The End of the Beginning, Not That Some Will Ever Admit It

thepilot.com

If you listen to the doomsayers of our so-called liberal media and to the dire pronouncements of the Frightened Right, you might be tempted to just give in to despair and fear. But let’s look at how some of their previous predictions have turned out:

Remember how Ebola was this terrifying epidemic that was, in the words of CNN commentator (and thriller author) Robin Cook “the scariest thing we can deal with”?

Remember when the panic was so severe that New Jersey Governor and B-list presidential candidate Chris Christie was, on the most dubious legal authority, locking a nurse up in a “quarantine tent,” even though she was showing no symptoms of the disease, purely because she’d treated Ebola patients in Sierra Leone?

Remember how it was going to jump the oceans via international travel and ravage the U.S. any day now?

Well, I’m pleased to pass on this piece of good news: The World Health Organization has declared Guinea, the country where the outbreak began, to be Ebola-free. Sierra Leone was declared clear of the virus in November, and Liberia got a clean bill of health in September.

A couple of cases have since been reported in Liberia, but it does seem as if the major outbreak is over and the disease is in retreat. And, in case you didn’t notice, the mass outbreak that had Americans running in circles with their hair on fire never materialized.

Remember how, when the Iranian nuclear deal was announced, the American right wing, the congressional Israel lobby, and Our Friend Bibi were all shrieking that the dastardly Iranians would never follow through, claiming that they’d be cheating right from Day One, and acting as if President Obama had ensured that we’d be seeing mushroom clouds over Tel Aviv and D.C. within this decade?

Well, I’m pleased to pass on this good news: According to a story in the New York Times, “A Russian ship left Iran on Monday carrying almost all of Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium, fulfilling a major step in the nuclear deal struck last summer and, for the first time in nearly a decade, apparently leaving Iran with too little fuel to manufacture a nuclear weapon.”

There’s still a long way to go, but the world is measurably safer from the threat of an Iranian nuke than it was a year ago.

Remember how Daesh (aka ISIS, ISIL, etc) was supposed to be this unstoppable force of invincible desert warriors, unable to be beaten except by a massive influx of American ground troops? (Not that anyone on the Right would actually admit to advocating that, but they’d deride everything else, including airstrikes, as weakness and appeasement.)

Well, I’m pleased to pass on the good news that those invincible desert warriors just got vinced. Daesh just lost the key city of Ramadi to Iraqi troops. Fact is, they’ve lost 40 percent of the ground they took since last year.

It’s gotten to the point where their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had to send out a message to his troops trying to rally their spirits: “If we are killed and the wounds are numerous and the problems amassed against us and the hardships are great, then it is no surprise either.” No, it isn’t, Bubba, and don’t let it be a surprise that it’s going to get a lot worse. This is not the speech of someone who’s winning.

This is very likely why they’re desperately lashing out with attacks like the one in Paris. But even on that front, the news is encouraging. The Belgian police reportedly just broke up an attack planned by ISIS in that country on New Year’s Eve.

Ten major Daesh leaders, including “several external attack planners," have been killed in anti-Daesh coalition airstrikes in the past month, according to coalition spokesman Col. Steve Warren. And the mastermind of the Paris attacks, as we know, was killed by the French police.

So does all this mean that everything’s coming up roses, that all the bad times are over and that, in the words of that annoyingly catchy tune from the Lego Movie, “everything is awesome”?

No. But it means that, despite a sensation-driven media and a grasping political party, all of whom follow a business model based on convincing us all that everything is awful and that the only response to terror is to surrender to it and be terrified, things are getting better.

As Winston Churchill famously put it in 1942, after the Allied victory in the deserts of North Africa: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

There are those who’d deny all hope, for their own selfish gain. But when they do, try looking at their record for prediction.

Scott Walkback's Comedy Circus

 The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Scott Walker hasn’t been getting a lot of attention lately, even from the people who once touted him as a serious contender for the GOP nomination.

No one’s really paid a lot of attention to what he has to say, because let’s face it, when the circus (i.e., Donald Trump) is in town, no one wants to go to a boring lecture on policy. His poll numbers have been slipping into the low single digits, so it seems that Walker decided he needed to strap on his own clown shoes, stick on the big red nose, and get some attention from the hoopleheads.

