Did "Borking" Begin With Bork?

Judge Robert Bork died on December 19th at the age of 85, an occasion that I expected Republicans to take advantage of by ratcheting up their constant pissing and moaning about how unfair life is. Modern conservatism, a philosophy that's supposed to be based on rugged self-reliance, is seemingly defined today by high decibel whining.

If you don't think that there's nothing funnier than the sight of a guy holding a copy of Atlas Shrugged and complaining about how he just can't get a fair shake from the Washington Post, you probably don't have a sense of humor at all. Or you're not very bright. Whichever.

Contemporary Republicans also don't have a particularly solid grasp of history, which is probably why the outrage machine wasn't sent into overdrive with Bork's death. With the exception of ranting about Woodrow Wilson, today's Republicans barely acknowledge anything that happened prior to 1980.

Worse than that, although they hold the memory of Ronald Reagan on the same kind of Olympian pedestal that Barack Obama has himself nominated on, they don't seem to remember very many facts about his presidency. The Reagan that I'm constantly preached to about on Fox News and blogs isn't the Reagan I remember being president. As a matter of fact, it isn't the Reagan presented in the innumerable (and often fawning) memoirs of those that served in his administration.

That the passing of Robert Bork didn't get the kind of coverage I would have expected it to was more than likely due to the fact that nobody really remembers him. Given modern attention spans, 1987 may well be 1587.

I like Richard over at Eye on a Crazy Planet quite a bit. We don't agree on a whole lot, but he's a good writer and seems like good people. And he's the only person I'm aware who started the debate about Bork that I've wanted to have, but have been too lazy to start myself.

The contemporary conservative wisdom about the Bork nomination, which Richard reinforces, was that it was all the Democrats fault. They started fighting dirty to win an ideological battle that didn't previously exist.

Smarter Democrats will now concede that going after Bork on ideological grounds was a mistake. Firstly because Republicans would shortly become better and meaner at it, and expand well beyond Supreme Court nominations. Secondly, the Bork nomination probably could have been defeated without resorting to philosophical guerrilla warfare.

Were they half as bright as they thought they were, Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden could just as easily made Bork's hearings an exploration of his role in the Saturday Night Massacre as they were about nonsense like abortion. Presented properly, especially with Watergate still being the very recent past in 1987, it could have killed Bork's hopes of sitting on the High Court. And it was the Saturday Night Massacre that finally convinced most people that President Nixon could and would be removed from office.

Nixon, through Attorney General Elliott Richardson, appointed the very first Special Counsel, Archibald Cox to investigate the exploding Watergate scandal. As soon as the existence of the president's secret taping system was exposed, Cox demanded the tapes. Citing executive privilege, Nixon not only refused to hand them over, he ordered Cox to stop asking for them, violating his pledge to Richardson to stay out of the investigation. Cox ignored the order and subpoenaed the tapes.

On Saturday October 20, 1973 Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then passed the order to Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, who also refused and resigned. The third-ranking officer in the Justice Department was the Solicitor General, Robert Bork, who carried out the order and was made Acting Attorney General for the balance of the year. The Cox firing was subsequently found to be illegal and Nixon named Leon Jaworski special prosecutor.

The Saturday Night Massacre was the predicate for Nixon's eventual resignation because it smacked of obstruction of justice, an obstruction that Bork carried out. While it's true that Bork was later confirmed by the Senate to serve on the U.S Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court is a very different matter.

You know who agrees with this line of thinking? Republicans. I know that because they used very similar logic in trying to defeat Eric Holder's nomination to be Attorney General in light of his role in Bill Clinton's midnight pardon of Marc Rich.

As a matter of historical fact, Democrats weren't the first ones to play dirty pool with the Supreme Court. That honor again goes to President Richard Nixon, with an able assist from congressional Republicans.

Nixon and Chief Justice Earl Warren had loathed one another for nearly twenty years when the former was elected president. Wanting to deny Nixon the opportunity the name the next chief to the Court, Warren resigned not long before the 1968 election. Lyndon Johnson then nominated his longtime crony and fixer, Justice Abe Fortas to the position.

Fortas had received speaking fees from American University (which weren't illegal, then or now) which Republicans and Dixiecrats used to filibuster the nomination, the first time that had happened in a Supreme Court nomination. A subsequent, more serious scandal forced Fortas to resign from the Court entirely in 1969

Nixon was determined to have as many friendly seats as he could on the Court (and finally wound up with four.) After Fortas resigned, the president, through then House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, engineered an attempt to impeach Justice William O. Douglas for outside income similar to Fortas'.

However, in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Ford also cited as grounds for removal Douglas' opinions in an obscenity case and some outside writings, making the impeachment transparently political. One of Ford's most famous quotes "An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history" comes from the Douglas matter.

With the exception of two singularly unqualified Nixon nominees (Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell,) Democrats hadn't seriously impeded Republican nominees to the Supreme Court. Antonin Scalia, for example, was confirmed by a Senate vote of 98-0 just a year prior to Bork's nomination.

But I'm sure that they remembered how the GOP launched the first filibuster against Fortas and tried to impeach Douglas. When they had a clear shot at a vulnerable Republican nominee in Robert Bork, they took it. In retrospect, I'm only surprised at how patient they were.

As I said earlier, I like Richard and Eye on a Crazy Planet quite a bit. But I would respectfully suggest that the history is considerably more complicated than his post implies. This wasn't started in 1987 and it wasn't started by Democrats. The Official Republican Narrative would have you believe otherwise, but that narrative is frequently untrue.

When Richard says that "With his death, now might be an appropriate time to look back and see if there is a way to start healing a still debilitated process," he seems to imply that self-examination is a process that should be exclusive to Democrats.

Unsurprisingly, I disagree. Republicans and conservatives have spent the last year getting their asses kicked from one end of the country to the other. In large part this is because of a deeply odd alternate reality bubble that they've built around themselves. But as we all learned on November 6, denying reality doesn't make it any less real.

Republicans have spent decades now denying their more unsavory characters and actions. Not only do you have a hard time finding a conservative who will say that President Reagan actually broke the law in trading arms for hostages, it's a challenge to find a Republican who'll admit that Nixon was president at all.

But Nixon wasn't alone. He had the full support of his party in Congress and not a few conservative southern Democrats that would soon become Republicans in his judicial wars. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they had to know that there would be consequences for it someday. They just didn't care. It shouldn't surprise anyone that liberals would one day exact their revenge, as they did on Bork and Clarence Thomas.

Anyone who thinks that this problem is going to rectify itself unless both conservatives and liberals engage in some self-examination is either dishonest or delusional.

