Back in the good old days before he lost his mind, Andrew Sullivan used to give awards for particularly egregious examples of lousy blogging. I fear Andrew’s award system is now obsolete, as no single award could ever completely convey the extraordinary depths of stupidity, depravity, hypocrisy, and ignorance of Joe Klein’s latest missive on the Fort Hood shootings.

Entitled “Bigoted Religious Extremists,” the post starts with the charming admonition that “There are today several odious attempts by Jewish extremists… to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs as opposed to a direct consequence of his insanity.” This, at least, can be put down to one man’s contentious opinion. The rest, however, is one of two things: shocking ignorance or outright baldfaced lying.

To be sure, extreme religious beliefs and violent insanity are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they tend to track–among fanatics of all religions. There was, for example, the lunatic Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, who opened fire on Muslims praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994, killing 24 and wounding more than 100. There was also the lunatic Jewish settler who assassinated Yitzak Rabin. I can’t remember many Jews calling these effusions of violence as a natural consequence of devout Judaism. They were acts of psychopathy, as was Hasan’s bloodbath.

This is indeed an auspicious moment, since most blog posts, however asinine, usually contain at least one or two accurate statements, if only by virtue of the stopped clock phenomenon. In this case however, Klein quite literally gets every single thing wrong. Most importantly, there is no evidence whatsoever that either Baruch Goldstein or Yigal Amir were insane. To the extent that their motives can be ascertained, they seem to have committed their atrocities for extreme but nonetheless sane political and religious reasons. In Goldstein’s case, this was the desire to exact divine revenge on the Arabs, in accordance with his theocratic Kahanist beliefs. In the case of Amir, who unfortunately for Klein was not a settler, his motive was the desire to derail the Oslo Process he opposed. Goldstein was killed at the scene of his crime, but no evidence has since emerged that he ever suffered from a mental illness. As for Amir, he has been imprisoned since the Rabin assassination, and there has been ample opportunity for observation and diagnosis of any psychosis he may suffer or have been suffering from. None has ever been found; and no one, as of yet, even his own counsel, to whom the insanity defense would have been quite welcome given his client’s acknowledged guilt, has made the claim that Amir was insane by any legal or medical definition.

Now, were these crimes the result of devout Judaism? Perhaps not in the most general possible terms. But they were results of a radical, politicized form of Judaism that bears more than a passing resemblance to its Islamic counterpart. While Klein displays the typical liberal tendency toward cheap emotional blackmail by saying, “we should identify the notion that Hasan’s act was somehow a consequence of his religious orthodoxy for what it is: anti-Islamic bigotry,” any honest observer would at least acknowledge the fact that there are several decidedly distressing signs that Hasan did what he did for precisely the same terrifyingly sane and premeditated reasons as Goldstein and Amir. By contrast, no evidence that he was clinically insane has emerged, and the most that the media seems to be able to come up with is “stress”; which, while difficult to deal with, is not insanity and generally does not drive people to mass murder. Klein’s attempt at defamation and fear mongering is, in other words, more farcical than appalling. At least in this case.

As noted, Klein’s rampaging orgy of stupidity and inaccuracy can only be accounted for by one of two things: ignorance or lying. It is certainly possible that, like many liberals, Klein simply cannot bear to face the possibility that the world may not conform to his ideological preferences, and may consider lying to be a small price to pay for reassuring both himself and his readers that there is no elephant in the living room. The fact that justice, truth, and journalistic integrity will have to suffer as a result is, naturally, of little concern in such a desperate situation.

One is inclined, however, to give the poor man the benefit of the doubt, and conclude that he suffers from another common liberal affliction: the need to engage in moralistic exhortations on subjects about which he knows absolutely nothing. Throw in a heady dose of wishful thinking, and even the most pedigreed establishment mind would be reduced by this to the kind of slathering, bug-eyed hysteria to which Klein appears unfortunately prone.

Indeed, this might well have qualified as an exonerating circumstance were it not for Klein’s apparently all-encompassing need to use his ignorant pseudo-moralism to slander, defame, and demonize other people. Whether this is the origin of his shocking ignorance or a product of it is not really relevant. One expects nationally published columnists, even at Time, to be slightly more mature than a five-year-old child dropping f-bombs to shock his parents. Unfortunately, Klein appears to have carved out a tidy living for himself throwing illiterate temper tantrums; so we will likely have to wait for him to grow up in order to present him with his award. I fear that the wait is likely to be a long one.

Benjamin Kerstein is a Senior Writer for The New Ledger.