First, he began suggesting to NBC’s Chuck Todd that maybe we don’t just need a fence on the southern border, to keep out the Brown Horde the Republicans have been using as the bogeyman in this election cycle. We may need one along the even longer northern border with Canada, to keep out the terrorists.

Asked, almost facetiously, by Todd about the possibility of a northern wall, Walker suggested with a straight face that that might be a fine idea.

“Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire,” he said. “They raised some very legitimate concerns. … So that is a legitimate issue for us to look at.”

Doggone right. We really should look at putting up 5,525 miles of concrete, barbed wire and guard towers to keep those syrup-sucking back-bacon-eaters from pouring across our sacred northern borders and forcing single-payer health care and Rush albums down our throats.

Confronted with widespread derision, even from his own party, on the issue, Walker, fresh off his performance a couple of weeks ago in which he took three different positions on birthright citizenship in two days, began the Romneyesque tapdance of denial and evasion that’s caused me to begin referring to him as “Scott Walkback.”

“I never talked about a wall to the north,” he claimed, two days after he’d done exactly that.

Then Walker fell back on the time-honored tactic of, “Let’s find something terrible and horrifying and try to blame it on Barack Obama.” He pointed to the murders of police officers Darren Goforth  of Texas and Charles Joseph Gliniewicz of Illinois, and blamed the “disturbing trend of police officers being murdered on the job” on Obama’s “anti-police rhetoric.”

It should be noted that, as usual, Walker failed to provide any specific statements from the president that are “anti-police” or any evidence whatsoever that these terrible crimes were a result of anything other than plain criminality.

“This isn’t the America I grew up in,” Walker claimed.

Thing is, though, the America Walker grew up in was actually more dangerous for cops than it is now. There have been fewer shooting deaths of police officers during the Obama administration than there were at this point in the George Dubbya Bush administration, just as there were fewer shootings of cops under Dubbya than there were under Clinton.

The trend has been going down, significantly, for years. The Washington Post’s Radley Balko analyzed the numbers and found that “between 1971 and 1975, when Walker would have been between age 4 and 8, an average of 125 police officers were feloniously killed per year. Between 2006 and 2010, the average was 50. In 2013, just 27 officers were feloniously killed. In 2014, it was 51. So far this year, the number of cops killed with firearms is down 16 percent from last year. Two of those officers were killed by other cops.”

So why does it seem like there’s a big jump in people killing police officers when the actual number is trending down? The same reason we have a huge shark scare every summer. The sensation-driven national media can make anything look like an epidemic if they report every single instance of it as part of a “disturbing trend” — where before, the individual stories would have been left to local news.

The national media profit hugely on fear. And, not coincidentally, so do Republican demagogues like Walker. His only problem is that Trump’s doing it bigger, and with a total lack of boundaries or shame.

Maybe Walker can pull himself out of his slide. But if you’re going to try to get the spotlight off Trump, you gotta go big. You’ve got to do something to get the rubes excited. Maybe he could remind us of his track record in Wisconsin by punching a teacher in the face. Wingnuts hate teachers, but they hate Mexicans more. So find a Latino teacher to clobber.

Do that, Governor, and you can get back in there.

THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: As he does nearly every week, Pilot commenter "Lenny Bo" can't wait to tell everyone how uninteresting he finds the column he reads every week:

Walker won't last another couple of months as his poll numbers are dropping fast - he will simply go back to being governor of Wisconsin.

Hey Dusty - how about a similar piece on Hillery - her poll numbers are dropping fast too. Plus she imitates Walker by saying one thing, then doing another (learned this from Bill), she flip-flopped on the emailgate scandal, the list goes on an on. In fact Dusty, if you think about it, there is plenty of material for a dozen pieces on 'ol Hillery.

Well, I've done quite a few pieces on Hillary Clinton, and I've managed to spell her name correctly. This is yet more evidence that wingnuts suffer from that weird kind of brain damage portrayed in the movie "Memento" where they can't form memories, since they're constantly bitching "Why don't you write about [insert obsession here]" when I already have.  It's the same form of brain damage that causes then to demand why President Obama hasn't said anything about violence to law enforcement officers when he has done so, repeatedly. 