The Constitution didn't foresee political parties and avoided a parliamentary system, in part, to preclude them. President Washington repeatedly warned against their establishment without success. The system was able to endure parties that it wasn't designed to accommodate because America historically had long periods of one-party dominance.

In the last twenty years that's become less and less true. Not only are there more "wave elections" at any other time in American history, they're coming closer and closer together. As the balance of power is dramatically upended more frequently, partisan warfare increases exponentially and the system starts to break down.

If you prefer a government that does nothing, that's great. Unfortunately, the U.S government hasn't "done nothing" for a century now. Its foreign and military policies are overextended to the breaking point and the balance sheet is disastrously out of whack. A broken political system, under these circumstances, will eventually destroy the country.

I agree with Richard that the story of Robert Bork should be studied, but there's a context in the decades that bookend the defeat of his nomination that shouldn't be ignored.

History is the study of trends, not incidents. In strict isolation, Franz Ferdinand was just some obscure Austrian that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Within the context of greater trends, his assassination was the opening salvo of the First World War.

Robert Bork is emblematic of a larger trend that began long before his nomination and continues to this day.

Happy Holidays

Hey everybody,

I know that I haven't done this in a few years, but I really want to express how much I appreciate each and every one you stopping by here as often as you do. When I started doing this in May of 2003, I would have thought that you were insane if you told me that there would be as many of you as there are. According to Blogger, 53,047 of you decided to take a look in the last month. That's nothing less than stunning to me.

I really don't know what you get from the nonsense that I put up here, but I know that I get a lot from you reading it. It's really heartening to know that so many people are interested in an independent perspective that you're not likely to find on cable news or the enormo-blogs.

And you know what? I wouldn't trade the audience I have for the world. For the most part, when you folks comment, you often sharpen my own thinking. I don't do this to show off how smart I am. I want you to challenge me, and you very often do. That makes me a better person in process, or at least I like to think so.

I also get that this is often an easy read. Some days I'll go on about an obscure political issue that you might not know about or not want to know about, and on others, I'll write about my love of pornography. On any given day, with each and every post, I know that half of you are going to be infuriated or disgusted with what I do.  But the numbers show that you keep sticking around.

A couple of years ago, I faced a legal challenge to my views, and I couldn't have been happier with how so many of you offered to support me. And just as many people who disagree with me regularly offered financial help as those that do. I couldn't bring myself to take your money, but I want all of you to know how much your support meant to me, and still does.

I know that you people are busy with your daily lives, and there are any number of blogs out there for to read. The easiest thing in the world for you would be to go elsewhere and have your own beliefs re-affirmed for you in three of four paragraphs. Instead, a lot of you come here, knowing that you'll frequently be offended by what I have to say.

That means more to me than I'll ever know how to say. But I do want to take this time, on this day, to thank each and every one of you from the bottom of my heart for all of the support and love that you've shown me over the years. I have a hard time believing that I deserve it.

I guess I don't have anything else to say other than Happy Holidays. May the New Year bring nothing but the best for all of you and those closest to your hearts.

Thank you.

The Revenge of Dana Loesch: The Final Nail in Breitbart's Coffin

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee: How Irony Escaped Aaron Walker

But for one post, I've stayed away from the strange and stupid saga of Aaron Walker (aka Worthing) because not only was it a dumb battle without any "good guys" in it, it also got powerfully tedious. Any self-respecting person can only listen to so many people engage in so much self-pity and retarded bravado before you throw up your hands and hope that everyone involved gets stomach cancer. I reached that point about 15 minutes after the whole dumb spectacle went viral.

Don't get me wrong, I wanted to support Walker, but I developed a powerful allergy to anyone who wants to take their blog pissing matches to the courts years ago. I don't care if they're on the left or the right. It's a giant waste of time and resources that can be better spent on other, more pressing matters.

For those of you who blessedly missed the story, here's a brief recap.

Once upon a time there was an adjudicated bomber who ran a couple of non-profit political groups* named Brett Kimberlin. A guy named Seth Allen wrote a bunch of posts that nobody read regarding Kimberlin's activities, so Kimberlin sued him for libel.

Mr. Walker, a self-described Virginia lawyer, acting under an alias and despite not being a member of the Maryland bar, started offering Allen legal advice. Walker maintains that he wasn't Allen's lawyer, although the former's e-mails to the latter reference "privilege" at least once, and maybe more often.

Anyhow, Kimberlin grew mighty interested in who this "Aaron Worthing" was. When he learned Walker's identity, he also connected it to the Everybody Draw Muhammad blog (which has since been scrubbed and made private.) That blog is key here, as you will see shortly.

On Everybody Draw Muhammad, Walker repeatedly asserted that certain segments of the Muslim population are violent psychopaths, which even most Muslims would agree with. Walker went further than that. From what he thought was the safety of an assumed name, he invited that violence to visit him personally and implored others to do the same under their real names. Of course, he didn't bother telling his readers and contributors that he was using a pseudonym because, to hear him tell it, he's more afraid of wife than he is of violently psychotic Muslims.

When Kimberlin found out who Walker was, Walker went to his employers and explained everything, including Everybody Draw Muhammad. Unsurprisingly, Professional Healthcare Resources, Inc. took a dim view of Worthing's online activities and shitcanned him, although they officially told him that he was being booted for (literally) sloppy lawyering.

But it would take almost a year for anyone to find that out. In the interim, Walker launched a legal and public relations jihad, insisting that Kimberlin cost him his job, although no evidence of that exists. In their e-mail terminating his employment (and, unfortunately, that of his wife) PHRI doesn't mention Kimberlin contacting them. They do, however, go on at some length about the security issues created by Everybody Draw Muhammad and his invitation to violence therein.

Walker's suits against Kimberlin (and Neal Rauhauser, Ron Byneart and at least one John Doe) have been thrown out by two courts of competent jurisdiction in the last five weeks.

The (almost certainly illegal or unethical) discovery leak that revealed the true reasons behind Aaron Walker's dismissal should have been enough for any honest conservative to withdraw their support from him. He was deliberately misleading in his public presentation of the facts and he continues to raise money from same. You can assume whatever you will about the motives of those who continue to stand behind him.

But it is that clear from the very first days of Everybody Draw Muhammad that he has a history of actively lying to his readers and not admitting it until he has no other choice. If you want to be a willing dupe for that, feel free. If you want to finance it, you're probably better off without the money, anyways.

Even before his lawsuits were dismissed as political nonsense and vindictive bullshit from someone that could only be charitably be described as a half-wit with honesty issues, Walker had the temerity to accuse PHRI's attorney of lying about his dismissal, which I'm sure will come back to haunt him, both civilly and before the Virginia Bar. If any one thing in the last year has made Aaron Walker unemployable in the legal profession, it's that. Lawyers blatantly calling other lawyers liars in public simply isn't done. That tweet was the final nail in his professional coffin.

