The Red Dawn Fantasy

Well Said:

“… in precisely which “tactical” scenarios do all of these lunatics imagine that they’re going to use their matte-black, suppressor-fitted, flashlight-ready tactical weapons?” I think we have to talk about what I call the Red Dawn fantasy. Red Dawn of course refers to the very entertaining film in which The Wolverines, a bunch of kids from a rural western community, heroically engage a division of Cuban paratroopers and their Soviet advisors who invade the United States at the start of World War III. If you ask those who insist they must own one or more assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols with high capacity magazines, the answer you’ll hear over and over again is: I want to be ready to defend America against the Commies, the terrorists, the immigrant invaders, the United Nations, and yes, even the government of the United States of America. That’s the Red Dawn fantasy. It’s time we saw it for the paranoid delusion it is, and stop giving craziness the legitimacy of the Second Amendment. The gun debate shouldn’t be about whether we need armed guards in every school, movie theater, and place of worship. I shouldn’t be about hunting rifles or weapons for home or personal defense. Take the Red Dawn fantasy out of the equation, and we’ll have no problem coming up with a sensible gun policy in America. But as long as it persists, and as long as we let a delusional minority dictate the terms of the debate, we’re accepting more mass shootings as the price we have to pay.

h/t: TPM Editor's Blog

SWORS: A Deadly Epidemic Returns

Latest Newspaper Column: 

An epidemic is sweeping America. It has visited us before, but this January it’s come early and this strain appears to be particularly virulent, even dangerous. 

Oh, you thought I meant the flu? Well, yeah, that’s bad too, but what I’m talking about here is another outbreak of SWORS: Spasmodic Wingnut Outrage Syndrome. 

As you regular readers know, SWORS is a disease of the central nervous system particularly prevalent among members of the American right wing. SWORS sufferers experience a significant degradation in upper level brain function, leading to a near-total loss of any sense of proportion. They become prone to manic outbursts of indignation and rage over trivial or even imaginary events.

The latest outbreak can be traced to a remark made by Vice President Joe Biden while speaking about the plan he was working on to curb gun violence in the wake of the horrific school shootings in Newtown Connecticut. Part of the plan, Biden said, might include “executive orders” by the President, actions taken under the power of his office that didn’t need to be voted on by Congress. 

Now, anyone who knows anything about this country’s Constitutional separation of powers would realize that what can be done purely by executive order is limited, and certainly do not include a blanket ban on semi-automatic weapons or high capacity magazines. You can at least rest assured that Barack Obama, a former Constitutional Law professor, knows this. This did not stop SWORS sufferers from immediately concluding that “the plan might include executive orders” meant that Biden was actually saying “OBAMA’S GONNA TAKE ALL YOUR GUNS! BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!”

Reaction followed the classic pattern of SWORS, including overly dramatic public statements of irrationally disproportionate anger. Washed up rocker and gun advocate Ted Nugent claimed gun owners were going to be “the new Rosa Parks.” Tennessee resident James Yeager, CEO of a company that trains people in “tactical skills” and who has an online shop selling “tactical” equipment, put up a YouTube video in which he stared into the camera with what I suppose was supposed to be a look of fierce determination but actually more closely resembled psychotic rage. 

“I’m not [bad word] putting up with this,” Yeager snapped during a profanity-laced tirade. “I’m not letting my country be ruled by a dictator. I’m not letting anybody take my guns! If it goes one inch further, I’m going to start killing people.” The state of Tennessee promptly suspended Yeager’s gun permit. Hint: when you go on YouTube loudly announcing that you plan to start killing people, don’t get all surprised if the state acts like you might be serious. 

Yeager later apologized. According to the Huffington Post, he stated "It's not time to shoot anybody," while sitting next to a lawyer (who no doubt, wished fervently that Yeager had come to him before openly making terrorist threats on the Internet).

When the proposed plan was revealed on Wednesday, the “executive order” provisions had nothing on confiscation or banning of any guns. They promised that the Executive Branch would, among other things, “nominate an ATF Director"; “develop model emergency response plans for schools, houses of worship and institutions of higher education," and "issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations." Any  limitations on types of weapons or high capacity magazines would be left to the Congress, although the President did call upon the Congress to enact those, which given the makeup of the current Congress, is a pretty long shot, so to speak.  Expansion of the background check requirement to include gun shows stands a better chance, but the President still left that up to Congress, while issuing executive orders that would make information more readily available for those. 

