The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger thinks he knows how the Fort Hood shootings happened:

In our time, nothing was bigger than the nearly 3,000 killed on September 11. But anyone who got involved with the development of public policy then knows that for the next seven years the battle never stopped over the details of the Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, then Guantanamo, then waterboarding, renditions and secret prisons and all the other issues that for some could be summed up in two words: “Bush-Cheney.”

This will never come up in the Lieberman hearings next week, but I think that nonstop policy battle is why Hasan’s overseers dropped the ball.

The most-heard reason for the possible failure is political correctness. No doubt. But Sen. Lieberman’s committee should avoid making this its main line of inquiry, because that is a problem without a policy fix. It minimizes the real problem.

The problem is confusion. The combatants at each end of the spectrum in the war over the war on terror know exactly what they think about surveilling suspected terrorists. But if you are an intel officer or FBI agent tasked with providing the protection, what are you supposed to make of all this bitter public argument? What you make of it is that when you get a judgment call, like Maj. Hasan, you hesitate. You blink.

Now everyone thinks the call was obvious. But it wasn’t so obvious before the tragedy. Not if for years you have watched a country and its political class in rancorous confusion about the enemy, the legal standing of the enemy, or the legal status and scope of the methods it wants to use to fight the enemy.

In war, uncertainty gets you killed. It just did.

Yes, if we could all just stop being so confused and see things more clearly, we could do something about all the problems. It should go without saying that the idea that we can simply do away with “uncertainty” when managing the tension between liberty and security is nonsense. Did authorities either miss or fail to act on what, in retrospect, seems like solid evidence of Hasan’s increasing radicalization? I think it’s fair to say yes. Is there any evidence that this failure was the result of “confusion” generated by the “nonstop policy battle” between the Bush administration and its critics? No, there isn’t.

Essentially, Henninger’s argument is that the practice of democracy itself set the stage for the Fort Hood tragedy. If everybody would have just shut up after 9/11 and not distracted President Bush with stupid questions about warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention and torture and the Constitution, then maybe the FBI wouldn’t have been so scared of hurting peoples’ feelings. And of course it goes without saying that this applies only to criticisms coming from the left. Conservatives who challenge Democratic presidents are just patriots asking tough questions. Progressives who challenge Republican presidents are sapping the nation’s vital essence.

My friend Rob Farley recently recorded an interesting diavlog with John Mueller, author of the new book Atomic Obsession. In his book, Mueller argues that fears of nuclear holocaust during the Cold War, and now of nuclear terrorism, are overblown.

In one funny segment, Farley and Mueller chuckle over the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) “awareness movement” — I think the “Pulsers” deserve their own spot alongside the Birthers and Deathers in the grand and glorious tapestry of goofballery that is the contemporary conservative movement — noting that achieving the sort of effect that they warn of — detonating a nuclear device at a high altitude, shutting down electrical power across most of the continental United States — would require a level of technical expertise that even the United States may not possess:

MUELLER: There’s a guy named Lawrence who used to be head of the Los Alamos lab, in weapons design, and in a recent book he asked somebody who knew all about EMP about that, and the idea that the North Koreans could do that, could basically wipe out the communications of the United States with a single bomb — I mean, right now their delivery system can barely hit the Pacific Ocean –but he didn’t even think the United States could do that. [...]

The technological ability to do that is fantastically high. It takes a huge amount of ability to even begin to do that.

Watch it:

Farley recently wrote an article about the EMP crowd which offers up this slice of fried gold:

Despite the effort that conservatives have devoted to this cause, it appears to have gained little traction in the mainstream media. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and other major television news organizations declined to cover the EMPACT conference. Indeed, even the neoconservative Weekly Standard, which seems perpetually on the lookout for ways to plug purported existential threats to the homeland, stayed away from Niagara. One Standard editor said in an interview with the author, “I don’t go for that EMP stuff. Kind of more interested in dangerous scenarios that might actually happen.”

Think about that for a moment: The threat from EMP is so remote that not even the Weekly Standard is willing to fear-monger about it. This hasn’t stopped two of the leading likely GOP presidential contenders, Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich, from making it a big part of their national security agenda. In terms of “serious ideas about things that might ever actually happen,” it’s the equivalent of a leftist candidate calling upon Americans to simultaneously begin chanting and thinking good thoughts about Al Qaeda in the hopes that our “love rays” will cause them to abandon their war against us. It’s a sad commentary both on the state of the GOP and on the nature of the U.S. national security debate that Gingrich and Huckabee’s advocacy of these ideas hasn’t prevented them from being taken (kind of) seriously.