All things being equal, I wouldn't care all that much if it ended there. Blowhards destroy themselves on the Internet with some regularity, and the people who ally themselves with Breitbart.com tend to do it more regularly than most. This is a story where everyone involved is someone that I wouldn't be proud to know.  It's one of those rare stories, like Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, where everyone's a Bad Guy.

I would have been thrilled to forget that I ever wasted seven months of my time following such a stupid story. Really, I would have.

But then Walker had to post this just as quickly as he could.

That's right. A guy who just wasted a year of everybody's time, energy and money fighting for his right not to be fired for his online activities ..... is calling for someone to be fired for his online activities.

Firstly, Walker proves that he's either an idiot or a dishonest hack by saying of Professor Loomis' "head on a stick" comment;

By the way, we are told that this bit about “head on a stick” could not possibly be an actionable threat, because it is a metaphor. Right, because you can never threaten a person in figurative language. If a Mafioso says “pay your protection money or you will sleep with the fishes,” these legal geniuses assure us, that is not a threat.

Which is my sarcastic way of pointing out that you can indeed threaten a person with a metaphor.

No, the when the Mafia said "Tonight, you sleep with the fishes," they meant exactly that. It's also where the phrase "concrete shoes" comes from. They would actually encase your feet in concrete and dump you in the water, thereby ensuring that you slept with the fishes. If you know anything at all about Mafia history or pop culture, which Walker apparently doesn't, you know it isn't a metaphor.

So far as I know, no one in western civilization has had their head  put on their stick as political statement since the nineteenth century. While it's a common figure of speech, it decidedly doesn't happen very often in modern America.

Of course, I'm being charitable in assuming that Aaron doesn't know that. I could just as easily say that he's a dishonest hack.

The real and clear reason, by the way, that this is not an actionable threat is because it was not plainly communicated to Mr. LaPierre nor was it plainly directed at being communicated to him. What this is, then, at worst, is ruminating about murdering a person, which can be rightfully a concern for law enforcement but it is not a threat.

(Ken at Popehat is also correct to say that it is not a threat if it is not meant seriously, but how does he know that he isn’t serious? I am sure he doesn’t literally want to put LaPierre’s head on a stick, but I don’t and I won’t speculate about whether Loomis actually wants to kill him.)

Wow. It does seem unreasonable to me to think that Walker's first remedy to questionable speech is to refer it the police, if not the speaker's employers, rather than the speaker himself. That kind of puts his silly fucking lawsuit in a new light, doesn't it?

And it gets better. Oh, it gets so much better.

Since Loomis said these things, there are some people who have argued that he should be fired from his university job and there are good people such as Ken in the piece I have cited, Adler over at Volokh, and eight professors posting collectively at Crooked Timber.

Now certainly if Loomis had merely said, “I hate the NRA.” Or even “the NRA’s policies are dangerous and contributed to Friday’s massacre,” I would agree with my distinguished colleagues and say he should face no retaliation at his job. I mean, I of all people don’t believe that as a rule people should be fired from their jobs for what they say on their off time. But they are missing (or in Ken’s case failing to grasp the importance of) the real problem in Loomis’ commentary:

Yes, respected lawyers who weren't fired from their jobs because of their dishonest and sloppy blogs tend not to support the firing of Erik Loomis. Whatever could these professionally respected and employed lawyers and scholars be missing that Aaron isn't?

The Problem is Fascism.

Oh. Who knew?

You see the real reason why Loomis should be fired—or at the very least investigated for what he said—is that his comments are fascist. Bear in mind, I define fascism as nothing more than a lack of belief in democracy itself.*

Walker published a footnote giving his preferred definition of fascism, which is hilarious**. I'm not going to reprint it, but if you're amused by the abuse of the English language to advance political bullshit, I couldn't encourage you to read it enough.

People like Aaron (and many others on the modern right) use the word fascism interchangeably with communism and socialism. They're either wrong or lying. Fascism was primarily an economic system that married government with private business, ensuring the success of both. Fascism was actually quite popular with the American right in the 1930s precisely because it was seen as an antidote to communism.

It takes a special kind of dickhead to equate fascism  "as nothing more than a lack of belief in democracy itself." There are all kinds of non-fascist systems of government that do that.

Consider for instance this comment by Loomis:

You are goddamn right we should politicize this tragedy. F__k the NRA. Wayne LaPierre should be in prison. [Cursing censored by me.]

So he believes that LaPierre should be imprisoned for what exactly? To the best of my knowledge, LaPierre has broken no laws. All he has done is advocate for a policy—reduced restrictions on gun ownership—that Loomis disagrees with. Advocacy of the criminalization of opinions you don’t agree with is the very essence of fascism. He repeats that thought several times:

Wayne LaPierre is a criminal and should be in prison for complicity with murder. 27 counts.—

Dear rightwingers, to be clear, I don't want to see Wayne LaPierre dead. I want to see him in prison for the rest of his life. #nraterrorism

Further he advocates that the NRA and its leaders be treated as terrorists, again for expressing an opinion he doesn’t agree with.

Can we define NRA membership dues as contributing to a terrorist organization?

Larry Pratt and the group Gun Owners of America are terrorists and should be dealt with as such.

The right-wing intimidation campaign against me for saying the NRA was a terrorist organization continues. Will not succeed.

I bet terrorist NRA head Wayne LaPierre will sleep well tonight.— [on the night of the Newtown massacre.]

 

Um, yikes! There are any number of things that the modern right wants harsh criminal penalties for that didn't used to be crimes. Material support for terrorism is just one of them. Republican congressman Peter King remains a proud supporter of what the Irish Republican Army used to do, and there's no shortage of Republican assholes who successfully lobbied to de-list the MEK as terrorists because they happen to be  terrorists they see them as our terrorists, so we call them "freedom fighters" instead.

Now this is not to say that this is incitement within the meaning of the Brandenburg standard (of which I am safely considered an expert) and thus can be criminalized or otherwise prohibited. But as a history professor wrote, “such language can embolden the crazy[.]” And who wrote that? Erik Loomis, when arguing that somehow targets on a map caused the Giffords shooting. What Loomis has been doing is a tad worse than that. So, add the charge of hypocrisy to the bill of particulars against this professor.

And even then, ordinarily, this doesn’t justify a person being fired from their job. Whether a person is a fascist or not, a brownshirt in waiting, is of no rightful concern to his employer if he was a bagger at a grocery store, a garbage man, a lawyer, a businessman, etc.

