Malkin’s column:

…Dr. Xavier Amador told the jury Monday that Little Orphan Moussaoui “suffered from schizophrenia of the paranoid variety.”

Let me throw away the medical dictionary and give my diagnosis of the defense team’s diagnosis: Bull.

Wingnuts love to practice lay medicine, don’t they? First Terri Schiavo, now Zacarias Moussaoui. I’m surprised Malkin didn’t say something like “Schizophrenia? Now they’re claiming multiple personalities made him do it!”

The fact is, mental status doesn’t excuse terrorism. Only Moussaoui’s defense lawyers claim it does - and that’s what they’re required by oath to do, and thank god they do it, because otherwise our legal system would devolve into a Malkin utopia kangaroo court. But mental status and everything that goes into it - nature, nurture, aspartame - might help explain terrorism.

“But Auguste,” you might be saying, “doesn’t explaining terrorism equal excusing terrorism?” If you are saying this, you are stupid.

I’m sorry, that was a little too strong. You are ignorant, intellectually lazy, and quite possibly suicidal. You probably also want to nuke Iran.

Malkin is your prophet:

On Monday, while Moussaoui’s defense team played their violins in court, apologists across Europe and the Muslim world played the same song for the suicide bomber who murdered 9 innocent civilians and wounded scores more at a Tel Aviv restaurant. The bomber packed his explosives with nails and shrapnel soaked in rat poison to increase the suffering of the victims.

Police had to pick bits of flesh off the blood-drenched streets and parked car windshields.

But it’s not the fault of terrorist Sami Salim Mohammed Hammed and his sponsors at Islamic Jihad. Blame “Israeli aggression” and “anti-Arab racism!”

The dry-eyed know there is one Root Cause for this carnage. It’s not America, Israel, racism, or psychological imbalances. It’s evil. Just evil.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, “No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.”

And no, wingers, liberals aren’t asking you to avoid harshing the mistaken man’s buzz. The pursuit of happiness is subjugated to life and liberty - no one disputes that except the strawliberals you keep creating. To a liberal, when someone’s happiness lies behind other peoples’ life and liberty, it becomes the evil Wollstonecraft references.

In fact, it’s Malkin and her cronies who have no absolute definition of evil - who “know it when they see it.” Oh, most of them claim it’s biblically based, but it’s been well documented that to the wingers, evil is that which is done by other people. (In Malkin’s case, it seems to be that which is done by liberals.) It’s based on that - the fact that the Other is responsible - that Malkin states “It’s not America, Israel, racism, or psychological imbalances. It’s evil. Just evil.”

I recently saw a winger argue that because Timothy McVeigh was not aiming to kill innocents, that he thought he would only be killing FBI agents, that his act was not terrorism. Bad, but not terrorism. Is this a mainstream view among the right? I doubt it. But there are echoes of that sort of American exceptionalism all over Malkin’s work. She has her own version of la raza - “By Americans, no excuse is irrelevant; by non - Americans, no excuse is relevant.”

So yes, 9/11 was evil. Obviously, because it involved death and destruction, and those practiced against civilians. But evil is not spontaneously generated. And that, my friends, is a value-neutral statement.

The 9/11 hijackers were pursuing their happiness, and so they did evil. So the question is, what made them think that the destruction that took place on 9/11 was their happiness? Malkin is right, the madrassas and imams were involved. But those seeds needed soil. And as for the kind of thing which prepared that soil - put Moussaoui and the 19 hijackers in the frame of mind to embrace jihad - we don’t need racism, or anti-Islamism, or any other long-disproven ism. We just need to look at history.

As for our current strategy and its potential for decreasing the number of “Just evil” people in the world, let’s look to an author whom the wingnuts claim as their own:

“Conquest is an evil productive of almost every other evil both to those who commit and to those who suffer it.” — C.S. Lewis

Malkin’s latest wackiness (While I have no love for the Chinese government, can you imagine her reaction if a heckler told President Bush his “days were numbered” is just the least of my thoughts) couldn’t have come at a worse time, as I have spent the last few days preparing for today’s vitally important professional exam. Everyone think good thoughts at 12:30 PDT, wouldja?

I have a huge-by-my-usual-standards post in the works about her latest column but it’s going to have to take a back seat. I’m sure you understand.

Update: Passed. Thanks for the good wishes.