The IRS Scandal: Tempest In A Teapot

 

After the previous essay on Benghazi, I got a bunch of email.

The gist of which is best summed up as:

Okay, Benghazi, fine, whatever. Fine. But what about the IRS thing? Huh, what about that? How are you going to defend your boy Obozo on that, huh? Huh? It’s Obumer’s Watergate, Man, he’s going down! Impeachment! Impeachment!

Right.

The IRS scandal.

You mean the IRS scandal where not one, not a single one, of the targeted conservative groups requesting 501(c)3 or (c)4 designations were denied tax exempt status despite being engaged in blatantly political activities in direct violation of the intent of the tax code? You mean the IRS scandal where not one of the targeted organizations were denied their rights as citizens of the United States or, in point of fact, were not harmed in any way? You mean the IRS scandal where no actual laws were broken? Where there was no actual cover up? And where the IRS itself found the problem and corrected it and then reported it to the American people?

You mean that “scandal?”

Right.

Folks, there’s a scandal here alright, starting with the one where hysterical conspiracy mongering conservatives in Congress will now use this non-issue as yet another excuse for obstructionism, yet another excuse to beat their fleshy chests in a pity party of make-believe persecution while managing to avoid doing any of the actual work they supposedly get paid for.

They’ll form committees and demand investigations and assign an independent counsel.  They’ll bloviate and pontificate in furious fulminous outrage. They’ll give self-important red-eyed interviews to the feverish rumor mill of Fox News.  They’ll stroke the corpulent fecund ego of Rush Limbaugh and his legions of misshapen trollish minions who are even now rubbing their flinty hands together and leaking noxious fluids and squealing in orgasmic glee.  They’ll stand by with eyes slyly averted while Glenn Beck spins his bizarrely ludicrous gold-tinged conspiracy theories replete with Nazis and Hitler and Mao and Sharia Law and the coming of the Mormon End Times of Doom. And they’ll send forth their scrawny pet Tea Party chimp and she’ll caper about dancing her little clockwork monkey dance to the sound of music only she can hear with the whites of her crazed eyes rolling madly in their sockets while she screeches her little set-piece monkey screech of Impeachment! Impeachment!  Then they’ll trundle out John McCain with his war medals a’clankin’ and a’janglin’ and he’ll briefly rouse from the excrement smeared bamboo prison of his cloudy yellowed existence and angrily shout Pickles! yet again.  And when the circus has done run its course, when all of the greasepaint saturated clowns have exited their gaudily painted little car and tooted their little horns and squirted their little seltzer bottles into the cheering crowd, when in the end it turns out that there’s really no scandal at all, and there’s nothing that they can pin on Obama or use to deflect Hilary Clinton from 2016, well, then congressional conservatives will sullenly slink back to their dark little spider holes and dust off their forgotten Benghazi script.

What congress will not do, is their actual jobs.

And most Americans won’t even notice.  America heard “IRS” and “Obama,” their blood began to fizz and pop, and they were off and running down to the store for a fresh supply of torches and pitchforks without once stopping to ask even a single question.

Because they didn’t need to ask questions, they didn’t need to think. 

IRS.

Obama. 

Ding!

When the bells ring, the dogs drool.  It’s really just as simple and as reflexive as that.

Kill ‘em all and let God sort it out, that’s how we do business in America these days. Kill ‘em all, let God sort it out.

But here’s the thing, Americans should have asked the questions.

That way they wouldn’t look so damned stupid all of the time.

At this point, most Americans couldn’t even tell you what this whole thing is actually about. 

Fine, so we’ll ask: Say, what’s this whole thing actually about?

It seems that the Internal Revenue Service singled out conservative groups for detailed investigation.  Republicans are calling it “The New Watergate” and “The New Iran Contra Affair.” 

Um, isn’t there a  non-republican scandal we can compare it to?

No.

What was the IRS looking for exactly?

In a word, fraud.  The groups in question were applying for tax-exempt status, specifically they asked the IRS for either 501(c)3 (charitable agencies) or 501(c)4 exemptions (social welfare organizations).

What the heck is a “social welfare organization?” Sound like a bunch of flaming liberals!

Not exactly, Social Welfare Organizations, called 501(c)4 Groups in the tax code, or usually just C4s, are nonprofit agencies that by law must be devoted primarily to programs broadly serving their communities and not private groups. These can be religious, cultural, educational, veterans organizations, homeowners associations, volunteer fire departments, and so on.

Sounds like socialism! And I  knew welfare would be involved somehow!

Right. In recent years the vast majority of those applying for 501(c)4 exemptions have been conservative patriot groups.

Like the TEA party?

Correct.

OK, that’s cool then. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that 501(c)4 group cannot engage directly in politics.  They can make campaign contributions, but neither that nor lobbying can be their principle function. Otherwise, they get to pay taxes just like everybody else. And there’s another more important thing, political groups, besides having to pay taxes also have to disclosure how much money they gave and to who.  C4 organizations don’t.

I don’t get it.

501(c)4 organizations can give money to politicians and political parties anonymously, as much as they want.

So, like if you’re one of these C4 outfits you can just give whatever you want to whoever you want and you can keep it a secret?

Bingo.

Wait, you’re saying you could be like The Muslim Brotherhood or Homos for Sodomizing Jesus or something and you can give gobs of money to a stinking filthy scheming liberal politician and they don’t have to disclose that?

Not directly to the politician.

How then? Like to a SuperPAC?

Exactly. Then that PAC can support a politician or lobby for or against a particular piece of legislation and you, as an American citizen, don’t have any idea who’s paying the bills or helping any particular candidate. 

That’s Bullshit! How did this happen?

Two words: Citizen’s United.  Prior to 1998, just about 100% of all political donors to federal campaigns were publically identified.  Today, four years after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, it’s less than 40%. That’s how profound of impact Citizen’s United had on federal elections.  It’s huge.  Today 60% of all federal campaign money is given anonymously, in other words, you as a citizen of the United States have no idea who’s funding which politicians.  And since money is the key to political office in the US, you don’t know who’s buying what. With the Citizens United decision, big donors can de facto give as much money to political parties and politicians as they want. In many cases, for what should obvious reasons, both the big money donors themselves and especially the candidates would prefer that you, Average American Citizen, don’t find out who’s giving what or how much to whom.  

So, you’re saying that…

Since Citizens United, C4 organizations and Political Action Committees naturally became a way to launder campaign money.

So, like, maybe the government tax people should watch out for that! You know enforce the law!

Yeah, maybe they should. That would be the IRS’s job, wouldn’t it?

Hey! I thought we were asking the questions here!

Sorry.

So why was the IRS spending all of its time harassing conservatives? That’s some Nazi shit right there.

Since Obama’s election in 2008 and the Citizen’s United decision in 2010, the vast majority of organizations applying for 501(c)4 status are, wait for it …. wait for it … conservative Tea Party groups. Naturally they get the lion’s share of the attention.  The IRS wondered if the organizations applying for tax-exempt status as “social welfare” organization really were social welfare organizations or if they were, maybe, engaged primarily in, oh, I dunno, politics. And they wondered that because it’s their job to ask the question.

OK fine. But how come the IRS spent 100% of its time targeting the Tea Party, huh. What about that?

Actually, only about 30% of the organizations singled out for further review were conservative political groups.  

Yeah, but, it still sounds like harassment!

Well, it’s the IRS.   However, of the approximately three hundred applications that were tagged for extra screening (out of several thousand), only about a hundred of which were conservative organizations, independent review showed that those applicants clearly demonstrated indications of significant political campaign activity and they should have been investigated in detail.  In other words, in nearly every case of the 501(c)4 application process, the IRS did exactly what it was supposed to do. In fact, the IRS should have been doing more to investigate these groups, along with the right-wing groups they should have investigated left-wing groups, and middle of the road groups, and any group applying for tax-exempt status as a social welfare organization who appeared to be engaged primarily in political activities. 

Yeah, but, it still sounds like harassment!

Again, it’s the IRS. they’re supposed to harass tax-cheats. And they’re supposed to regard everybody as a potential tax-cheat until proven otherwise. Everybody feels persecuted. But, see, here’s the thing. No conservative group that applied for tax-exempt status was denied.  All were eventually approved. All of them. None of them would have even noticed this thing if it hadn’t made the news. 

But, wait, I thought they were targeting the Tea Party?

Well, yes, in essence they were.  Given the overwhelming number of applications and the limited manpower, and the fact that Congress refuses to either confirm a permanent head of the organization or fund the IRS to the levels required to do a thorough job, the IRS needs a way to help filter things out, so they use something called a BOLO list, or Be On The Look Out.  Then they used certain keywords to flag applications for the BOLO list, words like “Tea Party,” “Patriots,” and “9/12 Projects.”   However, it didn’t work very well, so after about a year they changed the filter criteria to something more generic like “constitutional groups” and “groups dedicated to changing government.”

Ah HA! So it was Obama all along! Just like Nixon!

No. It was the Cincinnati IRS office. There is absolutely no evidence that the White House had anything to do with it.  And the difference between this affair and Nixon’s abuse of power is that Richard Nixon set out to break the law, he did it on purpose and with malice aforethought, and he damned well knew what he was doing.  In the current case, the direction regarding which organizations got extra screening didn’t come from the White House, there was no cover up, and no laws were broken, though the IRS did bend their own rules regarding impartiality – which is what this is really all about. In the Watergate case, the IRS under Nixon’s direction deliberately broke the law, in the current case the IRS acting on its own was attempting to enforce the law.  Big, big difference.

Why Cincinnati?

Because Ohio is a hotbed of liberalism?  Cincinnati is the office that processes all of the tax-exempt applications. Again, the White House had nothing to do with it. Clearly so. Provably so and even congressional conservatives agree with that assessment – well, most of them anyway, the ones that aren’t gibbering white-eyed extremists like the aforementioned capering monkey woman.  Instead of trying to pin it on Obama, the more rational conservatives are now using this event to push for a tax code overhaul, something the President has been calling for since his first term, and a revamp of the IRS itself.

