Some collected Ismael Ax theories from the farthest reaches of the Internet:

I just learned that the “Ismail Ax” mystery may only be a reference to the Turkish rapper “Ismail YK” and that folks misread the scribble on Cho’s arm.

Cho was known to downloads of music - maybe he listened to Turkish rap…

It’s almost like a viral marketing campaign for Turkish rappers.

As for the term’s meaning, one popular theory comes from a story in the Quran, the holy book of Islam, about Ibrahim and his son, Ismail. This theory picked up speed because many bloggers wondered if the shootings could be related to terrorism.

In Islam, Ibrahim is known as the father of the prophets and, upset that people in his hometown still worshiped idols and not Allah, he smashed all but one statue in a local temple with an ax. Ibrahim’s son is Ismail, who also became a prophet. Ibrahim is Arabic for Abraham, who plays a significant role in Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Two theories come from literature, where Ismail is spelled Ishmael.

Oh no, terrorists again! Alert level red! Go go go!

Cho Seung Hui wrote “Ishmael Ax” on his arm, signed his package to NBC “A. Ishmael,” and criticized Christianity in his video message. Do these things make him a jihadist? No. There is plenty of evidence that he was a deeply disturbed young man, full of rage and murderous fantasies, but none at this point to indicate that he had any actual connection to or interest in Islam or jihad.

However, that did not stop some jihadists on Islamic forums from celebrating his deed as if he were one of their own, and even dubbing him “Abu Mus’Ab Al-Virgini,” after the late Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi. The blogger Basharee Murtadd caught posts on two Arabic-language Islamic forums; one has been taken down, but the other is still there. Some excerpts:

Al-Jazeera reported 20 dead and 29 injured. Praise be to Allah.

Praise be to Allah for these calamities hitting America. By the will of Allah, more of this [will happen], following their defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As Muslims, our real condolences to you is to help you absolutely destroy your criminal democracy. By the vulnerable people in the Earth.

Oh good, crazy people approve of what a crazy person did. Can’t we exile all religious fanatics to some other planet where we don’t have to look at them or be killed by them, and let them fight the My God Is Better Than Your God wars amongst themselves?

One “Nightline” viewer recognized “Ismail-Ax” from a poem he had read by Drum Hadley, the 1960s beat poet. The poem is called the “The Goat Ranchers” and in it Hadley, under the pseudonym Yonder Ridgeline, writes about “Ishmael’s Ax.” Here’s the excerpt:

Went where they’d herded goats when they were kids,
Went where they were lovers,
Went where they were married here, those fifty years ago.
Traces of Ishmael’s ax on the scarred trunks of the cedar trees,
Crossing the canyons and winding arroyos.

Don’t bring the beat poets in, they were the original terrorists, trying to take down wholesome American society.

Sorry to say Virginia Tech Killer Cho Seung-hui was a terrorist and a christian.

His family back in South Korea attended Church on Sundays and he was brought up in Christian Fundamental Society

That’s makes him a Christian Terrorist. A Christianist, Fundamentalist Christian. His hatred for the Free world, higher education is obvious, He wanted to send a message to the world that Christian Terrorists Sleeper Cells are here and will attack America’s higher education institute, He Killed a Jewish Teacher and a Muslim Student. What Does Isamil Ax Mean? “Ishmael”, is what was written in the package he mailed to NBC. Ishmael is The Child of Abraham, Child of Israel and Ax means to cut, Chop, kill, = Kill the Children of Israel. Issac is the father of Jews and Ismael is the Father of Arabs.

I think all the Christian terrorist sleeper cells in America have already woken up and are actively plotting to take over the country. They don’t even try to hide it any more.

In James Fennimore Cooper’s story “The Prairie,” the settler Ishmael Bush, who is attempting to escape from civilization, sets out across the prairie with two key tools, a gun and an axe. Each has a symbolic meaning. The axe — which can either kill or provide shelter — stands for both creation and destruction.

This is actually the most reasonable explanation I’ve heard so far. I could completely see this being the reason. Cho was an English major, after all, no matter what you might think from reading his mind-bogglingly terribly written plays Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone.

It appears to be a reference to Abraham/Ibrahim, in which Ismail and Abraham take an axe to the idols of a temple as part of his conversion to monotheism.”

Maybe he was angry at the Greeks with their polytheism? Greeks = frats = college. There you have it.

