CBS's Bob Schieffer made a comment Sunday about the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, that's likely to raise eyebrows on both sides of the aisle.
During a Face the Nation panel discussion about the incident, Schieffer said, "If [shooter Adam Lanza] had had an Arab name, people would be going nuts about what we ought to do right now" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
BOB SCHIEFFER: After 9/11, we turned this culture upside down. We doubled our defense budget. If this person had had, I'm sorry to say this, but if he had had an Arab name, people would be going nuts about what we ought to do right now.
I guess Schieffer forgot how when U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan murdered thirteen people while injuring 29 at Fort Hood in November 2009, much of the media initially buried his Islamic affiliation. This included the CBS Evening News that day.
Schieffer himself had some problems with Hasan's Muslim roots as on the first Face the Nation following the shootings, he said, “It’s looking more and more like he was just, sort of, a religious nut. And you know Islam doesn’t have a majority – or the Christian religion has its full, you know, full helping of nuts too.”
At the end of that program, he actually blamed the Army for the shooting saying, "That doctor [Hasan] should not have been at Fort Hood. I don’t care how hard-up the Army is for mental health professionals....sadly, this shows the Army still does not take protecting soldiers’ mental health as seriously as it does training them to shoot.”
In reality, the contortions media members are willing to go through to protect Muslims from scrutiny when they commit or attempt to commit violent crimes makes it highly unlikely "people would be going nuts" right now if Adam Lanza had an Arab name.
Quite the contrary, Schieffer and his colleagues would be doing everything in their power to ignore or downplay this inconvenient truth.
On the flipside, what really would have gotten their attention is if Lanza had been a Tea Party member.
Then the media would be really going nuts!