Okay, sure, you’ve convinced us, it wasn’t Obama. Sure. Insert eye-roll. Some low level flunkies put in the filter criteria on their own. 

Yes, because that’s what their office is paid to do. These guys are supposed to be on the lookout for tax fraud. That’s why they call it Be On The Lookout for tax fraud. Should they have used the word “Tea Party?” Maybe. Maybe not. It’s exactly like a police sergeant telling his patrol officers to be on the lookout for red corvettes, because it’s his opinion and his experience that people who drive red corvettes tend to speed more than other drivers. It’s an asshole thing to do, but, honestly, just how egregious is that really? 

Still sound fishy to me. I feel all persecuted and shit.  So, anyway, which patriotic Conservative discovered it?

Actually it was brought to light by an internal review, by the Inspector General for Tax Administration – I don’t know if the inspector was a liberal or a conservative. I don’t think it matter.  What matters is that the system worked exactly as intended.  The IRS itself corrected the situation and informed its superiors in the Treasury Department, who informed the President, who informed the American people.  No cover up. No secrets.

Wait, I though like John Boehner discovered this?

The Inspector General submitted its report to the Treasury Department and the Obama Administration made the announcement on Monday.  It was considered minor, something easily fixed, already fixed. By Monday afternoon, somewhat predictably in retrospect, congressional conservatives had turned it into “the scandal of the century” complete with fireworks and a parade, which replaced last week’s “Scandal of the Century” in the headlines.  Now, again predictably in retrospect, every senator and representative, every holy man and con man, every circus clown and malingering hanger-on has jumped on the bandwagon and declared themselves persecuted by the IRS.  Boehner didn’t discover anything, and couldn’t have even if it was printed on his ass in orange self-tanning lotion, he’s just being an opportunistic asshole who now has to eat his own words. 

How come Obama fired Steven Miller then?

It’s Washington. Somebody had to be fired. Don’t feel sorry for Steve, he’s an IRS agent, you can dunk them in boiling water like lobsters, they don’t feel pain.  

But, but, but this sort of sounds like, um, kind of, not really a big deal.

Yeah. Funny that.

Well, crud. What kind of scandal is this? There’s no guns, no CIA break-ins, no Weapons of Mass Delusion, no LSD in the water supply. Hell, there isn’t even a blowjob involved. How can it be a scandal without blowjobs? Why for all the screaming and gnashing of teeth?

Well, now that’s the real question, isn’t it

See, because there are genuine scandals here. 

Political organizations, blatantly political organizations, are being allowed to commit tax fraud. And the IRS is letting them get away with it in direct violation of their charter and the law. The Supreme Court is letting them get away with it. The President is letting them get away with it. And Congress is most assuredly letting them get away with it.  

And we, us voters, are letting them all get away with it.

These organizations are pretending to be charities and social clubs and we’re pretending to believe them. 

All those organization were approved for tax-exempt status? All of them? None were denied?

That’s the problem right there. 

That’s the real scandal.

That’s the question you should have asked, right there, not, “How many organizations were singled out for review?” or “How can we pin this on Obama?” but “How many of these applications from blatantly political organizations were rejected?”

And so now they get to avoid paying taxes while secretly laundering funds for every giant money machine from the Koch Brothers to Rupert Murdock to Karl Rove to the mob to the UAW to the Mormon Church.  

We sold democracy to these conniving assclowns without even getting a receipt.

With its Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court has turned democracy into a fucking joke for sale to the highest bidder.

So, why isn’t John Boehner up in arms over that? Why aren’t these great patriots, these great constitutionalists, investigating that?

And that’s the real scandal, right there, isn’t it?

 

Ask yourself something: Who benefits from this situation?

Who benefits from being able to wash money through the system and buy politicians and political office anonymously?

Who indeed.

And that, my shiny electronic friends, is the answer to the real question.

Benghazi: Reductio Ad Absurdum

 

Update:  Apparently a number of folks that should be commenting on The Blaze have chosen to instead to grace me with their charming wit and razor sharp intellects.  Oh lucky, lucky me.   Because, really, reason, punctuation, and spelling are so overrated.

As such, comment moderation will be periodically turned on when I’m not able to watch the post in real-time.

This way I can get on with my life, rather than play Whack-A-Mole with a bunch of trolls.  Feel free to comment, stuff worth posting will appear eventually.  The other crap will be bundled up, put into a brown paper bag, placed on Glenn Beck’s front porch and … well, you know how this gag works. Just be prepared to run when I push the doorbell.

//Jim

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Benghazi.

Let’s lay out the playing field.

Just to make sure we all understand the rules.

If the President is in the White House situation room surrounded by his staff and military advisors, and he, personally, on his authority as the Commander In Chief, authorizes the US Navy to take whatever action necessary, if he authorizes weapons-free and gets out of the way, and then US Navy SEAL snipers acting on the resulting orders from their on-scene commander execute an astounding feat of marksmanship which then instantly kills three Somali pirates via three perfectly executed head shots which then subsequently allows Navy boarding crews to successfully rescue American merchant Captain Richard Phillips off the Horn of Africa in the tradition of Preble and Decatur – the President gets no credit for that at all, he was only a bystander.

Likewise, if the President is in the White House situation room, surrounded by his staff and military advisors, and he, personally, gives the go/no-go order on his authority as the Commander in Chief, and US Navy SEALs then jump from a C-130 high above Adow, Somalia, and make a daring raid in the middle of the night on an armed pirate camp to successfully rescue Jessica Buchanan and Poul Hagen Thisted, and kill nine pirates in the process – well, Obama gets no credit for that either. He’s just some uninvolved asshole who watched it all on TV.

And of course, if the President is in the White House situation room surrounded by his staff and military advisors, and he, in real-time, personally, gives the go/no-go order on his authority as the Commander In Chief, and US Navy SEALs then swoop into an allied country and double-tap Osama Bin Laden right in the brainpan – Obama gets no credit for that at all.  In fact, if he even mentions it in any way whatsoever, he’s grandstanding, taking credit,  dishonoring the men who actually put themselves in harm’s way to neutralize one of America’s greatest enemies.

However.

However, should four Americans die in the middle of a riot in a warzone, by intent or by accident – well, then that, by the Angry Bearded Christian God, that, Sir, is all Barack Obama’s fault, one hundred percent.

And he should be impeached for it.

And maybe shipped back to Kenya.

He gets no credit for any success and all the blame for every failure.

Do I have that about right?

I’m not complaining, I just like to know what the rules are.

 

Maybe Obama should have maybe made his various announcements of success while standing on the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln in a flightsuit, maybe conservatives would cut him some slack then.

But probably not.

 

So, Benghazi.  

What, exactly, is the point of this circus again?

I’m not asking rhetorically, I mean it precisely as stated.

What is the point?

Last week, the chief clown in this posse, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), said that he “did not know what took place, and who was where doing what and why."

King doesn’t know who, what, or why, and yet he next declared confidently, "I believe that it's a lot bigger than Watergate, and if you link Watergate and Iran-Contra together and multiply it times maybe ten or so, you're going to get in the zone where Benghazi is."

Bigger than Watergate?

Bigger than Iran Contra?

Conservative math, folks: ((Iran Contra + Watergate) x 10) = Joe Biden for President!

Yay!

… ur, what? No, that’s not what we, wait, now just hold on a minute, what do you mean it’s in the Constitution? Well, crap! Though, you know, at least Biden’s white….

So, if it’s not to make Joe Biden president, then what exactly is the point of the current conservative “investigation” into Benghazi?

I mean let’s be honest here, these people hate the government, they hate it more and more with every day that passes.

And they hate liberals, hate them with the fiery righteous fury of a born-again Evangelical minister denying that’s his face on YouTube snorting cocaine out of Rentboy’s tanned asscrack.

Now, the four Americans killed in Benghazi were government employee. 

And the Ambassador was a liberal appointed by President Obama. 

I’m frankly surprised that the folks screaming loudest about Benghazi aren’t out in the streets next to Westboro Baptist Church, cheering the fortuitous reduction of  government and thinking up ways to make it happen again.

Oh what? Now I’m being offensive? Now I’m being insulting?

Okay, fair enough, but come on, conservatives have spent the last five years threatening to take their guns to Washington. According to a Rasmussen poll taken two weeks ago, more than fifty percent of conservatives said that they believe armed revolution is now the only way to get what they think they want – now that they’ve lost two presidential elections to a black guy it’s time to burn down democracy.  Hell, they’d celebrate if somebody gunned down the president, would they not? A number of them have said so, in exactly those terms, in public. They talk openly about it. And, really, armed revolution, right? If you’re not talking about shooting down government employees, then what’s the point of the gun in the first place?

So what exactly are conservatives pissed about with Benghazi?

That the Libyans denied them four more targets?

That Ambassador Stevens died in a Libyan civil war instead of an American one?

Seriously, what’s the problem?

Hey, don’t get all soggy and hard to light with me, this is your revolution. I know which side I’m on. I know how long I’ll live once the shooting starts. The knock on my front door will surprise me not at all, nor what comes after (though it might surprise you. Just saying).

Like I said up above, I just like to know what the rules are, that’s all.

Given all the dead and sick and maimed Americans that Congress turns a blind eye to day in and day out, all the blood they personally have on their own hands, and given the responsibility they themselves bear for all our war dead up to and including Benghazi itself, what is the purpose of this particular Republican witch burning?

What is the point in specific and concise terms? Bullet point by bullet point, so to speak.

What is the purpose of the investigation, spelled out, in detail? What is the objective? What are the expected outcomes? How do we measure them, i.e. how do we know when the investigation is complete?

Most importantly: What will we do with the information once we have it?

I’d really like to know.

Why are we spending so much time on Benghazi?

I mean, we already know the answer, don’t we?

We know who is to blame. We know who is at fault, do we not? Conservatives certainly do. They’ve already reached a conclusion and made the announcement. It’s all over but the shouting and now they’re just looking for the smoking gun, and they’re going to keep at it until they find it – and in today’s world if you can’t find a smoking gun, well you can always just print one out of thin air, can’t you? (Of course, it’s liable to blow up in your hand, but that’s not really the point, is it?).