 Hardly the sort of stuff to send the citizenry to the barricades. Sadly, however, another symptom of SWORS is the inability to hear what someone has actually said. Instead, the SWORS victim reacts to a voice which apparently only they can hear. Republican representative Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, for example, demanded that the Obama Administration “enforce current laws,” apparently not noticing that some of the executive orders called for just that: they require  that the government “maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime” and “require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.” RNC Chairman Reince Preibus called the plan an “executive power grab,”  while failing to specify a single one of the executive orders that does not fall squarely within the President’s Executive authority. 

Sadly, there is no known cure for SWORS, since it renders its victims incapable of logic or persuasion. Even more sadly, it’s not just the infected person who suffers. It’s all of us. 

Excellent Review of Lawyers, Guns and Money at Men Reading Books!

Men Reading Books: Lawyers, Guns and Money by JD Rhoades: No matter what the population, information is power. Small town and county politics are being played out in rural North Carolina. Andy Col...

We're Not Going Platinum

Latest Newspaper Column:

With the recent crisis over the nonexistent “fiscal cliff” averted, the president and Congress seem inevitably headed toward another confrontation over the debt ceiling.

The Republicans, who inexplicably continue to be “led” by Cryin’ John Boehner, insist that they won’t allow the United States to borrow more money, even to pay its current outstanding bills, without an agreement to massive spending cuts.

The Obama administration, no doubt remembering that the last “deal” on the debt ceiling resulted in the very debacle we just went through, is saying, “No way. No deals. Do your job, raise the debt ceiling without conditions, the way you did without a negative word when there was a Republican president in office. Then we talk.”

If the debt ceiling doesn’t get raised, the mightiest nation in the world does what even a Third World banana republic should be ashamed to do: It goes into default. The government shuts down. So, with this disastrous showdown looming, some people have begun talking about an allegedly clever plan to save us, in the form of the Trillion Dollar Platinum Coin (or, as I call it, the TDPC).

Here’s how it would supposedly work: A federal law, 31 USC § 5112, allows the Treasury secretary to order the creation of platinum coins in any denomination. The law was originally meant to authorize commemorative coins, but it’s not specifically limited to those.

So, TDPC advocates say, the president should just order the secretary to mint a single platinum coin, declare it worth a trillion dollars, and deposit it in the Federal Reserve. Hey, presto! We’re solvent again, and we move on.

Sounds completely absurd, you may say, and you’d be right. But as a number of people, including Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, have pointed out, what would be even more absurd would be to let the United States become the world’s largest deadbeat nation, able to pay its current outstanding bills but unwilling to do so.

Because, make no mistake, this isn’t about new spending; this is about Congress refusing to pay for spending it’s already authorized. As several writers have noted, it’s like a father declaring that the family’s run up too high a balance on the credit card, so he’s just not going to make the payments on the debt they have.

All that said, the TDPC raises some practical considerations that would need to be worked out. For one thing, how does one “deposit” a trillion dollar coin? Does the Treasury secretary just stick it in his front pocket and walk it down to the Federal Reserve? Does the Fed have tellers? Does he have to fill out a deposit slip? And hey, wouldn’t this be an open invitation to some supervillain to try to steal the coin?

Also, whose face goes on the TDPC? A number of folks have made suggestions: John Boehner; The President Who Must Not Be Named; and for some reason, swimmer Michael Phelps.

As for me, my choice would be late night TV host Stephen Colbert. No one, in my opinion, does a better job of saying ridiculous things with a straight face to make a point. And that is exactly what advocating the TDPC is: a ridiculous answer to a ridiculous impasse.

Some — not all — liberal commentators have urged the adoption of the TDPC, not least because of the possibility it would make John Boehner’s pumpkin-colored head explode. For its part, the Obama administration has shown no signs of actively considering this plan. Nor should it. It also shouldn’t bargain with the shrinking Teahadist caucus that wants once again to hold the U.S. economy hostage.

There’s a time and a place for discussions about spending, but it’s not at gunpoint. Congress needs to do its job and not send the country into actual bankruptcy today in the name of keeping it from going bankrupt tomorrow.

