You Don't Gotta Have Faith

 thepilot.com

I know it’s an article of faith on the right that President Obama’s Jan. 5 announcement of various executive actions to help reduce gun violence is a tyrannical and blatantly unconstitutional overreach of power. It’s an article of faith that it’s an attempt to deny law-abiding citizens the weapons they need to keep them safe.

But faith, as defined by Paul the Apostle in the Book of Hebrews (Revised Standard Version), is “the conviction of things not seen.” And if you look at what the president actually said and plans to do … well, there’s not a lot to be seen, tyranny-wise.

First, he wants to apply the already existing system requiring a seller to run a background check on people purchasing firearms to anyone “in the business of selling guns,” including at gun shows or over the Internet.

This is an interpretation of existing law that has been supported by such screaming liberals as George Dubbya Bush, Honorable John McCain, and — oh, yes — 90 percent of Americans. At one time, it was also supported by the NRA.

But since the GOP (Grumpy Obstructive Party) has abandoned every principle or belief it ever had other than “if’n Obummer is fer it, we’s agin it,” even the massacre of schoolchildren couldn’t persuade the Republican-controlled Congress to let that pass. As right-wing icon Joe the Not-Plumber put it, “Your dead kids don’t trump my rights.” Catchy slogan, that. Maybe the NRA should put it on their flag.

Second, President Obama wants to make the existing background check system stronger and faster by hiring new examiners and modernizing the computer systems of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). He also wants to strengthen the enforcement of existing gun laws by adding more ATF agents.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has vowed to fight funding for these measures, which puts the GOP in the strange position of opposing effective enforcement of the existing law (see “if’n Obummer’s fer it,” above).

Third, the president wants to take steps to keep the mentally ill from acquiring firearms, a measure widely and vigorously opposed by such paragons of sanity as James Yeager, the fellow from Tennessee who declared on YouTube back in 2013 that he was going to get his gun, fill his backpack with food, and “start killing people” over the last set of proposed executive orders before anyone had read them yet.

Or the people currently barricaded with their guns inside a federal building, promising to “kill or be killed” if anyone tries to dislodge them because “God told them to.” Or Ted Nugent.

Mr. Obama’s speech did not address confiscating those people’s weapons. He does, however, want to fund expanded access to mental health care, “ensure that federal mental health records are submitted to the background check system, and remove barriers that prevent states from reporting relevant information.”

Now here, I’ll allow, we have a provision that will require some scrutiny and a light touch. While I have no problem keeping firearms out of the hands of someone who’s expressed an immediate desire to do themselves or someone else in, no one wants to see people stigmatized and excluded from firearms ownership because, for example, they were once treated for depression or an eating disorder.

As for people who frequently go on the Internet and post long, incoherent screeds in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS with LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!, they should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

Finally, Mr. Obama wants more research into “smart gun” technology that allows the gun to be fired only by its actual owner, so that, for example, some kid doesn’t accidentally shoot himself or someone else, or someone who steals the gun can’t use it. “If a child can’t open a bottle of aspirin,” he says, “we should make sure they can't pull a trigger on a gun.”

OK, Mr. President, that may be a bad example. I still struggle to get the aspirin bottle open, whereas most kids I’ve seen can do it with ease. But we take your meaning.

It’s one thing to have faith in the unseen and the unknowable. That’s spirituality. But to have faith in something contradicted by what’s right before your eyes, such as the assertion that “that speech was President Obama exercising tyrannical power to take away all our guns” — that, my friends, is pure wingnuttery.

Its The End of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

The Pilot Newspaper: Columns

First, a correction from last week’s column.

In that column, I reported that Donald Trump was polling second in the crowded field of Republican candidates. Between the time of the writing of the column and its publication date on Sunday, Trump became the front-runner.

This columnist regrets the error, but probably not as much as the GOP regrets having Trump in the lead for the nomination, since the same poll shows Hillary Clinton beating him by 17 points. Anyway, on with the show.

Well, I expected a complete freakout on the right after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down bans on same-sex marriage. But I have to say, the drama queenery, raging paranoia and hysteria exceeded even my wildest expectations.

Some of it took the form of dire predictions of what happens next, as if the legal sanction of lifelong monogamy between consenting adults is the key that will inevitably unlock the floodgates to practitioners of every imaginable perversion.

