Frank Rich has a great column up today on the hysterical, anti-Islamic reaction on the right to the Fort Hood shootings:

THE dead at Fort Hood had not even been laid to rest when their massacre became yet another political battle cry for the self-proclaimed patriots of the American right.

Their verdict was unambiguous: Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an American-born psychiatrist of Palestinian parentage who sent e-mail to a radical imam, was a terrorist. And he did not act alone. His co-conspirators included our military brass, the Defense Department, the F.B.I., the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and, of course, the liberal media and the Obama administration…

William Bennett excoriated soft military leaders like Gen. George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, who had stood up for diversity and fretted openly about a backlash against Muslim soldiers in his ranks.

“Blind diversity” that embraces Islam “equals death,” wrote Michelle Malkin.

“There is a powerful case to be made that Islamic extremism is not some fringe phenomenon but part of the mainstream of Islamic life around the world,” wrote the [Doughy Pantload] Jonah Goldberg.

Islam is “not a religion,” declared the irrepressible Pat Robertson, but “a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world.”

Say what you will — from an anti-theist/anti-theological perspective — about the many flaws in Islam that make it, like nearly every other religion on the planet, detrimental to human evolution and self-actualization, but — taking it from a practical, real-world-consequences perspective — it really is amazing to me that the radical right in this country has been so eager to validate Osama bin Laden’s thesis that America is at war with Islam and that young men and women should sacrifice themselves to destroy this existential threat to their people and their religion.

I once had a naive belief that there were certain extreme places into which even the “mainstream” wingnut fringe wouldn’t venture. I have sadly come to realize over these many years that there are no arguments too heinous, or slanders too reprehensible, to be put into the service of their corrupt, nihilistic pursuit of earthly power and the destruction of their (domestic) enemies.

I truly dread the day that America experiences another large-scale terrorist attack. Whereas the country pulled together in the wake of 9/11 to face down a common enemy, the mainstream wingnut fringe will circle, like a pack of hungry hyenas, and pounce upon our wounded nation to gash out and drink the blood of fear and demagoguery that sustains them. A dark day in America will be darkened even further by the suffocating blanket of lies and fearmongering these sociopaths will descend upon us.