Is Benghazi that important? In the grand scheme of things, among all the dead, among all the carnage, among all the blood we’ve shed in the Middle East, is it really that important?

It is?

Really?

But why?

 

No, stop for a minute and think about it carefully.

 

Why? Why is what happened in Benghazi important? Why does it matter?

Why does it matter to you? You personally. You as an American.

Will the answers, whatever they may be, will they make a difference? To you? Will they, whatever they may be, will they change what you think? Will they?

Will those answers, whatever they may be, make a difference in your life, personally?

Will the final analysis make a difference in the lives of people that you love or admire or are responsible for?

Will the answers make Congress fully fund embassy security and the foreign service? Will they approve funding and full military support to the eventual Damascus mission, you know, the one we’ll have to stand up once we oust Bashar al-Assad from Syria as certain members of congress are insisting the president do right now – the very same members of congress who are conducting the Benghazi investigation, as a matter of fact, and who cried Treason! when Obama sent us to Libya.

Will the answers reanimate the men who died in Benghazi?

Will the investigation return those dead men to their families, alive?

Now I, personally, don’t believe in reincarnation, reanimation, resurrection (divine or otherwise, now or previously), nor zombies, But some folks certainly do, including the ones conducting the investigation. So is that what this is about? Never mind the thorny moral or ethical questions posed by resurrection. Never mind the profound theological implications or the mind-bending metaphysics. Never mind even the practical, legal aspects of reanimating the dead or the chilling political implications of putting that god-like power into the hands of Congress. Simply answer the question, will the current investigations into Benghazi bring those men back from the grave? Yes or no?

Better yet, do you, as Americans, really expect that the investigation will return those men to life? 

No?

No, I suppose not.

Well then, if the investigation won’t make the dead live again, will it at least give their families closure?

Will the answers, whatever they may be, give those left behind comfort and surcease. Will it ease their pain and put their hearts at peace?

Is that noble idea what this is about?

Are we doing it for the families?

Are we doing it because we owe those who fell in the service of their country at least that much?

If that’s so, are the families of these four men that much more important to us, as Americans, than the families of all the thousands of men and women who have fallen, unlamented, uninvestigated, in the service of their country over the last decade? Are the memories of these four men so much more important than all of thousands who have died on patrol in hostile territory, who died because they lacked proper body armor or reinforced vehicles or dependable equipment or reliable intelligence or air cover or even a decent map, who died carrying out impossible orders in untenable positions, who died because they were sent into battle under false pretext, who died due to any of the hundred million idiotic things that can take your life in a war zone, leaving behind bereft wives and husbands and daughters and sons and mothers and fathers? 

Is that why we’re doing it? Because we owe the families of the fallen?

If so, shouldn’t we give each death, each life lost before its due time, each and every one of those fallen thousands, equal attention, equal outrage, equal measure?

And should we not hold to account with equal diligence the men who sent them?

No?

No, I suppose not.

Is the purpose of the investigation about the words?

Is it about Act of Terror versus Terrorism?

Is that what it has finally come down to?

Is it really about the missing “ism?”

Have all the big questions been answered to such a degree that we have nothing left to debate on the national stage but the phrasing? Has Congress really solved all the big problems, addressed all the big issues, faced all of the challenges, settled all of the big debates, that the only thing left to do is argue over grammar?

Is the Republican party so desperate, are conservatives so exhausted of substance, that the only thing they have left to argue about is the suffix?

Have they truly been reduced to that level by the mighty negro mojo of Barack Obama?

Does it really matter if the president called Benghazi terrorism or if he called it a ham sandwich? 

Do conservatives really, and I mean really, believe that “Act of Terror” and “Terrorism” actually determined the outcome of the last presidential election? 

That it really, honest and truly, came down to that?

Really?

If it’s that important, that the tense can determine elections, that it can change the very fate of nations, if it can alter the very fabric of the time/space continuum, I mean if it’s really that important, what we call it, then shouldn’t Congress draft a bill defining the exact criteria? If it really matters to the American people, then should we not, each and every one of us, demand from our elected officials a clear and unambiguous definition of the words and specific guidance on when each expression may be used – under penalty of law.

If it’s really that important, I mean.

On the subject of words, is the number of revisions important? 

CNN’s Candy Crowley suggested that the Benghazi talking points were edited to “help the president get elected.”

Leaving aside the question of why anybody would watch either Candy Crowley or the pitiful joke that CNN has become, what exactly did the rough draft say?  “The Ghost of Osama Bin Laden came to the president in a dream and said, ‘Baaaaaarack, America wiiiiiill beeeee bathed in the blood of infidels.’ But Obama ignored the warning, thinking it no more than a fitful bit of REM sleep brought on by the spicy halibut tacos he had consumed during a Press Club Dinner earlier in the night. ” er, no, let’s make that “The CIA had no credible indications of Al Qaida activity near the Libyan consulate…”

And should we, as Americans, even allow revisions to the pending release of government documents at all? If it’s that important, so important that Congress must hold hearings into the differences between a rough draft and the final copy of each White House memo, can we as citizens do no less than demand that only first drafts be used? That when penning a report to the American people, all government agencies must agree in the rough draft and that no changes shall ever be made?

Or shall we allow a certain number of revisions? One? Two? Exactly how many revisions shall constitute high crimes and treason? Come now, don’t be shy, Conservatives, step up and make your case. If an overabundance of revisions is an impeachable offense, well then shouldn’t that number be codified into the very Constitution of the United States itself via amendment (Wait, the Constitution is the ultimate government document, does the act of revising the Constitution via constitutional amendment fall into this same impeachable offense? Wouldn’t that make the Founding Fathers traitors? After all, they revised the Constitution several times. Also, will conservatives now throw out their bibles, starting with the King James Version? After all, look how many times that silly tome has been revised, it’s damned near gibberish. But I digress).   

Should we set a limit on the number of drafts?

If it’s that important, I mean.

Ridiculous?

Congress doesn’t think so. Conservatives don’t think so. They’re both deadly serious.

Is the exact location of the president that important?

Fox News’ Bill Kristol says the president was “absent the whole night the crisis.”

Absent? Like what absent exactly? Like they couldn’t find him absent? Like he was hiding behind the couch absent? Like Obama went out for a smoke without telling anybody? Like he just opened a window and shimmied down a tree, over the wall and disappeared out into the night?

Like where’s Obama? I dunno, I thought he was with you absent?

Like Great Scott, he’s absconded absent? Like that?

If that’s the case, maybe we should be having a completely different investigation.

What? I’m just asking, how’d he get past the Secret Service? 

Was it Obama’s smooth negro mojo again?

And what? He didn’t take a cell phone?

Former Secretary of Defense, Leon Penetta and General Martin Dempsey testified before Congress that the president was fully engaged with the National Military Command Center during the attack.  And really, don’t we spend a metric shitload of money to make damned sure the president is fully connected, all the time, no matter where he is – even if he sneaks out for pizza?

But here we are, with Conservatives declaring that the president, the president, wasn’t in the right place at the right time.  That the very future of the nation is at stake, isn’t that what conservatives are telling us?  The nation teeters on oblivion, the seas shall rise, the dead will walk, the Anti-Christ is come.  Because, hey, even though these are the same people who predicted with absolutely confidence that their guy would be sitting in the White House right now, we should just take them at their word on this subject. Right?  Because they’ve been so, so very correct in the past (like that time these same clairvoyant assholes told us to invest in real estate, but I digress). We can’t determine the exact nature of the treason until we pin down exactly where Barack Obama was during every second of every minute of every hour of the unfolding crisis. 

We don’t know where he was, man, but we know where he wasn’t – he wasn’t in the right place.

And where is that exactly?

Should Obama have remained in the Situation Room? The Pentagon? Deep below Cheyenne Mountain? Or perhaps he could have called Dick Cheney and asked for the undisclosed location of a convenient Cold War redoubt. 

If it’s that important, shouldn’t Congress pen a bill requiring the real-time tracking of the President via GPS collar? If it that’s important? Or maybe every member of the government, including Congress, should be belled, just in case we need to know where they are.  Hello? Is this thing on? Hello?

Are we doing this for the people? For us? For America?

Are we doing it because the people have a right to know?

Are we doing it for the truth?  Because the truth, the truth no less, actually matters to a nation steeped in conspiracy theories and make-believe creationist hoodoo and chock-a-block with science-denial and awash in unchecked rumor mongers and which routinely lends credence to hysterical talk radio and reality TV and embraces deliberate ignorance, because that nation clearly gives a good goddamn about the truth?

Really?

The Truth. That’s funniest thing I’ve heard all day. The Truth.

 

Of course, in reality (if that word has any meaning here), we should be investigating Benghazi in order to determine how we might better protect our people in the future.

That’s what responsible, mature, intelligent people would do.

That’s what those charged with the security of nation are enjoined to do. That’s the oath they swore and their solemn duty.

But obviously we’re not investigating what went wrong in Benghazi in order to reduce the likelihood of such an event again.

Look at the “investigators.” Look at the questions they’re asking. Look at the witnesses and those called before Congress. Look to the talking heads on the News. Look at the testimony. Nowhere is there any effort whatsoever to quantify lessons learned, to develop a better process, to update security procedures or embassy staffing or define security protocols.

Because, obviously, the investigation isn’t about that.

It’s not even about Barak Obama, except by default.

It’s about blame.

It’s about sour grapes.

It’s about bitter partisan driven revenge.

It’s about the last presidential election.

And more than anything, it’s about preemptive strikes. it’s really about the next presidential election and if these silly sons of bitches want the truth, the Truth, then they should start right there and admit it. 

But they won’t, and they won’t admit what they’re really up to because conservatives go into an election the same way they screw, scared to death and afraid somebody is going to catch them cheating.

 

Nothing, and I mean nothing tells you who conservatives fear in 2016 more than this idiotic charade.

Bang Bang Crazy, Part 7

Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.
         - Molly Ivins

 

I bought my first letter quality computer printer in 1988.

Personal computers were not very common then, at least ownership of business grade machines, home computing was just getting started.