This wingnut trope was most bizarrely expressed by former Texas Rep. and “Dancing With the Stars” contestant Tom DeLay. DeLay told Newsmax TV that he’s found a “secret Justice Department memo” that reveals “they’re now going to go after 12 new perversions, things like bestiality, polygamy, having sex with little boys and making that legal. … LGBT is only the beginning.”

It should be noted that DeLay only specifically mentioned three out of the 12 “new perversions” the DOJ is preparing to “legalize.” Wonder what the other nine are? On second thought, probably best to just let that go. Imaginations like that are best left unexplored.

Not content to torment themselves with fevered dreams of what nasty things others might soon be doing legally, a certain segment of Christians is pretty much convinced that the gays and the liberals are going to treat them pretty much the way they’ve advocated treating LGBT people. Some are even convinced the Christians who don’t back gay marriage are going to be jailed for their beliefs.

In fact, Donald and Evelyn Knapp, owners of a for-profit wedding chapel in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, have filed a lawsuit claiming they could face up to 180 years in jail under the town’s anti-discrimination ordinance for refusing to perform a same-sex wedding.

Only problem is, no one’s threatened the Knapps with any such penalty, the ordinance in question specifically exempts “religious corporations” like the Knapps’ “Hitching Post Wedding Chapel” from its coverage, and the very Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage specifically states that “religions, and those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned.”

That, however, doesn’t stop people like Republican presidential candidate and Ted Nugent sideman Mike Huckabee from repeating the falsehood that the Knapps are being threatened with almost two centuries of jail time, apparently by the voices in their heads.

Finally, there are the people predicting that, because of the action of the Supreme Court in lifting bans on same sex marriage, God himself will either smite our country or allow evildoers to do so, leading to thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of deaths.

“God’s hand of protection will be withdrawn,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, “as future actions from external and internal forces will soon make clear.” (Texas again. What IS it with these people?) Fox News pundit Todd Starnes even blamed recent heavy rains and flooding in the D.C. area on the Lord’s pique over the Supreme Court decision.

“Anyone got an ark?” he quipped.

This particular style of “prophecy” has always bugged me, by the way, as it implies that God will indulge his wrath by indiscriminate slaughter of both the just and the unjust, including, one supposes, opponents of gay marriage. I’m glad I don’t follow that God, because I’ve got to tell you, that one’s kind of a psycho.

Look, folks, the day Obergefell vs. Hodges, the landmark case legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states, was decided, I woke up, kissed my wife, and took her to her doctor’s appointment. Later that day, we took the dog to the vet together. (Everyone’s fine, thanks for asking). The week after, I helped my son move. Nothing that happened at the Supreme Court affected my marriage or my obligations to my family in the slightest. And it doesn’t affect you.

If you don’t like same-sex marriage, then don’t do it. If you’re a member of the clergy and you don’t want to perform a same-sex wedding, then don’t. It’s that simple. There’s no need to panic, file lawsuits to prevent things that aren’t going to happen, or flee the country to avoid God’s fiery and indiscriminate wrath.

It’s going to be OK, y’all. Really.

Beware Twitrage

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Happy Sunday, friends, and welcome to “This Week in Twitrage,” where once again we report on people’s propensity to go off half-cocked (sometimes as little as one-quarter or one-eighth cocked) and take to the Internet like Cheeto-stained Paul Reveres to spread the alarm about some outrageous story they’ve heard.

Said story, more often than not, turns out to be a total hoax, fabrication, half-truth or crazy rumor being reported as fact by our incredibly credulous news media.

Last week was a fertile one for Twitrage, what with the continued fallout from the Charleston terrorist attack, the controversy over the Confederate battle flag, and the Supreme Court’s bombshell decision upholding the right of same-sex couples to marry.

First, there was the picture making the rounds on Twitter and Facebook after Amazon.com, among other retailers, announced that it was pulling Confederate flag merchandise off its site.

This latest expression of Neo-Confederate butthurt claimed, and I quote: “You can’t buy a Confederate flag on Amazon, but you can buy this ISIS flag,” followed by a supposed screenshot of an Amazon page offering to sell one of the terrorist group’s amateurishly designed black and white flags. And the thing wasn’t even eligible for Free Amazon Prime shipping. The nerve!