But he is a professor in a University. Further, it is a state university. And that is a problem.

That's top to bottom nonsense. Walker successfully argued Brandenburg against a peace order (which doesn't require a lawyer) and he did so after losing at his initial hearing. That does not an "expert" make, any more than having a speeding ticket overturned makes you an expert in traffic law.

What Walker is suggesting is that some people have greater free speech rights in their private lives based solely on who their employer is. If you teach at a state school, according to Walker, you had better watch what you say!

Academic Freedom Applies to Students, too.

His students have as much of a right to express differing views, to enjoy freedom of inquiry, and so on, as he does. I mean a professor can say to a student, “I am teaching right now, so kindly shut up.” That is okay. Time, place and manner restrictions on student expression are fully justified or else teachers wouldn’t be able to teach.

But, a student should not face discrimination because his views—when expressed at appropriate times—differ from his professor. This is the ideal in the setting of a private university, but it is mandatory in a public one. After all, this professor’s actions are the actions of the state and thus academic freedom is not merely some ideal, but a constitutional command under the First Amendment (as incorporated by the Fourteenth).

And bear in mind I am not saying that Loomis is not entitled to believe what he believes, even passionately so. If he merely came on twitter and said he thought assault weapons should be banned, I wouldn’t be talking about either firing or seriously investigating him due to his words.

But he has gone further than that. He has advocated prison for those he disagreed with. He advocated designating political opponents as terrorists, which could bring consequences ranging from the freezing of funds to being killed summarily. And he has stirred up private violence against those who disagrees with him.

Do you think he can treat his students who disagree with him fairly?

Simply put, that's retarded, and I'm sure that Walker would agree if that standard were applied to him.

As a member of the Virginia Bar and an Officer of the Court,  it could be suggested that Aaron Walker's public positions should disqualify him from any number of legal issues. And I'm not arguing that, he is.

Bar associations have a monopoly granted under state power. If Erik Loomis is to be judged by a special standard because he teaches for the state, shouldn't Aaron Walker, as well? Given his publicly stated positions on any number issues, would it be reasonable to question Walker's ability to represent clients using Walker's own test?

Again, this is a guy, Professor Loomis, who said gun supporters should be imprisoned, treated as terrorists (which might be interpreted as endorsing their summary execution) and has whipped up violence against those who are pro-gun-choice. Even if you call that hyperbole, it doesn’t bode well for the possibility of an open and respectful discussion of gun rights in his class. If a student expresses a pro-gun-choice view on an exam will that student’s grade be affected by this professor’s unhinged hatred of this position?

Actually, that's not true. Loomis didn't say that "gun supporters should be imprisoned." He said that Wayne LaPierre should be. I disagree with that, but I'm not going to dishonestly manipulate what Loomis actually said, or cost him his job. And it was Walker himself who endorsed summary execution of terrorists and then imparted that motive on Loomis in regards to gun rights supporters, which goes further to Walker's record of honesty.

Walker also provides no proof that Loomis would treat anti-gun students unfairly. He cites no complaints or university censures. He just assumes that Loomis will be unfair, given his public record.

Who can say that Walker, as a lawyer, won't do exactly the same thing, absent any evidence that he won't? And I don't think that it's a huge stretch to suggest that the function of an attorney is as important, or more so, than that of a university professor. A lawyer's clients are at least as pliable, if not more so, than college kids.

I don't endorse applying that test, he does. And it takes a special kind of stupid for someone who lost his job due entirely to his online activities to do that.

Not three weeks after Aaron Walker's "free speech crusade" was throw out of court, he's parading around online demanding that other people suffer the same fate that he did. Hopefully, they have better repesentation than he did at trial.

If you want to continue financially supporting Aaron Walker, feel free. There have been things said about fools and their money, after all.

But please don't pretend that you're supporting free speech. You'll just look ridiculous.


As I said in my last post on this subject, if Mr. Walker wants to respond to anything that I've written here, I will give him all the space that he desires to do so, unedited and without unnecessary commentary on my part. Any counter-commentary (other than I deem necessary to protect my own legal interests) will be limited to the comments.

Should Mr. Walker feel that I have in way breached that commitment, he will of course be free to call me out for it on his presumably more widely-read blog.

If I have made errors of fact that are not supported by the available evidence, I will be more than happy to correct them. Having said that, "Because I said so" does not meet my standard of available evidence, particularly given the joint court dismissals.

Would Mr. Walker extend that courtesy to anyone else? There's no evidence that he would. But I am. If I'm going to make an error in this case, it'll be by being overly air to everyone. Except in the most egregious circumstances, I don't edit or delete comments. I think I've done it five times in almost ten years.

He can contact me at skippystalinATgmail.COM. 




*As I've said in my previous post, I don't think that anyone convicted of a crime should be allowed under the tax code to run a non-profit. If felons can lose their voting and gun rights, surely they can be stopped from playing politics at the taxpayers expense, too.

By the same token, that standard shouldn't apply to Kimberlin if it doesn't apply to Ali Akbar, whose crimes involve the theft of actual money. You can't deny a violent  psychopath his rights while granting them to an convicted thief without looking like a goddamned shill.

** Walker cites as a source Jonah Goldberg, who sees fascism completely as a creation of the left, despite an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary. The left already had their their totalitarian movement in communism. Fascism was a reaction on the right to that. As shocking as it may seem to those who buy into "left-wing fascist" blogosphere propaganda, the original fascist powers; Spain, Italy and Germany were vehemently anti-communist.

The United States itself allied itself with arguably fascist regimes in Central and South America, and Southeast Asia during the Cold War in the name of anti-Communism. They were just careful about not calling them that. Historical context is sort of important when throwing about phrases like "fascist."

Liberals can be extraordinarily totalitarian when they put their minds to it, but they aren't fascist by definition. When you hear conservatives describe then that way, that should be a giant red flag that they're dishonest, stupid, or working for Breitbart.com.

The National Rifle Association Isn't Helping

The most predictable thing happened in the immediate aftermath of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Everybody got dogmatic, stupid, and frequently both. The reaction to the massacre managed to reaffirm my contempt for the human spirit more than the massacre itself, which is saying something since we are talking about 20 dead first graders.

As I've said repeatedly over the last week, if I thought gun control would be even remotely helpful, I might find it in myself to support it, the obvious constitutional problems aside. But that train left the station well over a century ago. Even if you could stop the production of all American guns tomorrow, there would still be as many as 300 million of them floating around out there. Liberals understand this, they just refuse to be honest about it.