I had recently sold my first “real” computer, an IBM PC/XT, and upgraded to a new, more powerful Z-248, a huge behemoth of a 80286-based processor with a genuine VGA color display system that was only available to government employees and members of the military through a special government purchase program direct from Zenith.

And I decided that I needed a professional quality printer to go with it.

The personal computer printer market back then was pretty gruesome, choices were limited and none of them were good. 

There was dot-matrix, which sounded like endless yards of tearing cloth (unless you also sprung for a huge monstrosity of an insulated sound-box) and reams of tractor-fed fanfold paper – every wastebasket in the 80’s was filled with eleven inch long perforated strips of paper, because that’s all you did, tear off the tractor-feed strips. That’s where all the forests went, tractor-feed strips, endless, endless miles of them.  Inevitably the paper feeder would jam about every third page or so on those cheap printers, but the dumb machine would doggedly just keep on grinding away, szzzzzzzzrrrrip! Szzzzzrrrrip! Szzzzzrrriiiiiiiip. They called them tractor-feed for a reason, and if you didn’t catch the jam in time the idiot machine would relentlessly wad an entire box of paper into the stalled feed rollers like a Russian battle tank grinding inexorably through an Afghan village.  Each page started out with blackish letters that gradually faded to a kind of plum-tinted gray as the ink ribbon wore out. And on the cheap 9-pin models the only available font was best described as "a cluster of spots resembling the tracks of a drunken housefly that had recently crawled through fresh dog shit."

If you didn’t want tractor-feed, well, there were Daisy-Wheel printers and Element-Ball printers, both of which were descended from a bastard mating between a typewriter and a one-lung Harley-Davidson. They were loud, clunky, expensive, and charitably described as hideously slow.  Not to mention that they were extremely difficult to interface with.  See, in those heady days of PC-DOS, in the Paleolithic pre-USB world of serial cables, each program had to have its own printer driver, not the operating system, the program itself, and so while you might be able to pipe ASCII text directly to the COM1 port and get a generic dot-matrix printer to hammer out unformatted text, your word processor, which was likely Word Star or Electric Pencil, might not be able to speak to a Daisy-Wheel printer at all – unless you had a specialized piece of software from the manufacturer made specifically for your particular equipment.  And there wasn’t any Internet you could go download drivers from either, you had to order them, from the manufacturer, via written letter with an enclosed check, and then wait six weeks for the floppy disk to arrive via ox cart. Oh, it was a glorious primitive time, back in the wild wooly 80’s!  (And just for added fun, I was living in the island nation of Iceland at the time, and the fastest form of communication was the only vaguely reliable military postal system – which 99.9999999% of computer manufacturers would not ship to, no matter what. Period).

I really wanted a laser printer, but in 1980’s those were commercial products roughly the size of a mini-fridge, bulky, temperamental, prone to catastrophic jamming and bizarre formatting problems, requiring knowledge of specialized programming languages such as PCL and an innate understanding that what you saw on the screen would in no way whatsoever resemble what would eventually appear on the printed page.  Not to mention that a cheap laser printer was about eight grand beyond my price range.

And then HP came out with the Deskjet.

Laser quality printing without the laser. Inkjet technology had been around for a couple of years in industrial settings, but the Deskjet brought it down to the (mostly) affordable home market.

I bought one of the first five hundred units made by Hewlett-Packard via a money order for $999 (Plus S&H).

I had to order it directly from the company and have it shipped to a friend in the states who then shipped it to me via the APO/FPO system. When all was said and done, that printer cost me about $1200, give or take.

And it was well worth it.

It was whisper quiet and it printed crisp black Times New Roman letters on high quality paper that looked even better than the output from top end laser printers. I loved that printer. I still have it, in the original box, in a storeroom in the basement.

Back then, I was the envy of every techno-geek that I knew.  I owned the only affordable personal laser quality printer in the entire nation of Iceland (Ok, it was a small country, but, damnit, I was a god. A god of nerds, sure, still… I’m just staying. A God).

There were, however, some problems.

The ink wasn’t exactly permanent.  Get it wet and it smudged and smeared and ran. Damp fingers would do it.  Sneeze on a printout and your text would end up looking like it had a case of the measles.  And it was slow, not Daisy-Wheel slow, but slow, the specs said four pages per minute but it was more like two pages a minute, on a good day.  It was supposed to hold a hundred sheets of paper, but it would jam if you loaded the paper tray higher than seventy-five. It didn’t like cheap paper, you had to spring for the good stuff. And it went through ink cartridges at a ferocious rate.

Despite that, the Deskjet Model 1 was damned cool gadget for its time.

A year later HP came out with an upgrade, the Model II. I didn’t buy one of those, but in 1989 they released the Deskjet 500. Then the 550. Then the 550C, the first color version that would print pictures – that I bought.  And I didn’t have to order it from the factory, they sold it right in regular stores, like diapers and toothbrushes and frozen waffles.

In less than five years the technology of ink-jet printers went from primitive to fully mature, from four pages a minute in draft mode to twelve pages a minute in laser quality mode.  From black and white to photographic-quality full color.  From $1000 to $200.

And now?

Twenty years later and I own a commercial grade office “document center,” a photo quality color laser printer that can crank out a hundred double-sided pages per minute in full waterproof glossy color indistinguishable from the pages of National Geographic. It’s also a high-speed high-density scanner, duplex collating copier, fax machine, and data storage device with onboard processing, it’s networked via a broadband Gigabit wireless interface running an encrypted internet connection that I can print to from anywhere in the world via any device including my phone, it holds four full reams of paper – and it cost me less than my first HP Deskjet (not a lot less, mind you, but a bit less anyway).

And there’s nothing particularly unique about it, the technology is ubiquitous, anybody can own one, it requires no god-like specialized knowledge to setup or operate.

 

Yeah, yeah I hear you say in that voice you use when your eyes are starting to glaze over in a technobabble coma, thanks for that trip down the dusty forgotten dead ends of Memory Lane, Nerd Boy, what’s your point?

 

My point?

Nothing.

I’m just wondering at the state of the art.

The current state of the art, the one that includes relatively primitive 3D Printer technology.   Technology that was designed to produce cheap plastic prototypes and one-off designs. Technology that predictably is now being used to crank out single use disposable handguns.

At the moment those printers are clunky and slow.  The weapons, and other products they produce, are little better than a homemade zipgun and just about as accurate.  Anybody who actually tries to fire one these things, outside of a testing lab under very specific safety protocols, is putting themselves at risk of serious injury and/or death. 

At eight grand for a cheap 3D Printer, they’re a bit beyond the average consumer – but only a bit, and only for the next very few years.

And by now you have, of course, figured out what this essay is really about and you, like me, are wondering just where that technology will be in, oh, say, twenty years.

Twenty years?

Scratch that, make it five.

Very likely in much less than five years, inexpensive 3D printer technology will be able to rapidly  produce on-demand fully serviceable, reliable, accurate, and cheap handguns. 

And it will be available to basically anybody, you, me, kids, the sane and insane, criminals and terrorists and gang lords, anti-government types of all political persuasions, the Occupy Movement, your local militia in their raggedy-assed camouflage, angry loners itching for attention, seething psychotics under the lash of their pet demons, scorned crazy ex-girlfriends and abusive drunken wife-beating husbands.

Everybody.

And won’t that be fun?

Oh, and those plastic guns? They will also have the added benefit of being undetectable, untraceable, and disposable. 

See they were designed to be that way, available to anybody and undetectable without expensive sophisticated scanning equipment – like the body scanners employed by the TSA in our airports, i.e. equipment beyond the range of most police departments, businesses, and school districts.

See, that’s the whole idea.

The “printable” gun you’ve heard so much about in the press lately, was designed by a guy named Cody Wilson. He’s the founder and director of Defense Distributed, a non-profit organization dedicated to the development and distribution of open source templates for the 3D private manufacture of guns, so-called Wiki Weapons. Wilson is a Texan, and law student at the UT School of Law, he’s also a self-described crypto-anarchist.

If you don’t know what that is, a crypto-anarchist, it’s most accurately described as a Big L government-hating Libertarian, a guy who embodies the mindset of eugenics, i.e. survival of the fittest and to hell with everybody else else. 

So far Wilson has complied with US law at every step of his design process, up to and including getting a Federal Firearms License and removing his designs from Defense Distributed’s website following a cease and desist order from the State Department- not that the take-down actually matters in any fashion whatsoever at this point. The designs are out there and they’ll never be erased.

As I mentioned, Wilson is not big on government, any government.  If reports are accurate he apparently embraces the ultra-libertarian idea that all people are sovereign unto themselves (at least those strong enough and mean enough anyway, the rest, the weak, the unfit, according to libertarian philosophy are sheep fit only for slaughter or slavery). He believes that government should be no larger than community sized and disposable whenever you don’t agree with it.

Wilson has publically stated that he believes any human being should be able to possess any weapon of any kind at any time – up to and including weapons of war, including nukes.  If you’re familiar with Vernor Vinge’s Peace War universe novella, The Ungoverned, Wilson sounds a whole lot like an Armadillo (and if you don’t know what the hell I’m on about here, don’t sweat it).

The basic idea behind Wilson’s printable gun, the Liberator (named for the cheap handguns air-dropped by the WWII Allies to the resistance in Occupied France), is to make guns so easy to manufacture, so easily available and so widely available, that any human being can access them at any time – even being able print disposable guns out at will whenever and wherever they want. Kids, criminals, you, me, everybody.

 

Very likely, given the probable course of the technology’s development, the relentless and hectic pace of Moore’s Law or one of its many variations practically guarantees Wilson’s vision of the future will at least in some regards come true. It’s nearly inevitable at this point.

 

Now, home manufacture of guns is nothing new.  Any competent machinist with a decently equipped metal shop and few basic milling machines can build a far more accurate, more powerful, and far safer weapon than Wilson’s pathetic plastic pea-shooter.  Likely they can’t do it more cheaply, but that’s just a quibble. Before gun manufactures and their various pet legislators flooded the streets of America with cheap and widely available handguns, criminals and thugs used to make their own homemade zipguns on a regular basis. 

But to do it well does take specialized knowledge and a particular skill.