Pretty outrageous, huh? If you can purchase one symbol of a group violently hostile to the United States, why shouldn’t you be able to grab another, right? Well, as it turns out, you can’t buy either on Amazon. I myself did a search for “ISIS Flag,” “ISIL Flag,” “Islamic State Flag” and “Daesh Flag” (hey, I’m already probably on a half-dozen watch lists, so what harm can it do now?)

No results. The folks at the urban legends site Snopes.com dug a little deeper and found an archived page for a vendor selling ISIS flags that went up in May — and was quickly taken down. So no, as of right now, you cannot buy either a Confederate flag or an ISIS flag on Amazon.

Then there’s Don Stair of Little Rock, Ark., who was mightily offended by the actions of his local TV station when they adorned their logo with what he called the “gay colors” of the Rainbow Flag after the Supreme Court’s historic decision. “Just stay out of it,” Don tweeted furiously.

Problem is, the station in question, KARK-TV, is an NBC affiliate, the logo in question is the NBC peacock, and that rainbow color scheme has always been part of it.

I recall it as far back as my own childhood, when the network used the Bird (as it called it) to tout that its programming was presented “in living color!” 

Hey — who knows? — maybe they were all gayed up back then, too.

The left had its own episode of Twitrage over the alleged “coddling” of accused (and admitted) Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof. In particular, people were unhappy with reports that Roof, who’s white, had been “taken to Burger King” on his way to the police station after being apprehended. They point out that a lot of the black suspects we hear about lately have tended to get shot, asphyxiated, slammed around inside of police vans, and otherwise killed. And this murderer gets to “have it his way”?

Well, as it turns out, Roof wasn’t exactly taken to the drive-through and given a gift card. Some officer may have gone and gotten Roof a burger while he was locked in a conference room in the Shelby, N.C., Police Department waiting for the feds and the Charleston police to arrive, but you know what? That’s not all that unusual, especially with a subject you’d really like to get a confession from.

And let’s face it, you can’t just starve prisoners in your custody, even ones accused of mass murder. So once again, there’s less to this “outrage” than meets the eye.

Look, folks, “I saw something on the Internet” is not a reason to automatically get your dander up. I’ve seen pictures of rabbits with antelope horns and a video of a little gray alien peeking in a man’s window on the Internet, too. It doesn’t mean we have to believe in either of those things.

The World Wide Web is full of useful information. It’s also full of useless and dangerous lies. Take the time to keep calm, do the research, and learn which is which.

It's That Time of Year Again: The PWoC Returns

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Yes, it’s November, folks, and we all know what that means. It means it’s time for Christmas decorations to start appearing on the shelves and in the streets. It’s time for Christmas commercials to begin showing up on TV. And it’s time for loud (and ultimately useless) grousing about how awful it is that all this is happening when it’s not even Thanksgiving yet.

All of this is followed, as the night follows the day, by the annual Phony War on Christmas (PWOC), that yearly ritual in which the most privileged class of people (white, straight Christians) in the most privileged country on Earth get to whine about how they’re being oppressed because someone wished them “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

As always, the first cries of woe came from our old friends at the Resentment Channel, aka Fox “News.” Bill O’Reilly, whose platoons of researchers apparently comb the Interwebs looking for stories to spin up into new occasions for right-wing butthurt, announced, in his words, “the first salvo in the war on Christmas.”

In one school district in Maryland, O’Reilly said indignantly, “there will be no mention of Christmas or any other religious holiday on the school calendars going forward. That’s because a Muslim did something!”



Now, you may be thinking, “Doggone those Muslims! Now they’ve gotten Christmas banned! Is there no end to their perfidy?” Not so fast. What “a Muslim” (actually several local Muslim leaders) did in Montgomery County, Maryland, was ask for a day off for one of their own religious holidays, known as Eid al-Adha or “feast of the sacrifice.” They were certainly not asking that there be no Christmas.

I imagine they didn’t expect the school board’s reaction, which was to totally punt on the issue and remove all religious designations from the school holidays, both Christian and Jewish. It was a decision which satisfied no one.