Conservatives (or more exactly, Republicans) have been even worse over the last seven days. They're going out of their way to blame everything but guns and looking for liberal solutions that limit free speech rights and accomplish nothing. It's repugnant and all the proof you need that you shouldn't trust those assholes any more than you trust liberals. At the end of the day, their solutions require just as much big government and primacy of the state over the individual.

Over the last week, I've seen far too many conservatives blame TV, movies, video games, the Internet and even the news media itself. That kind of stupidity and brazen dishonesty is even more dangerous than the most powerful of assault weapons. Don't get me wrong, they still want their guns. In fact, they want more guns out there. The Second Amendment must be protected, even at the expense of the First.

It's also important to remember that most of the outraged voices this week are the same people that believe corporations are people for the purpose of election spending. If that's true (and I don't have any serious philospohical problems with it) it therefore stands to reason that they enjoy the full spectrum of First Amendment rights, including producing brutally graphic movies and video games.

If the sharp curbing of free expression rights,combined with the wholesale arming of the populace produces anything other than Yemen, I'm at a loss to explain what it would be. The American left and right seem to be in agreement that personal freedom has to take it in the nuts and are only arguing over whose will go.

Perhaps the most offensive notion out there is that this is all the fault of the news media. If I understand this assertion properly, it goes as follows: If the news media stops reporting the news, then nobody will get the idea to shoot a whole bunch of folks. The idea is that the desperate, sad and ill among us are looking for some manner of immortality. If they happen to attain that through a measure of infamy, so be it. You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?

Boiled down, the logic seems to be that if we ignore them, they'll just go away. And if you're a simpleton, you might very well agree.

But why then don't we apply that standard to all bad actors in the world? Wasn't Osama bin Laden granted a measure of fame in the wake of 9/11? Would there have been attempted copycat attacks if we all just agreed not to talk about the big hole in Lower Manhattan? Would rockets stop falling in the suburbs of Tel Aviv if the Israeli media stopped making such a big deal about Hezbollah and Hamas?

The idea that crazy people often do weird shit seems to have escaped everyone. It seems self-evident that they do weird shit precisely because they're crazy, and guns or media have little, if anything, to do with it. But it seems that mine is an increasingly lonely voice. Everybody wants the government to do something, even people who don't naturally trust it to do much at all.

I was actually impressed with the National Rifle Association's ability to keep its mouth shut in the days after Sandy Hook. Not only did they show admirable restraint, it was savvy public relations, which they're not often famous for. For example, the NRA's mouthpiece in chief, Wayne LaPierre responded to the sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco by calling government agents "jackbooted thugs," causing lifelong member George H.W Bush to resign in protest.

In keeping a respectful silence, the NRA very well could have gained some goodwill. And they couldn't have that, so they yesterday sent LaPierre out to piss it all away with a presentation so brazenly dishonest and chock full of stupidity that it couldn't possibly be ignored.



Actually, that's not true. Fox News bailed as soon as they understood just how badly Wayne was fucking up the narrative.

That LaPierre believes that the solution to a problem with guns is more guns should surprise no one. After all, the proliferation of weapons is the NRA's raison d'etre, their very bread and butter. But it is just a little counter-intuitive. As the always amazing Michele Catalano said "Next we'll combat the heroin problem in my town by providing the kids with more heroin!" I actually don't agree with that, but it's a great rejoinder.

According to the new official position of the NRA, guns aren't the problem, the media is. And only the government can address that. If the First Amendment has to go to protect the Second, by God, the NRA will be first one to pull the trigger.

In calling for armed cops in every school, LaPierre seems to be calling for a dramatic expansion of the federal government. Most of the examples he cited - airports, the president and Congress - are all protected by federal employees and paid for by Washington.

Let's not pretend that the NRA is a kumbaya, "Up with People" wing of the Democratic Party, okay? These are self-described conservatives. And they're basically proposing the federalization of the school security without a plausible way of paying for it and in direct opposition to decades conservative dogma about the federal role in education.

In fairness, that idea isn't half as fucking dumb as the wholesale arming of teachers. I could be wrong, but I suspect that giving glocks to a bunch of liberal arts majors won't end as well as some folks seem to think it will. Even if it did, it doesn't address the expanding use of body armor in mass shooting incidents since the 1997 North Hollywood Bank of America shootout. If it's hard for the cops to take these psychos out, there's no reason to believe that your kid's guidance counsellor is going to have better luck.

This expansion of government also flies in the face of the paranoid and constitutionally unsupported idea that the Second Amendment is necessary because Americans might have to rise up against their government that the NRA is generally supportive of.

Look, you're not rising up against shit, okay? Even the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 was unequal to federal might, and the United States didn't have a standing army at the time, let alone drones, Apache helicopters and Ticonderoga class cruisers with Aegis combat systems that can destroy a basketball with a Tomahawk missile from 500 miles away. For all the lunatic romantic remembrances of Ruby Ridge and Waco, it's sort of important to remember which side won those confrontations. If the next 25 most powerful nations can't defeat American military might, why does anyone think that some pissed-off hillbillies and blogger shitheads can?

That's not to suggest that I'm against guns. I'm not. But I'm also not going to look at you with a straight face and suggest that your right to bear arms is more important than anyone else's free speech rights.

Not only does LaPierre say exactly that, he will fight to death for the right of people on terrorist watch lists to buy firearms but he wants Grand Theft Auto and a twenty year old Oliver Stone movie made verboten, pronto. There is no other reason to devote that many paragraphs to scapegoating the culture if you don't want action on it. If, as some suggest, that he's only calling for "public shaming," we should take a good long look at how effective that's been against the NRA. Some people are simply biologically without shame.

Here's an interesting test I use to determine if someone is being honest with me. I take note of whether someone holds up individual amendments over the Bill of Rights as a whole. For example, the Second Amendment is pretty meaningless without the Fourth keeping the government from coming to take your guns away. The rest of the document is little more than quaint without the First Amendment.

That's a test that LaPierre and the NRA routinely fails. In a mad and desperate effort to deflect even the tiniest amount of responsibility for gun violence from guns, he throws other freedoms over the side.

Yes, I know that ol' Wayne didn't explicitly call for the censorship or regulation of media. But I can't overlook the fact that he didn't have to. He has no shortage of stooges in Congress and the conservative media that will do it for him. In fact, they've already started.

Always remember that Wayne LaPierre isn't a symbol of freedom; he's a lobbyist. As such, he'll say anything you wind him up to, provided you dangle enough money in front of his snout first. And anyone who doesn't get that is probably too dumb to own a gun in the first place.

Jay Leno and NBC: Twenty Years of Duplicity and Incompetence

Television executives are human garbage. The only people worse than them are music executives, with violent pedophiles actually being slightly better than both. They are merciless guardians of the bottom line and not only is loyalty a foreign concept to them, they see it as a sign of weakness. They can and will destroy both you and everything you love the second your value to them diminishes even slightly.