The last vote on the Senate’s fiscal cliff deal, arrived at after the House punted so disgracefully, showed that while there is still a crazy faction of the Republican Party willing to blow things up if they don’t get their way, it’s smaller than we originally thought. Some of them, thank goodness, will still vote not to wreck the country.

And if not — well, the wingnuts finally get what they want. A government that doesn’t spend money and does absolutely nothing for its citizens, one that’s so shrunken, in the words of wingnut icon Grover Norquist, that you could “drown it in a bathtub.”

Let’s see how much the people love them then, and how long before they realize they’ve overplayed their hand and they cave.

Call the bluff, Mr. President.

Obama Derangement Syndrome In Full Glorious Flower

Latest Newspaper Column:

People sometimes ask me if I have trouble coming up with ideas for columns. The answer is, "sometimes."

But I know that all I have to do is fire up the trusty Web browser, head on over to Fox News or Drudge Report or any of a dozen lesser online right-wing loony bins, where I'll often find the latest outbreak of what's come to be called Obama Derangement Syndrome for our pointing and mocking pleasure.

Take, for example, a recent interview conducted in the Fox News Echo Chamber by Sean Hannity, who indulged in yet another one of those head-wagging rounds of the game "Ain't Obama Awful/Yes, He Sure Is" with syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Hannity started with his usual prep-school-bully sneer, complaining about the president of the United States taking a "tropical vacation" during the so-called "fiscal cliff" crisis. By "tropical vacation," of course, Hannity meant "spending Christmas with his family in the American state where he was born." This is something I'm sure quite a few Americans did, Hannity included.

But remember, we're dealing with Fox News here, the Hot Zone for Obama Derangement Syndrome. No activity of this president, no matter how normal or benign, is beyond the ability of a raging ODS sufferer like Hannity to be outraged over.

On to Krauthammer, whom I've found hard to take seriously since a 2010 column in which he inveighed mightily against a value-added tax (VAT) which he predicted was coming. He urged his right-wing readers to "get ready to fight" against the VAT.

Funny thing is, no one in Congress or the administration had proposed any such thing, nor have they since, nor are they likely to. For an ODS sufferer, however, exhorting people to fight against legislation that doesn't exist is a classic symptom of the disease.

Another symptom is a deep paranoia combined with extreme cognitive dissonance, leading the sufferer to ascribe to his imagined antagonist both complete incompetence and fiendish craftiness.

Krauthammer credited Mr. Obama with no less an accomplishment than "shattering" the Republican Party and plunging it into civil war: "He's been using this, and I must say with great skill - and ruthless skill and success - to fracture and basically shatter the Republican opposition. ... His objective from the very beginning was to break the will of the Republicans in the House, and to create an internal civil war. And he's done that."

Wow. Not bad for a mere "community organizer" who was playing golf on vacation. It calls to mind the Honorable John McCain's complaint during his unsuccessful presidential campaign against Mr. Obama that the blame for rising gas prices could be laid at Obama's feet, even though he was, according to other McCain ads, only the inexperienced junior senator from Illinois.

As I observed at the time, you don't want to make someone that powerful angry. Lord knows what he could do if he was really paying attention.

So, what does Krauthammer think the president should do, now that he has crushed his enemies, seen them driven before him, and heard the lamentation of their women?

Simple. He should give up. Accept Mitt Romney's non-plan of closing undefined loopholes to raise revenue, rather than raising tax rates on the wealthy, which was what the president said he was going to do during the election - an election, lest Krauthammer has forgotten, that he won. If Obama doesn't capitulate entirely, Krauthammer predicted, he'll be blamed for the "fiscal cliff" and go down in history as a "failed president."

Of course, Krauthammer also confidently predicted that Romney was going to eke out a win rather than losing in a landslide, because, according to him, Obama already was a "failed president." He also ignored the polls which show that more people will blame Republican intransigence for any failure to reach an agreement than blame the Democrats.

Here we have two more symptoms of ODS: (1) the unshakeable conviction that the consequence of losing an election is that the victorious side is still required to give you everything you want; and (2) the inability to learn from experience.

People like Hannity and Krauthammer never recognize that the last time they made predictions like this, they were wrong and the polls were right, and that maybe this blithe self-assurance is not confidence but delusional thinking.

Can ODS be cured? In the case of people like Krauthammer and Hannity, we may never know, because it's one of the few mental illnesses that's actually profitable for some of its sufferers.