Note well that the Christian and Jewish holidays themselves are still there: Everyone still gets the same time off for Christmas and Easter, as well as the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It’s just that Christmas vacation happens over what’s now called “winter break.” Easter vacation is where it’s always been, during “spring break.” As for the Jewish holidays, they’re
designated as days of “no school for students and teachers,” according to a report in the Washington Post. So the kids still have the same holidays they had before, to celebrate in any way they and their families see fit. 

You’d think that would placate Mr. O’Reilly and his colleagues. You’d think that, that is, if you’d been living in a cave without TV for the last 20 years and were unfamiliar with Mr. O’Reilly’s shtick. This board decision, he groused, was “wiping out” all our traditions. “They’re wiping out — you know Christmas and Easter and Passover, these have a Judeo-Christian tradition in our country,” he said. “So they just wiped out all our traditions for these people.”

Actually, “they’ve” done no such thing. While calling the break at the end of the year “Christmas break” is something we may have gotten used to over the years, I seriously doubt that anyone regards how it’s designated on the written school calendar crumpled up in the bottom of Junior’s backpack as one of their fondly embraced traditions.

In any case, I strongly suspect that students and parents will still refer to the holidays as “Christmas break” and “Easter break,” and no one will try to stop them. All will still be allowed to participate in their real traditional observances of the season, such as trampling their fellow celebrants on Black Friday so as to snag the last of the “door buster” 50-inch TVs for $199 at Best Buy.

I’ve noticed that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of outcry from Jewish people over the Montgomery County School Board decision, even though their holidays got the same treatment as the Christian ones. Perhaps this is because Jewish folks, having actually been the recent targets of horrific and genocidal persecution, are less inclined to get their knickers in a twist over what some school board calls a holiday.

It’s a lesson some people could stand to learn. If the thing that makes you indignant is a faraway school board calling the end-of-the-year vacation the “winter” rather than the “Christmas” break, or the thing you feel the burning need to protest is someone using “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” then I submit that you’ve actually got life pretty good and should just be thankful for that, it being the season for thanksgiving and all.

OMG OMG OMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE AAAAAAAAAH!

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Anyone who says that President Barack Obama is not doing enough about ISIS, ISIL, whatever they call themselves, should be required to answer one simple question or forever hold their peace:

Do you or do you not advocate sending American ground combat troops into Iraq and Syria to fight ISIS? Yes or no?

Let’s make no mistake: These ISIS people are bad news. They’re so vicious and crazy even al-Qaida disowned them. They've committed horrific atrocities against American and British citizens, not to mention against thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of their fellow Muslims.

They do not, however, pose a significant threat at this time to the U.S. homeland. Don’t just take my word for it. This is the assessment of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon, even though Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel did allow as how they may threaten our interests abroad.

That doesn’t stop the usual hysterical ranting from the usual gang of warmongers. Sen. Lindsey Graham, for example, looked as if he was about to bust a blood vessel on Fox News Sunday as he demanded ground troops, ground troops and more ground troops, while railing that President Obama “needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home.”

Really? They’re going to kill all 314 million of us? No, Graham insists, it’s actually worse. According to him, ISIL, left unchecked, will “open the gates of hell to spill out on the world. … This is ISIL versus mankind.”

Meanwhile, you can always count on our old pal John McCain, a guy who never saw a crisis he didn’t want to carpet-bomb.

“We are now facing an existential threat to the security of the United States of America,” McCain said, possibly because he doesn’t understand what the words “existential threat” actually mean. Either that or he doesn’t care about anything other than the fact that the words sound scary.

It’s all poppycock. Also, codswallop and balderdash.

ISIS/ISIL doesn’t threaten the existence of the United States, which is what the words “existential threat” mean. They don’t hold the keys to “the gates of hell” like the Big Bad in a second-rate horror flick.

Yes, they need to be dealt with, before they get big enough to actually do some real damage to us. That’s going to take exactly the sort of broad-based plan we’re engaged in now: diplomacy with our allies who actually are on the front lines, combined with training and support for the people who rightly should be fighting the war for Iraq and Syria, namely Iraqis and Syrians.

It’s fear-mongering, pure and simple, from the party that realizes every issue it has counted on up to now to bring down the president and defeat his party has fizzled.

Obamacare is working as more and more people get access to health care. A Republican-led committee finally had to admit that its investigation of the Benghazi murders revealed no wrongdoing on the part of the administration. The economy continues to improve as the Dow rises and the jobless rate falls. And so on.