And When You Lose Control, You'll Reap The Harvest You Have Sown

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

You know, you can say what you like about Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Sen. Jim Webb and that dude from Maryland whose name escapes me right now, but at least for the moment they’re campaigning like grownups. In contrast, look at some of the wacky antics of the Republicans:

John McCain calls Donald Trump’s supporters “crazies.” Trump shoots back that McCain’s really not a war hero because “he got captured. I like people who didn’t get captured.” Lindsey Graham responds by telling Trump to stop being a “jackass.” Trump turns on Graham and calls him an “idiot” and a “lightweight.”

Rick Perry calls “Trumpism” a “mix of demagoguery and nonsense,” whereupon Trump says Rick Perry’s “only wearing glasses to try and look smart.” Ted Cruz calls Mitch McConnell a “liar,” whereupon McConnell tells Cruz his mama’s so ugly they’ve got to tie a pork chop around her neck to get the dog to play with her.

OK, I made that last bit up. But it does seem as if the party that at least tried to market itself as serious adult leadership for America during the Reagan years is acting these days like a bunch of poorly socialized 13-year-olds sniping at each other on Twitter.

The coarsening of dialogue between the Republican candidates has been described by some pundits as “the Trump effect.” Some candidates see Trump’s poll numbers increase with every bullying sneer and insult and think, “Hey, I need to get me some of that.”

But The Donald is merely reaping the harvest that’s been sown over the past 20 years by talk radio and the Internet, where the competition for ears and eyeballs has become so intense that wingnut politicians seem to be straining their brains trying to find something to say more horrible and outrageous than the last thing.

It’s what the Internet calls “trolling”: trying to shock and enrage in order to get attention, even if it’s of the negative kind. It’s an environment in which supposed “pundits” like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin get air time and book contracts because “they make liberals angry.” It’s a climate of drama and hysteria, in which every political defeat simply must be portrayed as the exact same thing as the Holocaust. Or slavery. Or both.

Witness, for example, Mike Huckabee’s ridiculous claim that the multilateral Iran nuclear deal is, and I quote, “marching Israel to the door of the oven,” a line which even the Anti-Defamation League called “completely out of line and unacceptable” and the Israeli ambassador said was “inappropriate.” But hey, it got headlines — and, Huckabee is no doubt praying, the same bump in the polls that Trump gets whenever he comes out with something that makes people look at each other and go, “Did he really say that?”

For years, the Republican Party has turned a blind eye to, and occasionally even embraced, the crudest attacks on its opponents, from Congressman Dan Burton referring to then-President Bill Clinton as a “scumbag” on the floor of the House to Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” and demanding that he be allowed to watch her have sex if the health insurance for which she worked and paid was required to cover birth control.

All this time, of course, these same Republicans would fall onto their fainting couches and clutch at their pearls in distress at the mildest harsh language directed at them. It’s more than a little ironic that many of the same people who cry like little girls over “name-calling” now embrace Trump, the candidate who’s made it his campaign strategy.

The rhetorical monster the GOP has nurtured is now fully grown and, as monsters do, it’s escaped the lab and is attacking its creators. Add to this the fecklessness of the so-called party leadership as exemplified in the utterly ineffectual Orange John Boehner and the equally helpless Mitch McConnell, and you have the perfect recipe for the current disarray in the GOP.

So who will benefit the most from the chaos? Obviously, whoever ends up with the Democratic nomination. Right now, that still looks like Hillary Clinton. On the Republican side, however, you’ve got two candidates — former Ohio governor Jon Kasich and John Ellis Bush, aka JEB! — trying to position themselves as the grownups in the race.

Will either emerge to give Mrs. Clinton a serious run, or will they be eaten by the GOP rage monster, leaving the nomination to one of the “crazies” who’ll alienate the general electorate and hand the presidency to the Dem nominee?

Stay tuned. But my money’s on the monster.

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.

They Love Our Troops, Except When They're Terrified of Them

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

It’s been said that everything’s bigger and better in Texas. They claim their beer is colder, their women are prettier, and even the nighttime stars are brighter.

Well, I don’t know about all that, but I can tell you this: their wingnuts are wingnuttier. And apparently, they’re running the state.

Seems the U.S. military is planning a large-scale training exercise called Jade Helm 15. JH15, as we’ll call it, is a “challenging eight-week joint military and interagency (IA) Unconventional Warfare (UW) exercise conducted throughout Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado,” which is scheduled for this summer.