That's what makes NBC's relationship with Jay Leno so perplexing. It's almost as if they go out into the wilderness together once a year, spit on their hands and grunt that they don't know how to quit one another as they unleash their conflicted sexual identities on another and Anne Hathaway grows ever more confused.

Leno has now twice almost single-handedly brought down the NBC brand, yet the brass there keeps running back to him. Few people in the history of television have displayed such mechanical skill in manipulating soulless monsters like he has.

If you haven't read Bill Carter's books The Late Shift and The War For Late Night you really should. Few other tomes are as insightful into the depravity and incompetence that infests the human condition. You can easily apply the lessons of those books into any industry or social interaction that you find yourself life. All you really need to know is that the vast majority of the population is stupid, cowardly, or all three. Few writers have laid that out as clearly as Carter.

Some background is necessary before I touch on recent developments.

First, Johnny Carson didn't leave the Tonight Show of his own accord. Jay Leno (more exactly, his late manager, Helen Kushnick) pushed him out. Carson was handily winning his time slot, just as he had for almost thirty years. The problem was the demographics. Carson was having his ass handed to him by Arsenio Hall (remember him?) with men aged 18-54, which happens to be the only demo advertisers care about.

Leno, Carson's permanent guest host, started quietly talking to other networks (primarily ABC) about starting his own show at 11:30. The brass at NBC, not wanting to see both Arsenio and Leno competing with Carson for a demographic he was already losing, panicked. Over the next 20 years NBC would be panicking regularly, which is why they're hardly a network anymore.

The network then told Carson that he could leave on his own terms, but there was to be no mistake about his leaving. To be fair, Johnny Carson was a world-class prick his entire life, especially with NBC. He got away with that as long as he dominated the demo. Once Arsenio came along, that leverage ended, and the network was stuck with a aging, domineering host who was down to only working three days a week.

They promised Leno the Tonight Show, which is where things got interesting.

Carson had explicitly promised David Letterman the Tonight Show, and NBC had promised it to him implicitly. Letterman's contract was ending just as Leno's maneuvering had become known and Dave, himself not an easy guy to get along with, properly went insane.

Contrary to all available evidence, NBC thought Letterman would stay at Late Night while Leno took over the Tonight Show and everybody would be happy. The network had either forgotten or never cared that, without Letterman, nobody would have ever heard of Leno. Someone with as little self-esteem as Dave would never tolerate such an affront to his pride.

After months of pointless and circular negotiations, the worst case scenario happened: Letterman signed with CBS for a 12:30 show, which despite losing in the overall ratings, regularly beats Leno with men aged 18-54.

I will give NBC credit for one thing in this mess. The signed and stood by Conan O'Brien as Letterman's replacement. O'Brien was the brilliant head writer for the Simpsons and Saturday Night Live, but he had exactly no performing experience. As he himself will readily admit, O'Brien's first six months as the host of Late Night were physically painful to watch, but the network stood by their guy until he got his footing. It would be the last time NBC showed any courage whatsoever.

Fast forward about 12 years.

Conan started worrying about beginning and ending his career at 12:30. Like everybody else in comedy at the time, he dreamt of hosting the Tonight Show. If Leno was going to try to beat Carson's reign, O'Brien would start putting out feelers elsewhere and he started talking seriously to Fox, which would have been a perfect fit for Conan's style.

Once again, NBC panicked. They concocted a deal where Leno would relinquish the Tonight Show to Conan in five years and everybody would live happily ever after.

Or not. Toward the end of his contract, Leno started talking to ABC (which was apparently willing to throw the much funnier Kimmy Kimmel and Nightline - which beats all of the comedy shows in the ratings - over the side.)

NBC panicked yet again. Just as was true in 1992-'93, they didn't want their two late night hosts on competing networks when they could keep them both. They came up with an idea the looked great on paper, but proved to be a disaster in practice: They signed Leno to do a show at 10 pm.

Prime time dramas cost about a million dollars an episode to make, whereas talk shows barely cost a tenth of that. Even if Leno caused a dip in prime time ratings, the network would still make more money with him there.

NBC couldn't stop congratulating themselves for their own brilliance, at least until the ratings came in. What they hadn't counted on was that absolutely no one was interested in watching Jay Leno at 10. If another network started broadcasting kiddie porn, it would have beaten the Jay Leno Show. NBC affiliates were dropping Leno at an alarming rate, and there was almost nothing the network could do about it.

At the same time, Conan was finding his feet in an earlier time slot and the Tonight Show's ratings had dipped. Unsurprisingly, NBC panicked.

This was complicated by the contract they gave Leno for the prime time show. They stupidly gave him a "play or pay" deal. They committed to air the show for two years. If for whatever reason the show was cancelled before that, the network had to pay Leno $50 million and let him immediately go to another network.

Faced with that, NBC chose to fuck with Conan. They wanted to move Leno to 11:35 for a half hour, and move the Tonight Show to 12:05. O'Brien rightly refused and tense negotiations about ending his contract ensued. In the end, Conan walked away with about $37 million and was only kept of the air for a few months before going to cable.

You would think that NBC would have had its fill of late night drama by now, right?

Guess again.

There’s word that NBC brass are ruminating over Jay Leno’s future — which would involve finally giving their current late-late guy comic, Jimmy Fallon, the coveted job as the host of "The Tonight Show."

The latest rumblings about Leno come from various talent agents who admit they have quietly been contacted by NBC officials hoping to find a new late-late host who will eventually take over Fallon’s 12:35 a.m. time slot.

Leno’s current $15 million a year deal expires in 2014, and came about after he “volunteered” to take a 50% pay cut earlier this year, a move that helped NBC slash "The Tonight Show’s" $100 million budget by about 20%.

What's going to happen next year is perhaps the easiest prediction to make in human history. Not only Jay Leno seem to have no life outside of television, he has the survival instincts of a fucking cockroach. More importantly, we have two decades of experience demonstrating just how nutless NBC is when it comes to Leno.

Not only will he not go quietly, he won't go anywhere at all. My guess is that by spring we'll start hearing about Leno talking to Fox (since ABC seems committed to Jimmy Kimmel, that avenue is closed off.) Astronomical numbers will be bandied about, and word will go out about Fox strong-arming affiliates in giving a potential Jay Leno show 100% network clearance (meaning that individual stations have to carry it, much like NBC does with the Tonight Show.)