3D printing doesn’t.  Using Wilson’s free open source template and the increasingly cheap and available printer, anybody can make a single use, untraceable, throwaway gun. 

If you can operate a smart phone and plug in a TV, you can make a gun with about as much effort as it takes to download and print out a recipe for tuna casserole.

And that’s the thing.  Right there.

3D Printers use technology adapted directly from inkjet printers and CNC (Computer Numerical Control) milling machines. Using a three dimensional electronic blueprint, they build up fine layers of plastic one on top of the other.  They can create infinitely complex shapes far easier and with much less waste than standard injection-molding or heated vacuum-forming techniques allow.  The current state of the art means that the 3D printer doesn’t produce a finished product when creating a complex device like a gun, rather it makes each individual component and a human being assembles those into the final machine.  Future generations will likely make complete products, ready for use.

Here’s one built by Cornell University:

 

The technology is exciting. Beyond guns, it is being used to literally transform manufacturing – and more, much more. For example: scientists have used 3D printing technology on a limited basis to actually make human body parts.  In a decade or two, very likely we will be able to literally print out replacement organs, literally printing with living cells.

Ironic, isn’t it? That the same technology that one day may preserve and extend human life is being used right now to make tools for ending it? 

Ironic that a guy with Cody Wilson’s talent would rather spend his days creating tools to destroy human life instead of making it immortal?

But I digress. The irony of people like Cody Wilson no longer surprises me, thus is the perverse nature of so-called libertarians.

 

Just like the evolution of text printers, within a few short years, cheap 3D printers will be able to use a variety of raw materials, not just plastic, to create complex and durable goods – including much more advanced weapons.

But that’s the nature of technology.

All technology, all of it, embodies both benefit and bane.

It’s how we choose to use technology that makes the difference.

And you can’t put the Djinni back into the bottle. 

The technology is out there in the public domain and it is too useful, too exciting, too valuable, too empowering, too laden with possibility and promise, to abandon. 

It can not be suppressed, even if that’s actually what we wanted – which we don’t.

With less money than I bought my first inkjet printer for, I can build myself a 3-axis CNC milling machine that will precisely sculpt wood and plastic in my workshop to an accuracy in the sub-millimeter range.  For a double that, I could build myself a 3D printer accurate enough to produce Cody Wilson’s Liberator.  Of course, being a professionally trained gunsmith, I could make a much better weapon without benefit of CNC/Printer technology, and for less money, and it wouldn’t blow up in your hand on the second shot. But I could only make one at a time, and I couldn’t teach you how to do it without a lot of effort.

But I could build you a printer, and then with the right raw materials you can make all the guns you like. 

And if I can do it, anybody can.

There has been talk of safeguards, i.e. forcing 3D printer manufacturers to include a software block that prevents the machine from making gun parts or certain shapes.  Won’t work. Can’t work. Total waste of effort. The mere suggestion shows a complete lack of comprehension with regard to the actual situation. Any teenager can jailbreak an iPhone or bypass their parents’ nannyware with ease. Any shade-tree mechanic can hack the chip in their truck.  Chinese, Iranians, and Anonymous burn through their government’s firewalls with impunity – and the only way to prevent it is to squat in the Dark Ages like North Korea.  DRM is a joke, as is the utterly ineffective regional encoding on DVDs.  Any blocked software will either be circumvented in short order or erased and replaced with easily available freeware – if you don’t know how to do it, just ask any random fourteen year old. 

Mandating software blocks is a complete waste of time.

So what am I saying here?

That homemade plastic guns are an inevitability?

Yes.

That’s exactly what I’m saying.

You can’t put the Djinn back in the bottle. 

However, will the proliferation of printed guns make the world any more dangerous than it is now? I mean really?

Probably not.

Not really.

Hell, last week in Kentucky a five year old boy shot his two year old sister to death with a rifle he received as a present for his birthday.  Five years old and he got a 22 caliber rifle for his birthday.  And the rifle was apparently kept loaded and unlocked without any form of safety or child control, leaning up against the wall in the family’s dinning room.  When the mother looked away “for just a moment” the kid naturally picked up the rifle and shot his sister. Authorities called it an “accident.”  Speaking as a certified firearms instructor, there’s nothing accidental about this incident at all. There’s nothing surprising about it any way, shape, or form. Anyone with even a modicum of experience around children and/or guns could have told you exactly what was going to happen.

These people left two children and a loaded gun together in the same room.

That’s not an accident, that’s negligent homicide, manslaughter, pure and simple.  

The parents however won’t be prosecuted.

Because there’s no law against leaving your kid and your loaded gun unattended in the same room (though, personally, I think a clever prosecutor could make a case of child endangerment). 

Shit happens.

Dead kids are just the price you pay for freedom, right? Right?

The following comments appeared under a Yahoo! News article about the shooting. I can’t find the link again, so you’ll just have to take my word for it without the reference:

This isn't a gun case, it's a parenting case. I wouldn't leave my 5 year old alone with a bottle of bleach, either. The only reason this made news is to brainwash the masses. If the child had drunk a bottle of bleach and died, it wouldn't have made the news. As for the mom, she made a mistake, as all parents do, and she'll pay dearly for it for the rest of her life, having lost her baby.

Mom made a mistake. Shit happens.  Kids die. That’s freedom. Just don’t let it affect me.

I have to wonder if the author of that comment would feel the same way if the five year old had been pointing his gun at their children.  Let’s ask the parents of Sandy Hook, shall we?

...and thousands more people die from car accidents....want to take autos away too?

No. But as I explained in the first installment of this series, I do want autos regulated, and registered, and the operators required to have training and to be held accountable.  And when they demonstrate an astounding level of negligence, especially when that negligence results in the death of other human beings, I want their right to own and operate a vehicle terminated, period.  I want them held accountable.

Now, why should a gun be different from a car?

Because a gun is designed to kill people, shouldn’t we hold gun ownership to a higher standard?

If not, why not?

Yes, rule # 1 is make sure all firearms are unloaded, but people make mistakes. So you want to lock the parents up so the 5 year old is an orphan? Great idea, lets just lock everyone up who makes mistakes, its not like our jails are overcrowded or anything.

And

Folks, this was an "accident". You know accident's can happen. I look at intent, knowone wanted this to happen. The article stated, the gun was NOT supposed to be loaded. The guilt will be enough punishment. I don't believe in locking everyone up.

And

Too bad that so many are making negative remarks about the parents. This is not a time to do this. I agree that the parents were wrong in giving the child a gun and for not keeping it locked up. So sorry for the family and friends, this is tragig.

Funny thing, the same folks who are staunchly pro-gun, and are consequently willing to dismiss this incident as a mistake, are very often the very same people who declare themselves pro-life and are perfectly willing to lock up abortion doctors – or shoot them..  Why is the life of a fetus in the belly of a liberal worth more passion and effort than the life of a child killed by gun violence (and no, I don’t, in fact, know if the commenters are actually pro-life, I’m asking a question based on well-established demographic statistics.  Ask around any NRA convention, see how many pro-choice types you find. There you go).

Why are these same people willing to dismiss the shooting of hundreds of children per year as “accidents” and the unavoidable result of freedom, but not do the same for Benghazi?

Hey, I’m just asking.

You have to look at intent. Their was none. Accidents happen all the time, (car accidents, gun accidents etc..) That is the way life goes. The gun was not supposed to be loaded. We can all learn to be more careful, but bad things are still going to happen sometimes. [sic]

Oh, well, a learning experience. Well, that makes it okay, I guess.  Intent. That’s what matters. Bad things happen. Just like drunk driving.  Or that abortion doctor and his house of horrors. Or Benghazi. Or handing your kid, the one with Asperger's and a behavioral disorder, the combination to your gun safe. Again, let’s ask the Sandy Hook parents how they feel about their  learning experience, see how much comfort it gives them.

Obama wants gun control - what about parent control? We don't need more laws, we need more citizens with armed with common sense who are responsible.

Ah, the wishful thinking solution to gun violence.  That’ll be helpful.  If only people weren’t irresponsible. If only.

Maybe we could pray for a pony too while we’re at it, a magic pony that can fly and shoot rainbows out of its ass.

So what. The mother has already broken the law just as if she let her 2-year old unattended by the swimming pool -- she is guilty of gross negligence in the care of her kids. So what is this article all about -- the story of a moron mother or another ultra liberal attempt to push their anti-2nd Amendment agenda using any means possible? Let's just take advantage of another tragedy by pulling on emotional strings. Hey you effete liberals, you wanna play big daddy to the max? Well,instead of taking guns away from law-abiding citizens maybe we should take kids away from moron parents. Better yet, we could sterilize all parents whose combined IQ scores are less than 200 (but that would wipe out a good amount of your voter base wouldn't it?).

So what? A five-year old killed a two-year old and obviously, obviously, it’s a liberal plot to take away our guns!

What exactly is the argument here? Gun ownership must be unrestricted, but reproduction? That’s fair game for regulation, right? We can’t stop crazy people from owning guns, but we can sterilize the ones we don’t think should have children.  If stupid people don’t have kids, kids won’t kill each other with guns. After all, the Constitution grants you the legal right to bear arms, but makes no mention of bearing children, does it? Is that about right?

Tell me again, who was it that used forced sterilization on people they deemed politically undesirable?  But Obama is the Nazi, right? 

Question: who decides?  Who decides who can have children and who can’t? This guy, the Yahoo commenter?

Color me slightly dubious here.

Why is it that those who repeatedly call for responsible gun ownership are so, so, very reluctant to actually put their money where their mouths are? In other words, don’t bother to tell me about responsible gun ownership if you’re not willing to enforce that idea by force of law. Could it be that they are not, in fact, responsible gun owners after all?

 

Folks, we need to stop asking “How damned stupid can you be?”  Some of these folks are taking it as a challenge.

 

In Detroit last week a teenager killed himself during a game of Russian Roulette.

Russian Roulette. Seriously, who does that?

In Oregon teachers were shocked and frightened damned near to death when two masked gunmen burst into a meeting at the school and started shooting. 