So they fall back on their tried and true tactic: scaring people into believing that Daddy McCain and Momma Lindsey and all their Republican pals will take care of us against the Scary Brown Supervillains Who Will Kill Us All. Pay no attention to how many of our own sons and daughters will be killed, maimed or broken to pay the cost of another war. After all, it won’t be their kids or grandkids bleeding and dying.

The kind of sustained freak-out the right is engaging in right now over an exaggerated threat is exactly the same sort of madness that led to this mess in the first place. Letting terrorists — well, terrorize us into committing troops to another quagmire in the Middle East is playing right into their hands.

They’d like nothing better than to have American troops in Iraq and Syria so they could go back to slowly bleeding us with IEDs and suicide bombers, while our inevitable reaction creates more and more resentment among the locals and more and more of them join the ranks of the terrorists.

Have we learned nothing?

But, hey, if the current group of Republican pols want to send division after division of Americans back into Iraq, make them say it. Don’t allow them to get away with their usual “we don’t want war, but we’ll call anything else failure” nonsense. Make them own up to it. See how the American people like them then.

Suppose They Had a Revolution and Nobody Came

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Those wild and wacky wingnuts are at it again!

What are those zany scamps up to this time? Why, trying to overthrow the government, of course! Unfortunately for them (and hilariously for citizens of the non-crackpot variety), the government didn’t seem to notice.

It happened (or more accurately, didn’t happen) last weekend, at an event called Operation American Spring, OAS for short. OAS was the “brainchild” of a former U.S. Army colonel named Harry Riley. On his website, Riley laid out his plan to “restore the Constitution.” In fine military fashion, Riley broke the op down into three “phases.”

1: OAS would “field millions, as many as 10 million, patriots” who would assemble on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., “spiritually/ Constitutionally armed” to replace the “current government.”

2: One million of the 10 million (Riley later told Alan Colmes that the count could go as high as 30 million) would remain on-site “as long as it takes to see Obama, Biden, Reid, McConnell, Boehner, Pelosi, and Attorney General Holder removed from office.”

3: “Those with the principles of a West, Cruz, Dr. Ben Carson, Lee, DeMint, Paul, Gov. Walker, Sessions, Gowdy, Jordan, should comprise a tribunal and assume positions of authority to convene investigations, recommend appropriate charges against politicians and government employees to the new U.S. attorney general appointed by the new president.”

Yes, there’s nothing that says “restoring the Constitution” like a minority of disgruntled voters overthrowing a freely elected government because they didn’t like the election result, then establishing an unelected tribunal to arrest and punish those they designate as political undesirables. Reign of Terror, anyone?

The coup wouldn’t be easy, Riley warned.

“It will be painful,” he said, “and some people may die because the government will not be nonviolent; some of us will end up in a cell, and some may be injured.”

A fellow named Terry Trussell, who identified himself as OAS’s “chief of staff,” told the “Patriot Nation” radio show that “if things got bigger,” the administration could “pull in drones,” but confidently predicted that “when the government destroys the capital just to get rid of us, I think it’s going to work to their discredit.”

Well, yeah, I guess that would be true. If, that is, the basic premise of the statement weren’t bat-spit crazy.

So the big day, May 16, rolled around, and — well, not much happened. From the live feed that the OAS people thoughtfully set up on the Internet, it looked like about 200 people showed up. It was kind of hard to tell, because for a long time, the camera was apparently lying on its side.

What could be seen in the feed, and in various photos posted from the event, was small knots of people (mostly older, almost exclusively white) milling around aimlessly, shouting a lot, and most definitely not being slaughtered by Obama’s Killer Drones.

“It’s a very dismal turnout,” 61-year-old Jackie Milton, the head of Texans for Operation American Spring, glumly told The Washington Times. One “patriot” was even more poignant; he stood in front of the camera and screamed “Where you AT?” over and over.

It is true that, in advance of the coming of the OAS wavelet, the president and Mr. Biden actually did flee the White House — all the way to a local Shake Shack, where they had a nice lunch and talked to reporters about raising the minimum wage. From the pictures, a lot more people showed up at that event than at the Mall.