And they even have quotes from the AP story proving — in their minds, at least — that the AP made this claim. Take this segment from Michelle Malkin’s blog:

Update: Some AP apologists are denying that the news organization ever reported that the mosques were destroyed. As I noted above, Mary Katharine Ham saved the timestamped and dated wire copy and tracked the evolution of the story:

11/24/06 10:10:28

Sunnis claim mosques and houses burned by Shiite militia, police watch
By QAIS AL-BASHIR
Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Sunni residents in a volatile northwest Baghdad neighborhood claimed Friday that revenge-seeking Shiite militiamen had destroyed four Sunni mosques, burned homes and killed many people, while the Shiite-dominated police force stood by and did nothing.

The reports were the most serious allegations of retribution in Baghdad the day after Sunni insurgents killed 215 people and wounded 257 with five car bombs and mortar fire in the capital’s Sadr City Shiite slum.

(emphasis not mine.)

Did they even read what they’re trotting out as proof? The article that they’re holding up to support their side of the story clearly says that Sunni residents claimed that the mosques were destroyed, and that these were “allegations.” I don’t see anything there saying that it actually happened.

But I guess they need something to help out their cause. “Oh no, see, the war is going fine, all that sectarian violence just damaged some mosques, but with a little tender loving care, and maybe a visit from a home renovation show, it’ll be as good as new! We’re greeted as liberators and redecorators!”

Lind says that the worst was James Buchanan:

In office when Lincoln’s election in 1860 triggered the secession of one Southern state after another, Buchanan sat by as the country crumbled. In his December 1860 message to Congress, three months before Lincoln was inaugurated, he declared that the states had no right to secede, but that the federal government had no right to stop them. By the time he left office, seven states had left the Union, and the Confederates had looted the arsenals in the South. If Buchanan had exercised his powers as commander in chief, the rebels might have been stopped at far less than the eventual cost of the Civil War — more than half a million American dead and the ruin of the South for generations.

Yeah, ok, I can go along with that. Causing the Civil War through his inaction which led to 500,000 dead Americans, that’s pretty bad. Dubya still has a lot of Americans to go before he reaches those kinds of numbers.

But I’m not so sure that Lind’s pick for second worst President of all time is really worse than Bush.

[Andrew] Johnson, Lincoln’s vice president and successor, a Tennessean who vetoed civil rights acts and blocked the 14th Amendment because he didn’t like blacks…. Johnson’s policies led to his impeachment and forced the Republicans in Congress to create a quasi-parliamentary system marginalizing the president.

I don’t know, that doesn’t sound that bad. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still pretty bad, and he doesn’t sound like a very good President at all, but compared to everything that Bush has done, that doesn’t seem that terrible. Can you really put Bush’s worst actions up against that and say that Johnson trying to fight against civil rights was worse than Bush? That doesn’t sound right to me.

I guess I can go along with Richard Nixon and James Madison (for the War of 1812), though. Which means that I really just think that Johnson is ranked too high (or is that low) on the list, which would bump Bush up to the fourth worst American President in history, in my opinion.

Lind has a pretty good summary of why Bush deserves to be on the list, in case there’s anybody who hasn’t been watching the news during the past six years:

The fact that Bush followed the invasion of Afghanistan, which had sheltered al-Qaeda, with the toppling of Saddam Hussein, will puzzle historians for centuries. It is as though, after Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR had asked Congress to declare war on Argentina.

Why did Bush do it? Did he really believe that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? Was it about oil? Israel? Revenge for Hussein’s alleged attempt on Bush’s father’s life? The war will join the sinking of the USS Maine and the grassy knoll among the topics to exercise conspiracy theorists for generations, and the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib will join images of the napalmed Vietnamese girl and executed Filipino rebels in the gallery of U.S. atrocities.

And don’t forget, he still has 25 months to go. That’s a hell of a long time to do even more damage to America and the rest of the world. And then who knows what kind of buried secrets future historians and Congressional inquiries will uncover once he’s out of the White House; I have faith—Bush would love my faith, wouldn’t he?—that Bush still has a chance at climbing even higher up that list.

Go Bush, go!

The problem is that the official vote count isn’t credible. In much of the 13th District, the voting pattern looks normal. But in Sarasota County, which used touch-screen voting machines made by Election Systems and Software, almost 18,000 voters — nearly 15 percent of those who cast ballots using the machines — supposedly failed to vote for either candidate in the hotly contested Congressional race. That compares with undervote rates ranging from 2.2 to 5.3 percent in neighboring counties.

Reporting by The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, which interviewed hundreds of voters who called the paper to report problems at the polls, strongly suggests that the huge apparent undervote was caused by bugs in the ES&S software.