But at least it gives me something to write about.

2013: The Year In PREview

Latest newspaper column:

At this time of year, newspapers, magazines, and TV shows are filled with retrospectives of the past year: "Top 10 News stories"; "Top 10 Sports Stories"; "Top 10 Drunken Celebrity Mishaps," etc.

Not this column, by golly. We believe in looking forward, not back. So, as always, we bring you 2013: the year in PRE-view:

JANUARY: House Republicans vote to replace John Boehner as speaker of the House with actor/director Clint Eastwood.

"We read an article by this guy from the American Enterprise Institute that pointed out that there's nothing in the Constitution requiring the speaker to actually be a member," says House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, "and everyone here really loves Clint. He's the guy that won the election for Romney."

When a reporter points out that Mitt Romney did not actually win the election and that the majority of Americans who saw Eastwood's argument with an empty chair at the RNC regarded the performance as an embarrassment, Cantor and other Republicans in the vicinity put their hands over their ears and chant, "We're not listening, we're not listening, na na na..."

FEBRUARY: Fox News commentators join forces with right-wing religious organizations to demand the resignation of President Obama after he refers to the Feb. 14 holiday as "Valentine's Day."

"It's SAINT Valentine's Day!" thunders Catholic League President William A. Donohue. Bill O'Reilly chimes in, saying, "The fact that this so-called 'president' refuses to honor an obscure saint who no one really knows anything about just illustrates his implacable hatred and hostility toward religion."

MARCH: House Republicans refuse to authorize an increase in the country's debt ceiling unless the administration agrees to cut three months out of the calendar year.

"We're in a lot of debt in these debt-filled times of great debt," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says. "We can't afford all these months where we just have more and more debt, because we're very concerned about debt. Debt. Debt. Debt. Also, Greece."

APRIL: Following the success of the first installment of Peter Jackson's film version of "The Hobbit" (which stretches the shortest of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth novels into three movies, each nearly three hours long), Jackson announces his new project: a four-part, 16-hour filmed version of the children's book "Pat the Bunny."

MAY: House Republicans defend Speaker Clint Eastwood's "interview" with "60 Minutes," which is actually just Eastwood screaming at a picture of reporter Lara Logan propped up on a sofa.

"He really schooled that socialist [bad word]," North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry chortles to what he thinks is an interviewer from Fox News, but is actually a hatrack in the House cloakroom.

JUNE: After five people are shot by an assault-rifle-wielding gunman in a Piggly Wiggly store in Birmingham, Ala., NRA President Wayne LaPierre holds a press conference demanding that grocery clerks, stock people and bag boys be armed with handguns.

JULY: Unfazed by national criticism of its "Stand Your Ground" law, Florida enacts the "What Are YOU Lookin' At?" law, which allows gun owners to shoot anyone they "reasonably believe is eyeballing them in a suspicious or threatening manner."

AUGUST: Social network Facebook announces more changes to its so-called "privacy policy."

Founder Mark Zuckerberg explains: "If you join Facebook, you agree to let our employees come to your house and look through your stuff. But don't worry. We won't misuse the information. We promise."

SEPTEMBER: A deranged man shoots four garbage collectors with an assault rifle, then kills himself. NRA President Wayne LaPierre holds a press conference demanding that all garbage trucks be armored and equipped with gun turrets.

OCTOBER: A Justice Department investigation of the three largest American banks determines that the banks engaged in money-laundering for drug cartels and terrorist organizations and defrauded investors out of billions. It also turns up evidence that bank executives were personally involved in major narcotics trafficking, gun-running, prostitution, murder for hire, convenience store robberies, and shoplifting.

The Justice Department, however, follows the pattern it has established in previous investigations and refuses to pursue criminal indictments.

"You know how it is," Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer announces with a shrug. "They're bankers. Mess with them and they might get mad and collapse the economy again." Breuer, however, promises that the civil settlements with the banksters will include a "very stern talking to."

NOVEMBER: Retailers Walmart and Best Buy create an uproar when they announce that their "Black Friday" pre-Christmas sales will now begin on Veterans Day. Consumers complain bitterly as they line up to get $199 50-inch flat-screen TVs.

DECEMBER: Not to be outdone by its competitors, Target announces that its Black Friday sales for 2014 will begin on Dec. 26, 2013.

Like it or not, here comes another year....