Sounds OK, right? Similar to the sort of exercises run around here all the time from Fort Bragg.

OK, that is, except to the paranoid, conspiracy-mongering right, to whom no move by the government, even by the military, is anything less than a harbinger of The Death of Freedom.

Someone got hold of a map that identifies Texas, Utah and a small patch of Southern California as “hostile” territory for purposes of the exercise. To wingnuts, this could only mean one thing: The United States was preparing to invade … itself.

“I’ve hardly ever heard of something joint like this unless they’re planning an invasion,” asserted Alex Jones of the online nut-farm Infowars. Except for, you know, the dozens of other joint exercises the military has conducted on American soil.

Aging martial arts star and conservative icon Chuck Norris joined in, writing for World Net Daily: “What’s under question are those who are pulling the strings at the top of Jade Helm 15 back in Washington.” Poor Chuck. All those shots to the head he took from Bruce Lee are finally taking their toll.

It just keeps getting crazier and crazier. Walmart had to publicly deny that recently shuttered stores are going to be repurposed as prisons for people on a so-called “red list” of dissenters (all red-blooded conservatives, naturally) who’ve been pre-targeted for arrest when the Evil Obama Administration brings the hammer down. Or food distribution centers for Chinese occupation troops. Or something.

This sort of lunacy would have been no reflection at all on the current state of the Republican Party had not the governor of Texas his own self, the Hon. Greg Abbott, decided to buy into it, or at least pretend to. He’s asking the Texas State Guard to go down to the area of the exercise to keep an eye on things and make sure our military doesn’t get out of line, freedom-wise.

“It is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed,” Abbott wrote in his letter to the commander of the TSG.

Huh. I thought the Republicans believed that’s what our troops were for.

It should be noted that the “Texas State Guard” is a different organization from the National Guard, and appears to be mostly concerned with things like disaster relief.

Sorry, but if the government really was executing a military takeover and the TSG was deployed to stop them, they’d barely register as a speed bump as the Army rolled into Austin.

With Abbott standing tall, other Republican pols just naturally had to weigh in against the imaginary plan for the Kenyan Islamocommiefascist Usurper to put Texas under martial law.

Loony Louie Gohmert, the Texas congressman and teahadist mullah who’s taken over the coveted Michele Bachmann Chair in Bat-Spit Craziness, said he was “appalled” by the map, especially “that the hostile areas amazingly have a Republican majority.” He demanded that the “tone of the exercise” be changed “so the federal government is not intentionally practicing war against its own states.”

Even presidential candidate Ted Cruz allowed as how he had “no reason to doubt” the assurances of the military, but he understood “the reason for concern and uncertainty” because that Obama is just so very, very awful.

Poor wingnuts. Their ideology so often requires that they hold two diametrically opposed ideas in their heads at once. They have to revere the “troops” and the police while at the same time being terrified that those organizations are going to impose martial and/or Sharia law any minute.

They have to love their country while maintaining a big ol’ cache of weapons at all times in case they have to make war against it if they lose an election (which would also include firing on those same soldiers and cops).

It’s no wonder some of them go insane. But it’s a pity that some leaders of the GOP feel like they have to don the tinfoil hats of the conspiracy theorists to pander to the party’s lunatic fringe.

Chris Christie: EBOLA FIGHTER!

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to the Thrilling Radio Hour. Tonight, we bring you another slam-bang episode of our most popular show — “Chris Christie, Ebola Fighter”! Brought to you by Panicwear, the last word in stylish hazmat suits for the whole family! Dad, Mom, even the kiddies, will look and feel their best in these full-body suits designed for Panicwear by Ralph Lauren. Remember, if it’s not Panicwear, you’re gonna die horribly! AAAAAAHHHHHH! Now, on to our story…

As our show opens, Gov. Christie is waiting on the tarmac at Newark Airport, along with his faithful aide and sidekick Wazoo.

WAZOO: De plane, Boss! De plane!

CHRISTIE: I see it, Wazoo. Get ready. We’re about to face our most dangerous enemy.

WAZOO: Another ethics investigation, boss?

CHRISTIE: No, Wazoo, even worse. There’s a nurse on that plane. And she’s been in Africa!

