AUTHOR: Jeffrey Lord, former Reagan White House political director
FORUM: The American Spectator
LENGTH: 2,703 words
APPROXIMATE THESIS: If Ronald Reagan had been involved, alleged Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan would have been spotted and stopped
WHAT RONALD REAGAN WAS 'VERY, VERY GOOD AT UNDERSTANDING': "If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck--chances are it's a duck."
WHAT NIDAL MALIK HASAN IS: "a duck"
PEOPLE WHO FAIL TO RECOGNIZE DUCKS: Hollywood director Roland Emmerich, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd
THINGS THE MILITARY MAY HAVE GIVEN THE 'PROVERBIAL DUCK': "a Thanksgiving turkey with an exotic feather or two," "a vanilla ice cream soda," "the reincarnation of Freud," "an iPod"
TOTAL APPEARANCES OF THE WORD 'DUCK': 25
ROUGH DEFINITION OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: "a cousin to the reason Mecca will not be suffering the same cinematic fate as the Vatican in Roland Emmerich's 2012."
BEST TRANSITION: "It seems clear Ms. Dowd and the Times are, like Mr. Emmerich's co-writer, scared witless they will be at the mercy of something a bit more definitive than the outrage of an Archbishop's blog. Which brings us back to Ronald Reagan and the Berlin Wall."
THE TAKEAWAY:

There are ducks out there. They look like ducks, walk like ducks, they quack like ducks. Nidal Malik Hasan--whether he was alone or hanging out with a flock of other ducks--was still a duck.

Ronald Reagan knew a duck when he saw one. The Berlin Wall was a duck.

And now it isn't.

The rest of us can learn from that.

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Heather Horn