About a third of those interviewed by the paper reported that they couldn’t even find the Congressional race on the screen. This could conceivably have been the result of bad ballot design, but many of them insisted that they looked hard for the race. Moreover, more than 60 percent of those interviewed by The Herald-Tribune reported that they did cast a vote in the Congressional race — but that this vote didn’t show up on the ballot summary page they were shown at the end of the voting process.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard computer security experts up in arms over the state of electronic voting, and their complaints and criticism of the process has been going on for many years now. But states keep rushing head-first into buggy voting systems like this, and the citizens of the country don’t seem to care.

I’ve always had a hard time figuring out the difference between America invading another country because their supposedly democratic elections were obviously rigged, and all of the apparent election rigging that you can see in America.

For what it’s worth, Avi Rubin has a defense of Krugman’s take on one of the security experts that’s looking into the Florida race, Alec Yasinsac. Apparently Alec is strongly Republican, but Rubin says that he’s trustworthy and would be impartial. Avi Rubin has always been one of the people calling for reasonable fixes to electronic voting, so I’ll probably go ahead and trust this Mr. Yasinsac. Not that my trust matters, it’s only voting. What the citizens want doesn’t really figure into that.

The central drive of the Bush administration more fundamental than any particular policy has been the effort to eliminate all limits on the presidents power. Torture, I believe, appeals to the president and the vice president precisely because its a violation of both law and tradition. By making an illegal and immoral practice a key element of U.S. policy, theyre asserting their right to do whatever they claim is necessary.

Yeah, I’d buy that. That fits in with Bush’s record-setting use of signing statements to exert more control over laws.

Mr. Bush would have us believe that the difference between him and those opposing him on this issue is that hes willing to do whats necessary to protect America, and they arent. But the record says otherwise.

The fact is that for all his talk of being a war president, Mr. Bush has been conspicuously unwilling to ask Americans to make sacrifices on behalf of the cause even when, in the days after 9/11, the nation longed to be called to a higher purpose. His admirers looked at him and thought they saw Winston Churchill. But instead of offering us blood, toil, tears and sweat, he told us to go shopping and promised tax cuts.

Only now, five years after 9/11, has Mr. Bush finally found some things he wants us to sacrifice. And those things turn out to be our principles and our self-respect.

Are there still people out there that support Bush, torture, the war in Iraq, the PATRIOT Act, domestic spying, etc? Was there ever anyone supporting these things, or was it all spin from the White House public affairs office and Fox News?

The other instant tip-off to a Cheney lie is any variation on the phrase “I haven’t read the story.” He told Tim Russert he hadn’t read The Washington Post’s front-page report that the bin Laden trail had gone “stone cold” or the new Senate Intelligence Committee report(PDF) contradicting the White House’s prewar hype about nonexistent links between Al Qaeda and Saddam. Nor had he read a Times front-page article about his declining clout. Or the finding by Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war that there was “no evidence of resumed nuclear activities” in Iraq. “I haven’t looked at it; I’d have to go back and look at it again,” he said, however nonsensically.

It’s like he’s going for the Bush image of not reading any news, because how terrible it would be if he read something that shook his firm belief in whatever crazy thing he believes in.

And then you have gems like this one that make you wonder why the country isn’t clamoring for Bush’s impeachment:

As for that Zarqawi “poisons network,” the Pentagon knew where it was and wanted to attack it in June 2002. But as Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News reported more than two years ago, the White House said no, fearing a successful strike against Zarqawi might “undercut its case for going to war against Saddam.” Zarqawi, meanwhile, escaped.

Wow. What’s wrong with America that these jerks are still running things? How come we could impeach Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky incident but we can’t impeach Bush for all the much more serious things he’s done to try to ruin America and destroy our freedoms?

It makes you wonder, why does he hate freedom so much?

Whenever W. does something legally sketchy and morally ambiguous — from pre-emptive war to spying to torturing — he claims he’s doing it to protect Americans from terrorists. But there’s a more visceral agenda: Vice and Rummy have persuaded W. he will not carry a big stick if bound by Lilliputian legalities, tiresome checks and balances and Kumbaya international conventions. Rather than being alarmed at their battiness, the president naively admires what he sees as bravado.

Of course, I don’t know Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld personally, but that really seems to be accurate from what I have seen of them.

This part’s even more scary, though:

Besides saying he’s in ‘’a struggle between good and evil'’ — which inflames many Muslims — W. told the columnists he thought America might be experiencing ‘’a Third Awakening,'’ a religious fervor, because people he meets in rope lines tell him they’re praying for him.

How is increased religious fervor a good thing in Bush’s view? Did he forget about 9/11, and what strong religious beliefs did then? How can anyone think that religious fervor has ever done anything positive throughout history?