African Americans turning against the gangbangers in their own neighborhoods, or Sunnis turning out the terrorists in theirs, all politically correct wars are civil wars.

It is no more helpful to hold up a terrorist by the hair and say, “look, we captured another Muslim,” than it is to do the same to a ghetto thug and say “look, we captured another n****r.” Both are bad strategy, insulting to exactly the wrong people, and both totally destroy the kind of willing cooperation you must have from the community if you're going to help the right side win its civil war.

We have every right and duty to protect ourselves when that war spills over to the homeland. That takes good, clear-eyed, police work, free from unjust profiling that turns citizens into suspects, and free of illusion that turns enemies into victims.

Political correctness can help. It lets us set the terms of debate when events are spiraling out of control, it starves those who feed on hate from a big second helping, on us, it denies terrorists the “judo” that is the real goal of their acts. Making us make more terrorists by making us overreact against whole races of people.

Terrorism is a provocation. Political correctness, properly used, can prevent us from being provoked into doing something predictably stupid.

But political correctness is a weapon that is sharp on both ends. Use it unwisely, and you can put an eye out, use it stupidly and you can put both eyes out. We do have enemies and we need to stop them before they kill again. In a free society of 300 million plus people, that's a daunting task. It takes two eyes, wide open and seeing clearly, to get it done.

The blind hatred of anti-political correctness won't do it. Neither will the blind obliviousness of political correctness. The first is a gun with no aim, the second is a shield of air.

Authors Bio:
San Francisco based columnist, author, gym rat and novelist. My book, "The Confessions of a Catnip Junkie" is the best memoir ever written by a cat. Available on Amazon.com, or wherever fine literature is sold with no sales tax collected.

For those seeking more detail on yours truly, the following is from my website, allangoldstein.com, where you can partake copiously, and for free.

"Allan Goldstein lives in San Francisco with his wife, Jordan, and a minimum of two cats. His op-ed newspaper column,"Caught off Base," has appeared in San Francisco's West Portal Monthly for the past decade. Satire, invective and humor are specialties.

He also blogs regularly on opednews.com and on hypocrisy.com under the pseudonym Snark Twain. Other work has appeared in Spitball, The Baseball Literary Review, The Potomac Review, and several magazines including Rock and Gem and Pilot's Preflight. He is currently at work on his third novel."