Faced with this kind of embarrassment, some OAS supporters took to Twitter, with a variety of excuses for the poor turnout that were so lame that #Americanspringexcuses became a trending topic all its own.

30 million "patriots" descend on DC disguised as empty chairs! Clint Eastwood was proud! #OperationAmericanSpring pic.twitter.com/PbTxMUbCIB
— KHARY PENEBAKER (@kharyp) May 17, 2014

Some posted photos of massive crowds on the Mall, only to have others note from a cursory examination of the signs and clothing that the pictures were from civil rights marches from 40 years ago.

My personal favorite was the often-repeated “well, a lot of these patriots have jobs.” Possibly, but here’s a thought: When the horrible tyranny under which you claim to suffer isn’t enough to make you ask for a personal day to overthrow the government, then maybe the tyranny isn’t so horrible after all.

Another right wing attempt to overturn the election has failed, because, despite the drama-queen ranting of the worshippers of “West, Cruz, Dr. Ben Carson,” etc., normal people look around and, for the most part, see things as getting better. They may not be completely happy, but unlike the deluded misfits of OAS, they’re not unhappy to the point of treason.

Make Up Your Minds: Is The ACA Slavery or the Holocaust?

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I’ve noted before how our crowded media environment has led politicians to resort to wilder and wilder rhetoric and crazy hyperbole to try to draw attention to their side.

But I have to say, the current fight over the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) has created some truly grade-A hysteria among its opponents, both on the right and the left.

For instance, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli has been fond of using his stump speech to claim that the resistance of some states to implementing the Affordable Care Act is analogous to the states that refused to honor fugitive slave laws in the pre-Civil War period.

Venerable conservative George Will, whom I used to actually respect, parroted what has apparently been distributed via fax, text and email as the latest anti-Obamacare talking point.

“I hear Democrats say, ‘The Affordable Care Act is the law,’” he groused, “as though we’re supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on. Well, the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, separate but equal was the law, lots of things are the law, and then we change them.”

New Hampshire State Rep. Bill O’Brien apparently got the memo, too. He called Obamacare “a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that allowed slave-owners to come to New Hampshire and seize African-Americans.”

To be fair, some on the left are as prone to overheated rhetoric over the ACA as those on the right. Michael Moore, for example, lambasted Obamacare because it didn’t ban the health insurance industry altogether and create a single payer system. “If you’re going to ban slavery,” he said, “ban slavery.”

Yes, because a law that keeps insurance companies from denying you coverage based on pre-existing conditions is exactly like a law requiring that human beings who achieved freedom be returned to owners who would most likely beat them half to death with a bullwhip before castrating them for running away.

And having to have health insurance is exactly like being forced to pick cotton from sunup to sundown, having your wives and daughters subject to rape, and living under constant fear of having your family broken up and sold to someone hundreds of miles away. It’s eerie how similar those two things are.

For some Republicans, however, comparing the ACA with slavery doesn’t create the horror they’re looking for. Nothing will do for them but to equate it with the Holocaust, because after all, nothing makes you look more reasonable and level-headed than the knee-jerk Hitler reference.

“You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo — the IRS,” said Maine Gov. Paul Lepage. Sheryl Nuxoll, a Republican state senator from Idaho, characterized the health care exchanges set up under the ACA as “much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps.”

Ted Cruz, in his famous “Green Eggs and Ham” faux filibuster, compared Republicans who doubted the efficacy of his “defund Obamacare or we shut down the government” strategy to the European powers who rolled over for Hitler in the 1930s.

Yes, because creating an online health care marketplace where people can compare and contract different plans is exactly like forcing people into an unheated cattle car with no room to sit or lie down and no sanitary facilities and taking them hundreds of miles to a hellhole where they’ll be tattooed with numbers on their arms and either worked to death or herded into extermination chambers and asphyxiated en masse with Prussic acid. Those are entirely the same thing.

Here’s the thing about the health care system: You really can’t opt out of it. At some point, you’re going to get sick, and you will receive medical care. We don’t just let sick people die for lack of money, because despite the efforts of the Teahadists, we’re still a civilized country. And if you don’t have the means to pay for it, then the rest of us foot the bill.

While the ACA isn’t perfect, it is one means of making sure that more people have the ability to pay for the medical care they get. It was arrived at by grueling negotiation and multiple compromises, and it was found constitutional by the Supreme Court.