WAZOO: A nurse? Africa? Oy gevalt, boss!

CHRISTIE: Wait, when did you start speaking Yiddish?

WAZOO: Hey, is it my fault the scriptwriters could never settle on my exact ethnicity?

CHRISTIE: Never mind, Wazoo. Here she comes.

ANNOUNCER: As the nurse exits the plane, Gov. Christie steps forward, hand raised bravely.

CHRISTIE: Stop right there!

NURSE: What? Hey, aren’t you …

CHRISTIE: That’s right, filthy disease carrier. It is I! Chris Christie, Ebola Fighter! (MUSIC FANFARE) And I quarantine you in the name of the law!

NURSE: But … I don’t have Ebola! I don’t even have a fever!

CHRISTIE: That’s exactly what you’d say if you did have Ebola! Wazoo, to the quarantine tent with her!

WAZOO: You got it, boss!

NURSE: No! Wait! Aaaah!

ANNOUNCER: As Gov. Christie turns away from his vanquished foe, an interfering busybody steps up.

BUSYBODY: Excuse me sir, are you a doctor?

CHRISTIE: I don’t need to be a doctor! I am Chris Christie, Ebola Fighter! (MUSIC FANFARE)

BUSYBODY: I thought not. If you were, you’d know that there’s no danger of Ebola infection from someone not showing symptoms. And only then if you have contact with bodily fluids from an infected person.

CHRISTIE: Hold on there, pal! Are you a doctor?

BUSYBODY: As a matter of fact, I am. An infectious disease specialist, actually.

CHRISTIE: And did you just get off a plane from Africa?

BUSYBODY: No, Amsterdam.

CHRISTIE: Close enough. You didn’t think Chris Christie, Ebola Fighter (MUSIC FANFARE) would know that there are flights from Africa to Amsterdam? Your cunning plan to infect the populace has failed! Take him away!

WAZOO: Yes, boss.

BUSYBODY: Wait! No! Aaaah!

CHRISTIE: Hmmph. Silly liberals and their “degrees.” And their “geography.” Don’t they know I have leadership to display?

WAZOO: Hey, boss, we got a problem …

CHRISTIE: Wait! All those little men. In uniform. What are they doing here?!

WAZOO: Ummm … that’s a Boy Scout troop from Ottumwa, Iowa. They’re getting ready to fly back home after visiting New York.

CHRISTIE: New York?! There’s Ebola there! Quarantine them immediately!

WAZOO: But there’s no more room in the tent, boss! That’s the problem I was trying to tell you about!

CHRISTIE: What!? Well, then, wrap those Boy Scouts head-to-foot in Saran Wrap!

WAZOO: They’ll suffocate, boss! And the people already in the quarantine tent have cellphones! They’ve gotten hold of the media!

CHRISTIE: Not to worry, Wazoo! The media love me. I help them preserve the fiction that my whole party hasn’t gone off the deep end.

WAZOO: I’m not sure this is helping, boss. But they’re also contacting civil rights lawyers. Something about you not having the authority to lock people up just on your word. Especially when there’s zero evidence that they’re actually sick.

CHRISTIE: But I’m Chris Christie, Ebola Fighter!

(LONG PAUSE)

CHRISTIE: Hey! Where’s my music fanfare?

WAZOO: The trumpet player got quarantined, boss. Turns out he has a great-aunt in Mozambique. There’s no Ebola there, but, you know, you can’t be too careful.

CHRISTIE: (Sighs heavily) Oh, all right. Let everyone go. But be sure we do a press release telling everyone I’m still right about everything.

WAZOO: Yes, boss.

ANNOUNCER: Tune in next week for another episode of Thrilling Radio Hour! Next week’s installment: Chris Christie, Ebola Fighter, meets ISIS! And remember: if you’re not in constant fear, you’re not a real American! Good night, and God help us all!

THE GOBSHITES RESPOND: Weekly commentator "Francis", who often has his response up within fifteen minutes of the column being posted on the Pilot's website, responds in the fashion we've come to expect from the Party of Love:
Some deserve a long agonizing death, not quick, but slow and painful, then they too will understand just how those who have contacted this virus felt before dying, sorta of takes the humor out of the subject don't ya think.[sic]

But don't forget folks, it's the liberals who are filled with hate.