And, as they did in 1992 and 2009, NBC will panic. And this time, it'll be Jimmy Fallon would gets it, sans lube. Don't worry about him, though. If there's one person that Fox probably wants more than Leno, it's Fallon.

But NBC will have screwed three of its 12:35 hosts - Letterman, O'Brien and Fallon - in favor of Leno in a row. Who would be crazy and desperate enough to take over Late Night under those circumstances? No one with any career prospects or human dignity would subject themselves to that, and any one that would is almost guaranteed to be a loser in the ratings.

There's gotta be a point where Jay Leno and NBC know how to quit either other or there won't be an NBC at all.


I couldn't address this topic without sharing this, the most brilliant takedown of Jay Leno ever. Better still, it was done to Leno's face.

And here's Letterman venting some hate.



And Howard Stern ...



I'd love to share some moments from Conan's last week or so at the Tonight Show but the cowards at NBC appear to have stripped them all from YouTube, the bastards.

The Tea Party is Keeping it Classy!

One of the great things about the Tea Party is that it claims to be leaderless. There are also many factions of it that are constantly warring with one another over who actually represents the movement. In that they aren't unlike the Communist Party split in the days immediately after the Russian Revolution.

So why is that a great thing? Well, if you're the Tea Party, it allows you to avoid responsibility for anything! For a movement that never tires of advocating personal responsibility, when was they last time you saw them accept direct responsibility for anything that their members have said or done?

The correct answer is "never." Not once. It's always the fault of the mainstream media or some nefarious socialist plot (when the mainstream media itself isn't part of some nefarious socialist plot,) but it's never, ever their fuck up. That's the first reason that you shouldn't trust these people. The second reason is that they're idiots.

Timothy Birdnow is with Tea Party Nation. He has posting rights on their website, so I assume that he speaks for them in some way. And he sure is efficient. In this post he manages to cram so much crazy and stupid into such a small space, just 2,875 words, that you can't help but be impressed!  To give Mr. Birdnow his proper due, he also manages to stuff a healthy dose of small government rhetoric while calling for big government solutions. You really have to read it to believe it.

The takeaway from the Birdnow commentary that Mediaite is running with involves George Zimmerman. You remember George, right? Good. I'd rather not devolve into re-explaining his sad story, nor do I want to re-litigate it.

Birdnow says this about Friday's mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School; "Had George Zimmerman been at the front door instead of some mechanical card reader those children would still be alive."

Let me repeat that in case you missed it. "Had George Zimmerman been at the front door instead of some mechanical card reader those children would still be alive."

That's a highly debatable point, actually. Were those children carrying skittles and iced tea? If they were, that could have been a problem.

The fact that Mr. Zimmerman has been charged with second degree murder at least suggests that he isn't exactly judicious with a firearm and is perhaps best kept away from children. Mr. Birdnow also never explains how Zimmerman would have dealt with Adam Lanza's body armor. A head shot, you say? He shot Treyvon Martin in the chest.

It's really too bad that Mediaite focused on the Zimmerman angle because there's just so much other crazy in Birdnow's piece that it should be dealt with at length. He has a list of suggestions, few of which have anything at all to do with gun violence but are almost all paranoid, comic or both.

1. Homeschool. Take away the power of the radicals in the classrooms. Makes your kids safer, too.

Well, it makes your kids safe from strangers, I'll grant you that. But since most murdered kids are taken out by a close relative, why shouldn't they all be?

 2. Back Right to Work legislation for the public sector. Teacher’s unions have helped cement much of this in place. As long as we have group think in the classrooms we will never see the end of this.

Huh? Do non-union teachers have some ninja powers that I'm unaware of. It would be kind of cool if they did. Also, the unionized teachers were shot trying to protect the kids.

3. Engage in more frank discussion of race and culture. For far too long we have tiptoed around these issues, fearful of being branded a racist. If black thugs kidnap and rape a woman, ask if there is something in the black culture that fostered that. If an evil white kid murders a bunch of children at the school, ask the same question of the white community. What was it that spawned this behavior? What was this kid taught? We have to stop hiding from our respective national sins.

I'm not sure what "black thugs" kidnapping and raping a (presumably) white woman have to do with this, but okay. And what exactly does severe mental illness have to do with "national sins?"

It should also be pointed out that the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators of mass public shootings are white men. And the violence is rarely ever racially motivated.

5.Call evil out. We have to stop being sorry and start being angry. This is not a time for national grief so much as a time for national anger. We should stop tolerating this sort of thing. Indeed, stop tolerating any bad behavior. If you see kids jumping ahead in line, say, call them out. If you see punks bothering their neighbors call them out. Say something to the idiot blaring his car stereo. Say something to the foul-mouthed teens. Tell the brats to pull up their pants; nobody wants to see their filthy underwear and pimply behind. We have to start saying something, stop ignoring it. The first way any society maintains order is through social pressure from individuals. We have insanely given that up.

You know, in a nation where everybody is armed, I'm not sure that's very wise. This is, I think, the "broken windows" theory with one important difference. Every loudmouthed hillbilly like Timothy Birdnow gets to be a cop.

6.Work to devolve power back to the parents, the local officials, and the communities. A society that is top-down will inevitably lead to alienation of the sort we have seen here. This young man was twenty years old, and his actions were neither spurious nor random. As an FBI profiler said on television last night, he undoubtedly felt powerless and sought to remedy that. Why does a twenty year old feel powerless? He could leave his mother’s home at any time at his age. He feels powerless because he has lived in an over-bureaucratized society, one run ultimately from a far-away central location. He sees his life as at the mercy of others, and sees himself as having no real input or control. He has been coddled all his life, given free rein to indulge his senses but not to face the responsibilities that freedom necessitates. He was an eternal juvenile, a child who was not allowed to grow up. He lived in a world of the Progressives making, not in reality.

The family is the fundamental building block of civilization, and from it all power originates. The Left has systematically destroyed the family for the purpose of empowering the State, and this has destroyed so many lives. Individuals - especially immature individuals - need to be taught how to live, how to think, how to believe. Man’s animal passions must be placed in check and his rational faculties engaged. His moral compass must be set. Liberalism sought to destroy all the controls by destroying the family and community, centralizing power in meta institutions and granting the individual absolute moral autonomy without giving him the wisdom he needs to exercise it. . It is a recipe for disaster, as we have seen.

Um, wow.

Birdnow thinks the solution is a devolution of power from the federal government. He then cites the opinion of an FBI profiler and plasters his own opinion over that of the profiler. I've read a lot about profilers. Never once have I heard them cite "Progressives" as a cause of anything.

Moreover, who do you suppose that Birdnow wants to empower the family to triumph over the dastardly Left? My guess is Congress. I know, I can't follow his fucking logic, either.