Turns out the whole thing was a setup by the school administration, the “shooters” were firing blanks and the idea was to … well, fuck, I’m not exactly sure what the idea was – unless it was to determine if any of the teachers were packing concealed heat like the NRA wants, because that would have been hysterical, right? When the armed teachers started shooting back I mean. With live rounds.  

You talk about a learning experience – here’s an abject example of why amateurs and fuzzy headed NRA gun droolers should be the very, very last people teaching school security or handling weapons around children.  Nobody with any professional experience in Tactical Survival Training would ever, and I mean ever, mix active shooter simulations with the possibility of live fire.  The use of simulated munitions, blanks, simunitions, must be in a carefully controlled and rigidly managed training environment – and yes, I have extensive personal experience in this area.  There’s no more egregious violation of basic weapons safety protocols than this incident. Whoever authorized this evolution is criminally stupid if not actually insane.

The number of ways this could have gone horribly wrong are too numerous to count.

Meanwhile, down Texas way, retired firefighter and all around bad neighbor, Raul Rodriguez, tried to use the state’s stand your ground law to get out of capital murder charges.  See, back in 2010, Rodriguez shot and killed Kelly Danaher, a thirty-six year old elementary teacher.  She was having a birthday party and Rodriguez didn’t like the noise. So he confronted Danaher and two men in Danaher’s driveway.  When the unarmed trio told Rodriguez to shove off, he called police and told the dispatcher, "my life is in danger now" and "these people are going to go try and kill me."

Then he declared, "I'm standing my ground here."

And then he went back to his neighbor’s house and shot the unarmed Danaher down in cold blood and wounded the other two men.

Then he bragged to his friends how he’d never be convicted because Texas has a Stand Your Ground law and as long as you kill the other guy, you’re home free.

To give the state of Texas its due, Rodriguez was convicted of murder and sentenced to forty years in prison last week – why he didn’t get life or even the Texas death penalty I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader. 

Advocates say that Stand Your Ground wasn’t intended as a free license to kill, but it seems not everybody got the word.

And as long as we’re in Texas, I suppose I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the NRA’s national convention of batshit bang bang craziness.

Even the annual Adult Video Awards Show in Las Vegas can’t hold a handful of sanitizing gel to the staggering amount of public masturbation, ejaculation of bodily fluids, copious drooling, and general ass buggery that a bunch of rednecks climaxing over a couple acres of guns generates.

They were all there too, all the crazy people who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a gun, all in the same room together. 

Glenn Beck wasted no time in invoking Hitler and the Nazis, beating the same old dead horse into rotten scraps while waving a rifle ala Charlton Heston over his head, raving on about shadowy conspiracies and the evil Obama.

Sarah Palin rode her favorite hobby horse around the stage, declaring that the elite lamestream media would never let a Republican president get away with what Barack Obama has done in his push for new gun laws – which is what again, exactly? Ask for a national dialog? Ooooh, that America hating bastard! 

Palin a longtime NRA member drew a standing ovation when she reminded the crowd that her son Trigg’s name is short for “trigger” (like the horse, I guess) and her new nephew’s middle name is Remington (probably in homage to William Remington, blacklisted liberal economist and designated by Tailgunner Joe McCarthy as a communist suspect. If I had to guess, I mean).

Ted Nugent predictably shit his pants in public, his comment aren’t worth repeating, you’ve heard them all before.

Wayne Lapierre engaged in his usual wackiness.

“They are coming after us with a vengeance to destroy us and every ounce of our freedom. It's up to us, every single gun owner, every American to get to work right now and meet them head-on."

LaPierre than declared that the recent background check legislation in Congress got the “defeat it deserved!”

Funny thing, though, the NRA used to be for background checks, but that was when a conservative Texan was in office. You know, right after a crazy man shot Ronald Reagan.  That’s different though, I guess.

Every opinion poll, every single one, shows that the vast majority of Americans, somewhere between seventy and eighty percent want tighter control over gun ownership – including background checks. 

There are roughly three hundred and fifty million Americans.,

There are about five million NRA members, about 70,000 of which showed up for the convention in Texas. 

That means the folks cheering LaPierre are a fraction of one percent of the population. But somehow they think they represent the rest of us. Then again, modern conservatives have never been good at math and science (or grammar and spelling) so I suppose the reasoning follows.

Be that as it may, the convention loudly cheered gridlock in Congress, and the resulting lack of any effort to address gun violence.

And nothing will be done, because nothing can be done.

I hate to say I told you so, but, well, I told you so.  I did.

 

And so, here we are. Back to where we started at the beginning of this series. 

 

Look out there, look upon the upturned wild-eyed fevered faces of the people waving their guns and cheering for Wayne LaPierre and tell me that you’re surprised. Look at the fact that these people, seventeen percent of Americans, fifty percent of Republicans, according to recent polls, think that armed revolution and overthrow of the United States government by force of arms is the only way to get what they think they want.  

You still think that some plastic gun will make the world any more insane, any more bang bang crazy?

 

So, what do we do?

Do we embrace the fatalistic NRA mindset?  I.e. dead kids, gun violence, random slaughter are just the price you pay for Freeeeeedom?

Do we give up? Do we just say fuck it, fire up the 3D Printers and open fire?

Do we march on Washington, waving our guns, and shoot down those we don’t agree with like some third world shithole and their revolution of the week? 

Do we end the argument by killing those we disagree with? Like Iran? Or Somalia? North Korea? The Soviet Union?

Is that what you want?

No, of course not.

What we do is talk about it, like rational adults. And there are far, far, far more of us, the rational ones, on both sides of the political spectrum than there are of the bang bang crazies.  If you need proof of that, look at the falling popularity of those senators who moved to obstruct discussion and debate last week.  My own cowardly asshat of a senator is one of them.  And he damned well lost my vote, if he won’t stand with his fellow Democrats in Congress he sure as hell can’t be trusted to stand with me. 

Now, I, like you I suspect, don’t really know if the failed legislation would have changed anything or not, whether it would have made the world safer. Whether or not it would have preserved our Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms while keeping guns out of the hands of crazy people. I do find it hopeful that it was proposed by a bipartisan group of Senators, seems they can work together as rational adults when they want to.  I don’t know if it would have worked, but the legislative process of the United States government was blocked by a bunch of selfish, self-centered assholes who are more concerned about their own reelections than the safety of the people whom they are supposed to represent. 

Here’s what I do know for certain: our government was designed around conversation, around discussion, around compromise and debate – not on obstruction.  The Founding Fathers, who are so frequently invoked by the gun lobby, were a diverse and fractious lot. Some of them hated each other.  And yet, and yet, they managed to sit down and hammer out the compromise that eventually became the Constitution, the United States itself.

If they can do it, if they could do something so monumental as design a country from scratch, these petty jackasses should be able to handle something simple like background checks.

If you’re not willing to compromise your sacred beliefs in service of the country, then you have no business in government. Period.

If we can’t talk about it, about this and other difficult subjects, if we can’t talk about it in a rational and reasoned manner, we will never find the answers.

And we’d better start talking about it.

We’d better start figuring out how to deal with it.

Because sooner or later, likely sooner, those cheap shitty plastic guns are going to appear, they’re going to be made in bedrooms and basements and garages. And pretty soon after that, the advancing state of the art is going to ensure that anybody who wants one is going to be able to make basically any kind of weapon.  And by the time that happens, we’d damned well better know what to do about it.

Given the restive state of the nation, were I a member of congress I’d be making a real sincere effort to find solutions.

Because given the restive state of the nation, were I a member of congress, I’d be damned concerned about who those undetectable, untraceable, disposable plastic guns are likely to be pointed at.

We need to sit down now, right now, and figure out how to deal with the inevitable future.

 

Congress’s job is to hold the nation together, to preserve the union, to place country above party, courage above partisanship, to lead by example.

Their job is nothing less than to preserve the republic against the coming of night – not to tear it apart. That is the very essence of the oath they swore, the oath that I swore.

The truly ironic part of this whole thing is that if they were doing their jobs, there would be no market for those plastic guns in the first place.

It’s about time they wised up to the situation.

 

 

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The first six parts of this essay are here:
Bang Bang Crazy, Part One
Bang Bang Crazy, Part Two
Bang Bang Crazy, Part Three
Bang Bang Crazy, Part Four
Bang Bang Crazy, Part Five
Bang Bang Crazy, Part Six

Related Essay written after the Aurora Massacre :

The Seven Stages of Gun Violence

 

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I’ll do without the standard warning with this essay.   I’d caution you to read the post first, thoroughly, before commenting. Address your comments to what I actually said, not what you think I said. //Jim

Various and Sundry For the Week of April 26th

Where do they get bottled water?

You know, that so-called "pure spring water" everybody drinks nowadays.

Where does that water actually come from?

The bigger question is: has anybody checked the water for funny chemicals lately? Is it radiation? Some kind of gene-spliced Franken-virus? Psychotropic drugs? Alien nano-tech? Glenn Beck bathing in the reservoir? The machinations of cats? What? There’s got to be something in the water is what I’m saying here.

Where exactly is that spring anyway?

I'm guessing that it's got to be in Louie Gohmert's backyard.

Because, man, speaking of Louie, it's been a weird month so far, hasn't it?

 

The George W. Bush Presidential Library opened last week.

Bush. Library.

Library. Bush.

Bush. Library.

Bush Library, those are two words you don’t usually see together in the same sentence, unless they’re caveated with the phrase “book burning.” 

What?

Yes, yes, I know, former First Lady Laura Bush is a librarian, but that just makes it even weirder (seriously, you’ve got to wonder about that arrangement. I mean she had to know, right?).  

The Big Dubya says he didn’t want the George W. Bush Library to be “all about him.”  He says history will judge his presidency.  

So, so very many jokes, so, so very little bandwidth.

Stonekettle Station was there, of course, way back in 2009, long before mainstream media. For you, gentle reader, I do it for you. And for the fame and the glory and the piles of genuine American cash bucks.

And the easy gratuitous sex.

But mostly for you.

