Many times, dear reader, we, the crack young staff of "The Hatemonger's Quarterly," have taken aim at the loveable far-left lunatics at Counterpunch. And for good reason: Pound for pound, we'd wager that Counterpunch is amongst the very nuttiest outfits on Al Gore's World-Wide Web.

A delightful case in point is "Cho Seung-Hui Delivers His Message," a recent article by a woman called Susan Rosenthal, M.D. According to her "website," Dr. Rosenthal is a practicing doctor and psychotherapist, and her brief essay ably demonstrates that she ought to stop with the medical racket posthaste and check herself into a mental health clinic. In fact, her short article is a veritable locus classicus of pernicious nonsense.

In the essay in question, Dr. Rosenthal aims to get at the motivations behind Cho Seung-Hui's brutal attack at Virginia Tech. As such, she appears to be approximately a month behind every other half-wit psychologist who professed to understand Cho despite the minor wrinkle of never having met him.

Ah, but what Dr. Rosenthal's article lacks in timeliness it more than makes up for in deranged lunacy. First and foremost, we ought to mention that Dr. Rosenthal is a master at producing dubious "facts" without the merest shred of evidence. Why, just take a gander at the following claim from her piece:

In fact, racism kills 50 times more Americans every year than die at the hands of individual murderers.

How can one even begin to assess this unsupported claim? What the heck does it mean? Who gets to define what racism is, and exactly how does it relate to people's deaths? Naturally, this is nothing but fatuousness.

To this we should add Dr. Rosenthal's irksome desire to engage in ridiculously simplistic political hectoring:

Individual violence should be no surprise in a world that promotes violence as the solution to every problem. When President George W. Bush wanted Iraq,s [sic] oil, he didn,t [sic] offer to buy it; he didn,t [sic] negotiate for it; he took it by brute force, using the flimsiest excuses.

Well, it's a darn good thing that Dr. Rosenthal, despite her impressive education, isn't a political pundit. Her description of the Iraq War is so utterly tendentious as to be beneath contempt. Ah, yes: George W. Bush should have offered to purchase Iraqi oil. That would have saved everything. Can someone tell us why Susan Rosenthal, M.D. isn't secretary of state?

But, dear reader, it gets even better. According to Dr. Rosenthal--a practicing physician and psychotherapist--Cho's deadly assault was caused by...capitalism. Yeah, we know: That sounds too nuts to be true. Yet here it is:

We don,t [sic] need more ways to "manage" anger and punish angry people. We need to abolish the injustice that provokes anger. We need to create a world where everyone has equal worth, a caring society where the top priority is relieving human suffering. Profit-driven capitalism cannot do this. We need to build a socialist society that puts people first.

Yes, yes, yes: Evil American individualism forced Cho Seung-Hui to become a murderer. In short, Milton Friedman caused the Virginia Tech massacre.

Now do you see why we want Dr. Rosenthal committed? You'll notice, dear reader, that she offers not a whiff of evidence to support her claims. Have socialist governments throughout history promoted societies with uniformly lower murder/suicide rates than those of capitalistic democracies? Would collectivism really end youthful alienation? How do you know?

This, dear reader, is the most asinine charlatanry. Given that the article appeared at Counterpunch, we guess we should be glad that Dr. Rosenthal didn't blame Cho's rampage on Israel.

Perhaps another Counterpunch moron is working on just such a piece?

(Note: The crack young staff normally "weblog" at "The Hatemonger's Quarterly," where they are currently blaming the economics department at George Mason University for John Hinckley Jr.'s assassination attempt on President Reagan.)