Equating it with slavery or the Holocaust makes you look like the kind of teenage drama queen for whom cleaning her room before she goes out is The End of Life As She Knows It.

Lose the tantrums and grow up.

Woodward Wimps Out

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Geez, when did Bob Woodward turn into such a wimp?

You may remember Bob Woodward as the fellow who became a journalistic folk-hero when he, along with partner Carl Bernstein, broke a series of stories about skullduggery, dirty tricks, and outright criminality in the Nixon White House that become collectively known as the “Watergate Scandal,” and which eventually led to the resignation of a President.

Since then, Woodward has released several books, some of them quite interesting, like “The Brethren”, his inside look at the Supreme Court, and “The Commanders,” an account of the prelude to the first Gulf War. He’s also written some that, to put it as politely as possible, strain the credulity of the reader. Books like “Veil,” in which he claimed that CIA director William Casey dramatically confessed his knowledge of the Iran-Contra scandal to Woodward himself on his deathbed. Or “The Agenda,” which opens with a description of a conversation between Bill and Hillary Clinton. In bed. Just the two of them. Perhaps Woodward was hiding underneath the bed. Reading Woodward in the past few years has usually led to a lot of eye-rolling and “yeah, rights” on my part, and the occasional book chucked across the room in disgust. 

Recently, however, Woodward’s attention-seeking made him a bit of a laughingstock. At issue was an op-ed Woodward had written in which he claimed that the Obama administration was “moving the goal posts” in sequester negotiations by asking for additional tax revenue as part of the deal. Woodward went on Wolf Blitzer’s TV show and intimated that he’d been threatened by White House aide Gene Sperling. “They were not happy at all,” Woodward said. “It was said very clearly, 'You will regret doing this.'"

Later, in an interview with Politico, “Woodward repeated the last sentence, making clear he saw it as a veiled threat… ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I think if Obama himself saw the way they're dealing with some of this, he would say, 'Whoa, we don't tell any reporter that you're going to regret challenging us.’"

This made Woodward a hero to the right, since they’re always ready for anything that will support one of their favorite bogus claims: that Obama and his people are “thugs.”

Woodward was even invited on Sean Hannity’s show for a round of “show us how the bad man threatened you.”

Unfortunately for Woodward, the White House released the full text of the exchange, starting with Sperling’s e-mail:

“Bob: I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today. My bad. I do understand your problems with a couple of our statements in the fall — but feel on the other hand that you focus on a few specific trees that gives a very wrong perception of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.”

Wow. “I apologize for raising my voice”? “My bad?” “Perhaps we won’t see eye to eye?” Terrifying. This Sperling guy’s a regular Tony Soprano.

(Gene Sperling, in Bob Woodward's Imagination)

Woodward’s response indicated that he knew there was no threat: “Gene, You do not ever have to apologize to me…I for one welcome a little heat; there should more given the importance.”

Merriment ensued among the DC press corps. “Hezbollah is intimidating,” Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlantic wrote on Twitter. “‘I think you will regret staking out that claim’ is not intimidating.” Even conservatives had to admit that, in the words of the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis, “we were played.” Eric Ericson of RedState ruefully admitted that he’d “moved into the ‘not a threat’ camp.”

I remember back in the day when journalists had some cojones. In the summer of 1972, a pair of reporters discovered that the Nixon White House had a secret slush fund controlled by Attorney General John Mitchell. Katharine Graham, who was at the time the publisher of the Washington Post, discusses in her autobiography what happened when they called Mitchell for comment:

“After [one of the reporters] read him the first two paragraphs, Mitchell interrupted, still screaming, "All that crap, you're putting it in the paper? It's all been denied. Katie Graham is gonna get her [vulgar expletive for a female body part] caught in a big fat wringer if that's published."

That, by golly, is a threat. “As a friend, I think you may come to regret that,” doesn’t even come close. You’d think that, since one of the aforementioned journalists was Bob Woodward himself, he’d know the difference. But since those glory days, Woodward’s become one of the Beltway Insiders, a fading fabulist looking for attention, desperately trying to reclaim former cachet, and not above a little right-wing style drama-queenery and fake victimhood to get it. Or maybe time really has rendered him that gutless. Either way, it’s sad.