Last week's massacre at Fort Hood cost more soldiers' lives than an average Bush administration cabinet meeting.

The public outcry over the murderous actions of Nidal Malik Hasan is leading many to connect the dots between Hasan and a constellation of other strangely-named killers including a D.C. sniper, a synagogue shooter, not to mention countless terrorists with silly, unpronounceable monikers.

As soon as the the Fort Hood massacre hit the news, millions of Americans all thought the same thing: this tragedy could have been prevented if people had bothered to pay attention to the warning signs inherent in the guy's name.

How was the man allowed to enter an army base with such a name? Well, that was probably due to his Army credentials and such, but that's beside the point. Better still, how is it that he managed to earn his medical license and join the army in the first place without anyone noticing his weird name? Oddly enough, no one at the Pentagon has been able to adequately answer that question.

The time has come, they say, for a federal watch list of people with funny names. Never again would we have to hear about an airline disaster caused by someone with a strange, hard-to-pronounce name with a 'q' where a 'k' or 'c' should be.

How will it work? Simple. People will these oddly spelled names won't be allowed to fly or join the army or hundreds of other things that involve public safety or sharp objects. That might seem severe, even cruel, but that's just it. Freedom is like dandruff shampoo, It's the tingle that let's you know it's working.

If these people wanted to fly, they should have thought of that before they were born into families with such goofy, non-American-sounding names.

Also, the watch list will cover people who've changed their names.

Of course, the plan is too simple for some people. It makes too much sense. Opponents of the proposal, generally civil libertarians with funny-sounding names, are calling it a drastic, knee-jerk reaction to a terrible event- and they say it in that snobby way that implies that drastic, knee-jerk reactions are always a bad thing. Without drastic, knee-jerk reactions to terrible events, we would never have invaded Iraq. We would never have offered up hundreds of billions to failing Wall Street firms. Meanwhile, what have cool heads ever accomplished? The League of Nations and the metric system. That's what.

America is what it is today due to rash action and bold decisions based on unsupported evidence. How else can a country get itself into two wars at the same time? How awesome is that? Answer: pretty awesome if you don't have to fight in either of them. Now is not the time to think things through (unless we're talking about healthcare reform, of course). After all, freedom isn't free. It has a real tangible cost in terms of the lives of other people who look like you and the civil liberties of people who don't.

Sympathetic legislators say they could have a watch list bill before Congress by the end of the year. For now, though, they're busy tweaking the language, struggling to find a way to legally define "funny sounding" that only includes names that are foreign-sounding now, and not the all-American names from Gremany, Italy, and Poland that sounded foreign a century ago.