Bush says he and former VP Dick Cheney have a “cordial” relationship.  Cordial.  I don’t know, man, I’d double-check the security if I was Dubya, and I’d stay out of cornfields and away from men with shotguns and orange vests.  I mean, we saw what Dick does to his close friends.  Cordial is likely to get you a ride on the ol’ Rendition Special and waterboarded in an undisclosed former Warsaw Pact satellite nation by large lumpy men with Bulgarian accents.

Cordial, that was the same kind of relationship Cheney once had with Saddam Hussein and look how that turned out.

Wait, what I am I saying?  I’m rooting for Bush here and how in the hell did that happen? But otherwise I’d be cheering on Cheney and his black clockwork heart, and no, wait, I, uh, Goddamnit, it’s hard to know who to side with in this relationship.

Cordial.

Listen, I’m just saying, if you drop by for a visit and the GWB library staff has Bulgarian accents, I’d run like hell.

 

And as long as we’re on the subject of testy cordial relationships that are likely to end with a gun “accident” in the middle of a cornfield, you’ve got to wonder how John Boehner is getting on with his soon to be son-in-law.

Seems Lindsay Boehner is engaged to dreadlocked Jamaican-born Rastafarian Dominic Lakhan.

Lakhan was busted on pot charges in 2006 – because, well, when you’re boffing a Rasta, giant knit caps and large fragrant buds of cannabis sort of come with the territory.

Boehner, as you’ll recall, is vehemently opposed to drug use, including and especially marijuana.  Plus he’s more or less head of the same group who isn’t real big on immigrants from the islands, mon, if you know what I mean.

And next month his daughter is marrying a Rastafarian from Jamaica.  

Now it’s not like we didn’t already know about Jesus’ twisted sense of humor when it comes to the children of conservatives (speaking of Dick Cheney) but man, this takes the cake (and the chips and the cookies and the leftovers and, hey, Dad, don’t you have anything to eat around here? I got the munchies baaaad. But I digress). 

I don’t know about you, but I sense one hilarious reality TV show in the making: Thursday night on Fox, it’s Mr. Speaker Gets Baked! Tensions mount when Lindsay brings her new husband home for the holidays. Things start out with a bang [overdub sound of rhythmic squeaky bed springs from the guest room]. Watch things go from bad to worse when a certain prominent Republican mistakenly eats a plate of magic brownies right before a big House vote on immigration!  Wake the kids and set the DVR, you don’t want to miss one minute of this week’s hilarious hijinks! (special guest appearance by Honey Boo Boo, brought to you by Doritos).

 

Anthony Weiner is back on Twitter.  Says he can’t be sure there aren’t more pictures of Little Tony floating around the blogosphere.

If I was Weiner (first thing I’d do is change my name and/or my fetish. So many joke, so little bandwidth), I wouldn’t worry about it, nobody remembers the warm-up band. No seriously, see, Bill Clinton joined Twitter this week.

It’s like the ribald comedy just writes itself, isn’t it?

With all the conspiracy theories flying around lately, I’m shocked that Alex Jones isn’t openly speculating on whether or not this is all a set up paid for by late night comedians. 

Think about it, two politicians famous for not being able to keep it in their pants?

On Twitter?

Weiner and Willie?

Even Jay Leno could get a couple of laughs out of that.

Speaking of getting a rise out of conspiracy theorists, apparently one of NASA’s rovers drew a naughty picture on the surface of Mars. 

 

NASA tried to deny it, just like Tony Weiner and Bill Clinton, but they’re not fooling anybody. Every guy who has ever passed out during a college dorm party recognizes that picture – usually they discover it the next morning, drawn in permanent laundry marker on a prominent part of their anatomy, right before they have to meet their girlfriend’s parents for brunch.

I’m going to be honest here, I can’t wait to see what the Face On Mars nuts comes up with for this one (Nuts. See what I did there? Ballsy move, right? But I digress).

Face on Mars, I suppose it was only a matter of time until we had a Wang on Mars.

And as long as we’re on the subject of nutty conspiracy theories, how about New Hampshire Republican Stella Tremblay (I swear I’m not making that name up). 

Not content with just being a run of the mill loony-tunes birther or buying into every goofy debunked conspiracy theory regarding the current president, trembling Stella went after Woodrow Wilson this week (Also, Trembling Stella is up for grabs as a band name, have your people contact mine. Rates are reasonable. I take PayPal).

During a state legislative committee on Federal Relations and Veterans Affairs this week, Tremblay stood up and announced that she wanted to use the last day of Black History Month to outline the contributions of African Americans to early America – and then she launched into a wild rambling unintelligible fever dream that began with Frederick Douglass and somehow got to President Woodrow Wilson being an enthusiastic supporter of Adolf Hitler.

“Woodrow Wilson, because he was a sympathizer and he believed in the Aryan race, he believed that Hitler was correct in the races, where our Founding Fathers believed that all men were created equal. He went through all the educational material and wiped out all the, uh, all anything, that he could about the true history, about how the slaves were a really good integral part.”

Just one thing: Woodrow Wilson left office in 1921.

He died in 1924.

During Wilson’s time in office, Adolf Hitler wasn’t precisely a nobody, but he wasn’t exactly front page news outside the beer gardens of Munich either. He’d just gotten out of jail for his treasonous attempted coup against the German government, the Beer Hall Putsch, and was more or less lying low and licking his wounds.  He was elected Chancellor of Germany in 1933 – about nine years after Woodrow Wilson kicked the old Aryan bucket – and didn’t become the actual Fuhrer until the end of 1934.

But hey, if you’re already a birther with a tenuous grasp of reality, why let a little thing like actual history get in the way of good conspiracy theory, right?

After connecting Wilson to Hitler in support of Black History Month, Tremblay worked her way around to the point: her bill to force New Hampshire to recognize what she says is the “original” Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution – which she says is really about strengthening the ban on titles of nobility.

Because apparently that’s an actual problem we have here in the United States.

The rampant, widespread, unregulated, willy-nilly conferring of titles upon the peasantry.

As I’m sure you know, certain raving nutters actual historians with actual degrees in actual American history claim that a constitutional amendment covering titles of nobility was ratified by the states in the 1800s and then taken out of the Constitution by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and replaced with the existing “Thirteenth Amendment” – which supposedly bans slavery.

See, according to Stella Tremblay, the idea here is that since Honest Abe allegedly pulled some kind of flim-flam, the US Constitution is, in fact, void.

Which makes America not a real nation.

Which somehow means it defaults back to the previous owner.

Now, just so you don’t think she’s completely nuts, Tremblay double-checked her historical facts with David Barton. Barton writes books, on American history, so he’s like an expert – never mind that his book, The Jefferson Lies, was taken out of print because it made actual experts in US history fall onto the floor and foam at the mouth in convulsions. 

According Tremblay’s spokesman, who addressed reporters in order to make sure the liberal Lamestream media didn’t take Trembling Stella out context, the United States is no longer a country.  See, it’s now a corporation chartered in the District of Columbia – which Tremblay's proposed legislation actually notes in the text.  And because the “real” Thirteenth amendment was ratified and then illegally removed from the Constitution by President Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln's actions dissolved the United States, which means he could not have actually emancipated the slaves.

Bummer, Black People, looks like you’re all still property.  Gives kind of a different meaning to Black History Month, doesn’t it?

Tremblay’s spokesman then went on to explain how the United States is still subject to Lincoln's declaration of martial law and is now under the control of Queen Elizabeth II.

I swear to you, I am not making this up.

It’s all true.

So terribly, terribly true.

But, really, folks, how awesome is a speech that begins with the contributions of African Americans via slavery, connects an American president to Adolf Hitler through posthumous Nazification (I visualize this process kind of like how Mitt Romney’s church can just convert random dead people into Mormons), manages to raise the lurking danger of unsuspecting Americans being suddenly raised to nobility (Wait, I’m a Baron? Goddamnit, I suppose I’ll have to order new checks now), and finally ends up with a declaration that reveals surprise! slavery is, in fact, still legal and we all belong to the Queen – all during a speech supposedly in support of Black History Month.

Anybody know if NASA is taking requests?

Maybe we can get Curiosity to draw a picture of Stella Tremblay in the Martian desert?

I’d chip in a fiver, as long as they made it big enough to see from Earth.

In fact, I’d like to pre-order the Hubble poster, please.

 

And then there are the poison letters.

Last week, somebody sent ricin-laced letters to the president, a U.S. senator, and an 80-year old Mississippi judge.

Predictably the conspiracy nuts went apeshit. 

But eventually all the sensational leads involving space aliens, Bigfoot, the CIA, and North Korea turned out to be dead ends.  This entire thing appears to be just another tired and clichéd case in which an alleged child molester named Dusty Dutschke, a part-time taekwondo instructor and part-time lead singer in a band consisting of himself and a robot, attempted to frame a mentally disturbed Elvis impersonator who believes the federal government ruined his life to hide its involvement in a secret plot to harvest organs from corpses and sell them on the black market.

Honestly, how many times have we seen this exact scenario?

On Wednesday, authorities were at a small retail space in Tupelo which Dutschke once used as a martial arts studio. Investigators in gas masks and Hazmat suits like something out of The Andromeda Strain were observed carrying large containers full of plastic-wrapped items from the building. Once outside, other officers started spraying down the protective suits with some sort of mist in an obvious attempt at biological decontamination.

Officers at the scene wouldn't comment on what they were doing – which, you know, demonstrates an admirable degree of self control. Because frankly, at this point, I imagine the urge must be damned near overwhelming to walk out of that building, face the microphones, and announce in a solemn and sincere voice, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we just found the zombified body of Jimmy Hoffa sitting behind the controls of a flying saucer holding the trigger used to bring down the World Trade Center.  Also, Mr. Hoffa had President Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate in his pocket and the plans for a hundred mile per gallon carburetor… Ur, I mean No Comment! No Comment!”

 

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to run down to the hardware store and pick up a water testing kit.

I’ve got well water and a massive high quality filter system, but frankly, you can never be too careful.

Especially when they really are out to get you.

…And They Are Us

[Update: Obviously I’m too subtle for my own good.

As such, allow me a cautionary preamble. This post is about extremism.

