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It's one of those terms that might seem to belong to an earlier era: political correctness. But in the wake of the Fort Hood shootings, critics are seeing exactly that in both the treatment of alleged gunman Nidal Malik Hasan by the military before the shootings and in the comments of politicians and members of the media afterward.

"Who’d think the U.S. Army could be seized with a sudden case of political correctness?" columnist Margaret Carlson wrote Thursday, dubbing the army "oversensitive."

"If they hadn’t been so cautious, authorities could have pieced together the links between Hasan and radical Islam and possibly prevented Fort Hood," she argued. Authorities, Carlson notes, knew Hassan had visited radical jihadist Web sites; some officials at Walter Reed, where he had worked, thought he might have been psychotic. "It wouldn’t have been an act of bigotry, just an act of sanity."

"Jihadist rhetoric espoused by Hasan was categorically dismissed out of submissiveness to the concepts of tolerance and diversity," complained Major Shawn Keller. "The Army as an institution has been neutered by decades of political correctness and the leaders in Hasan's chain-of-command failed to act accordingly out of fear of being labeled anti-Muslim and receiving a negative evaluation report."

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