I’m about to lead into the post with some extreme positions and images of my own. See, because none of us, me included, are immune from those kinds of things, especially in crisis, especially when terrible things occur and leave us impotent with rage.

I’d like to see this guy dead. I admit it. So would a lot of people. I’m not ashamed of wanting him dead, I’d like him to feel the terror and pain and horror that he inflicted on others. Does that make me evil as somebody called me on Twitter and Facebook? Or does it make me just your average human being who can’t look at those dead kids and that poor son of a bitch in the wheelchair with his shattered leg bones sticking out of the stumps of his legs, and think extreme thoughts about the bastards who lit the fuse?

What matters is how we express those extreme ideas, and where that might lead.

I not going to apologize because this post isn’t full of happy laughing kittens. This is an ugly damned subject. And it isn’t going to get any better if I sugarcoat it or turn it into a joke. The murdered and maimed deserve more respect than that. 

As I said in the previous post, Turn, and face the danger. Don’t look away.

Extremism. Extremism in all of us. That’s what this post is about. And don’t try to tell me it isn’t, I know, I wrote it.

The title should have been a dead giveaway // Jim]

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Chechens.

I’ll be honest, I really didn’t see that one coming.

It turns the that the Boston Marathon bombers are, most likely, two brothers from the breakaway Russian region of Chechnya.

Chechens.

Look at the bright side, at least we have somebody new to hate.

As I write this one of the brothers is dead for certain, and police might have just shot the second one.

[edit: Obviously by now everybody should know that the police got him].

I honestly hope that the authorities take the remaining terrorist alive. I’d like him to live long enough feel the needle sliding into his arm. I’d like him to look through the glass of the execution chamber at the people waiting there, and then I’d like him to be strapped down on that hard cold table, and I’d like him to stare at the cold metal ceiling, and I’d like him to feel his heart painfully hammer out the last few terrorized beats of his miserable life before the poison surges into his veins and he pisses himself and empties his bowels onto the gurney.

Because really, fuck him.

But, since, in addition to blowing up the Boston Marathon the brothers managed to kill a cop and wound another, I don’t suppose Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will remain either at large or alive much longer.

[edit: Reports are that he’s alive and in custody. How about that?]

And while there’s a certain level of satisfaction in seeing the son of a bitch blown to bloody scraps in a hail of gunfire, I’d really like Tsarnaev to answer a few questions before he bleeds out. 

Like, “What the hell, Jerkwad?”

Supposedly Dzhokhar and his now violently deceased older brother, Tamerlan (and, really, there’s prophetic name out of history for you), came to the United States more than a decade ago, when they were age nine and sixteen respectively, and have lived here, legally, among us ever since.  Details are a bit sketchy at the moment and everybody who ever knew them has a conflicting story to tell.  No doubt over the next few weeks we’ll end up knowing them better than they knew themselves and that probably won’t give us much in the way of satisfaction – unless one of them remains alive long enough to explain himself. 

However it shakes out, one thing is for certain: The United States gave the Tsarnaevs shelter and opportunity, just like every other citizen, naturalized or naturally born, Boston and Cambridge welcomed them with open arms – and they shit all over us. 

They nursed their differences and their hatred and let their bigotry fester, they – at least Tamerlan, according to his own words – didn’t understand Americans and didn’t like us.

Supposedly he lamented the fact that he didn’t have any American friends.

So they resorted to violence. They decided to kill people. Blow things up. Make a statement and go out in a blaze of terror.

I don’t know what their actual motivation was, religious extremism, political extremism, nationalist extremism, mental extremism, or whether they were just assholes.

Unless the FBI takes the remaining one alive, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.

And I would like to know why they did what they did – but I don’t really know that it really matters in the grand scheme of things.

Hate is hate, all we’re talking about here is the particular variety.

This, right here, is always the ultimate destination of unchecked extremism whatever its flavor.

Fear, hate, violence, and death, that’s how it goes.

Writ large or on the personal level, extremism unimpeded always leads to the same place.

War, conflict, murder, terrorism, death, that’s the natural sum of extremism.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar likely didn’t have any friends because they didn’t really want any. There’s every kind of person in America, somewhere out there are people you can relate to, form a friendship with, establish a relationship with, no matter your origin, no matter how different you are.

Hell, attend a Science Fiction convention sometime and then tell me that there isn’t somebody for everybody.

Somewhere out there are people who will give you comfort, make you happy, be there in good times and bad.

But it takes work.

You’ve got to stop seeing others as alien and make an effort to meet them halfway.

And if you don’t, if you won’t, well then eventually you end up right here at fear, hate, violence, and death.

And that’s what always happens when you see people as other, as alien, as not one of us.

 

That’s what happens when you look out at the world in terror, you become terrorized.

And when you take that far enough, well, you become a terrorist.

 

The Tsarnaev brothers aren’t the only ones who refuse to meet America halfway.

They’re not the only ones who look around our vast and infinitely varied country, indeed the world, and see not friends, but enemies everywhere, aliens, other.

The Tsarnaevs are just the far end of a curve, they’re where you end up when extremism goes unchecked.

They are where you end up when fear and hate are allowed to flourish.

But there are a hell of a lot of points along that curve, each a little step closer to the edge.

The ironic part is that by their own words the Tsarnaevs felt themselves alone.

They are far, far, from alone.

There are plenty of people here in the United States who look upon the world just exactly the way the Tsarnaev’s did, just the way Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols did, just exactly the way Major Nidal Malik Hasan did, just exactly as Eric Rudolph did, and just exactly as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did.

Events like the Boston Marathon bombing bring it all right into sharp focus.

From those who remain convinced that a Saudi national must have been involved – because he was a Saudi national, and a Muslim…

…To the once great news source, now sadly reduced to little more than a tabloid, who triumphantly announced a “dark skinned” man was responsible, and those who nodded and turned to each other and crowed, “told you so!”

…To those who immediately blamed the Tea Party or the Occupy Movement. And those, Right and Left, who continue to wage an unabated war of furious blind hatred on the twin fronts of news forums and social media, lobbing grenades of unguided ignorance and flaming rage at each other.

…To those who believe, and will continue to believe no matter what, that the president of the United States through the agency of some shadowy government organization conspired to blow up Boston in order to seize their goddamned guns.  Because, really, isn’t everything about their goddamned guns? Really? I haven’t checked with The Blaze or Infowars yet today, so I’m not sure what the President’s exact role in all this is, but I think we can safely assume that Alex Jones or Glenn Beck will shortly announce the details of Obama’s secret plan to employ Chechens in his nefarious plot to destroy America – which, paradoxically, will no doubt be immediately followed by condemnation from the same sources, berating the President for “taking credit.”

…To all of those who took the public stage to announce who they hoped the terrorists would be, or wouldn’t be. Please let it be a Christian, not a Muslim. Please let it be a Muslim and not a Christian. Please, oh please, let it be an atheist. Let it be a liberal. Let it be a conservative. Please don’t let it be a black man. I sure hope it’s an illegal immigrant, or a member of the Weather Underground, or a homosexual. I suppose it’s human nature, to hope or to fear one way or the other, but when you do it in public, well, you know, you’re an asshole.

…To members of congress who blamed Muslims trained to “act like Hispanics” in some Mexican drug cartel run training camp south of the border. Remember, folks, it’s never too early to blame brown people. Or to just make things up whole cloth and pretend you know what you’re talking about.

…To the columnist for a major online Tabloid who publicly called via social media for the death of all Muslims – before the identity of the assumed terrorists were even known. Ironically, that columnist is black. You’ve got to wonder if he’d call for the death of all African Americans if it had turned out that the bombers were Black Panthers. Or Christians.

…And right on down to those religious organizations who blame gays, and by extension God, for every single ill that comes along – and I’m not just talking about Westboro Baptist Church here. Like the Tsarnaevs, they’re just the most obnoxious extreme end of an ugly curve. If you preach hate and intolerance from the pulpit, you’re no goddamned different, even if you are more polite about it, even if you wrap it up in a pointy hat and a pretty robe and claim that’s what Jesus would do. Fear and hate and intolerance are exactly that, fear and hate and intolerance, no matter how divine your holy man makes it sound.

There’s an editorial in the Wall Street Journal today, Fascism By The Numbers, subtitled “The thuggish majoritarianism of the Obama-era left.” It’s worth the read, though you might want to avoid the comment section. Given the general nature of my usual audience, you won’t like what it has to say, but it’s worth the read nonetheless. The author, James Taranto, outlines the grievous excesses of the supposed “liberal” media in general, and David Sirota in particular – a liberal radio host from Denver who said that he hoped the bombers would turn out to be “Caucasians” (and in fact it looks like Sirota got his wish, thought not exactly in the manner he wanted. You should always take great care when commanding the Djinn, just saying. But I digress). Taranto spends some considerable ink pointing out every left-leaning publication and pundit who expressed similar sentiments, i.e. they hoped the terrorists would turn out to be somewhere on the right side of the political aisle.  He has a point.  The same one I’m making here, and in the previous post. But what Taranto conveniently leaves out is this: when you have spent the last five years, or more, talking about secession, and revolution, and shooting down your government and your neighbors, when you spend all of your time hating others and calling them unAmerican, then you shouldn’t be all that surprised when people take you at your word. 

And it goes both ways.  Note that some of the very folks Taranto paints as victims of unwarranted blame and bias, are the same exact people who declared the Left must be responsible because way back in the 60’s they were the ones talking violent revolution and secession and shooting down their government and their neighbors.

What goes around, comes around, sooner or later.

What it comes down to is this: If you look out upon the world and you see only enemies, the problem isn’t them, it’s you.

If you don’t like being labeled as afraid, then stop being afraid.

If you don’t like being called ignorant, then stop acting ignorant.

If you don’t like being accused of violence, then stop threatening violence.

If you don’t like being called a hater, then stop hating.

 

Extremism, unimpeded, always leads to the same place.

If you want an end to terror, then don’t allow extremism to go unimpeded, unchecked, unquestioned.

Confront it, always, and call out it for what it is, hate, fear, ignorance, and terror.

If you don’t want to be labeled an extremist, well, then you know what to do.

So do it.