7. Restrict the sex in movies, television, on the internet. There is a reason why young people commit these sorts of crimes, and sex plays no small part. Their passions are eternally inflamed, and they wander the Earth with no outlet for their overstimulated glands. People have understood the close relationship between sex and violence through history; sex was an inducement to military service in ancient times (and modern, too) and it has traditionally been understood that a sexually robust individual will fight harder and more aggressively. We are engaging half this equation, overstimulating our youth while denying them a planned outlet. Even if they were to live promiscuously (a very bad thing for society) they still cannot find adequate outlets for their passions, which have grown to titanic volume. Fighting is the traditional outlet. Societies have always carefully planned ways to release this tension constructively - through physical labor, through hunting, through military service, sometimes even through intellectual pursuits. Now we have nothing, no place for this pent-up frustration to go. The only answer is to follow the other societal coping mechanism, which is to tone down the sexual stimulation, encourage chastity and modesty. Our society has conveniently thrown that away as well. We have to restore it.

Parents, monitor what your children watch, what they look at on the internet. Make sure they dress modestly.

You have got to be fucking kidding me. These guys are going ape with an AR-15 because they're horny?  Are you serious?

Again, who is to be restricting "the sex in movies, television, on the internet?" This guy likes the government a whole lot more than he's letting on. And I love how "intellectual pursuits" can "relieve tension," but only "sometimes."

Birdnow obviously holds the Second Amendment very close to his heart, so much so that he sometimes forget that there's one right before it. Or would he prefer that it be stopped at the distribution point, which is government interference in business and exactly what the Tea Party is supposed to be fighting against.

You know what else relieves sexual tension, Tim? Furious masturbation and hardcore, animalistic fucking. Want proof? I'm the least excitable person I know.

Finally, making sure children dress modestly has certainly gone a long way in preventing Afghanistan into a violent and chaotic shithole. Oh, wait ....

8. Control drugs. Do not think that puffing a joint is harmless. Several American states decriminalized Marijuana, and it is actually legal in Washington and Colorado. Is it a coincidence that this shooting just occurred? Probably, but not in the long haul. Drugs and crime and violence go together. Trayvon Martin, the youth shot and killed by a neighborhood watch captain after he was assaulted , was likely high http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2888655/postswhen he was shot - and George Zimmerman has claimed Martin assaulted him, something backed by medical testimony. Martin had trace amounts of marijuana in his system, http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-05-17/news/31753474_1_medical-... should be pointed out. Would Martin have done that had he been sober? And medical marijuana is a joke; there are far better substances that can be used. It is nothing but a way to backdoor legalization.

Again with the government! Remember, it's the state and local governments that are decriminalizing marijuana, precisely the people the people that these Tea Party types are supposed to trust more than the diabolical tyrants in Washington that they need their semi-automatic weapons to defend themselves against.

I know that you teenagers are hip enough that I don't need to point this out to you, but Mr. Birdnow doesn't understand that potheads are too busy giggling to attack anyone.

10.Go back to church. We need God more than ever, need prayer. It’s time the Ten Commandments were taught again. It’s time the Bible was taught. It’s time people learned the examples of the heroes of our Judeo-Christian heritage - heroes like Moses, who gave up his life as an Egyptian noble to become a shepherd and eventually lead his birth mother’s kin out of slavery, or David who spent years hiding from King Saul, and who, at one point, had Saul completely under his power (in the cave of Adullum) but would not smite the Lord’s anointed, or of John the Baptizer, a man who spoke the truth until his head was cut off, or of any of the Apostles who died for their faith. Most of all they should learn of Jesus, who refused to turn from the Truth and allowed himself to be sacrificed in the most painful manner possible for other people’s sins.

This evil can be fought, but not by any methods likely to be proposed by Progressives or imposed by our government. At best it will entail a top-down approach that will impose greater restrictions on the individual, on the family, and on the community. The solutions will be more of what caused this in the first place.

"Well, we obviously need the tyrannical and probably Marxist federal government to stop the porn and pot, but once that's taken over, the churches can take care of the rest."

You know what scares me even more than monsters like Adam Lanza walking among us? The fact that otherwise intelligent people support and vote for ideological nonsense like this.

Why Sandy Hook Changes Nothing

Since Friday's mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut there has been an almost constant chorus about how the tragedy is a "game changer" in America's gun politics. Some of the calls for reform have actually been quite moving, such as MSNBC host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough's just this morning.


If you don't know anything about the American government or society, you might actually believe that "nothing will ever be the same." Sadly, that isn't going to be the case. There will be no fundamental change in America for several reasons.

As I explained yesterday, this isn't about guns, movies, video games, or even mental health. It's about something fundamental to the American character that leads them to resolve conflicts with violence. Even English-speaking industrialized countries with ready access to weaponry don't have anything close to the homicide rates of the United States.

That's well beyond the capacity of a government, even the world's most powerful government, to solve. Yes, you can incarcerate even more of your citizens - and the United States already has the largest prison population in the free world - but that does nothing to address the underlying issue. Were it otherwise, American criminal justice would have done away with this ugly phenomenon decades ago. Instead, it has gotten worse and the victims are now first graders.

One of the reasons that I have no faith in anything changing is something that we've already seen. Too many Americans are casting blame at their government, which I suppose is to be expected. But that ignores that in a constitutional republic, you don't just get the government you deserve, you get the government you vote for.

And what the American people have voted for couldn't be clearer. Over the last 50 years of federal elections, the re-election of American incumbents has been somewhere in the neighbourhood of 97%. In every election all one hears is constant clamoring for change, but voters never actually mark their ballots for it.

That's not the fault of the government, the politicians, the law, or even the money in politics. That is a perfect representation of the intellectual, physical and moral laziness of the voter. Unless and until the people start accepting responsibility for what their country has become, dreams of change will remain precisely that, dreams.

If people are unwilling to change their government in a fundamental way from time to time, what right do they have to believe that their government is ever going to change anything at all? The politicians rightly know that they risk nothing by maintaining the status quo, so what reason do they have to do anything but that? "Hope and change" is a slogan, it is not an agenda.

I remember how 9/11 was supposed to "change everything," too. However, it didn't take long for people to rail against the security measures put in place to prevent it from happening again. The modern attention span is virtually non-existent. No matter how terrible the tragedy, no matter how brutal the carnage, people will put it out of their minds as soon as their daily routines are negatively impacted.

Change starts with the people. Expecting the government to change absent the will of the people is little more than wishful thinking.

But there are practical challenges Washington would face.

Here's an interesting fact, which reinforces something else I noted yesterday;

There are an estimated 270 million guns in the hands of civilians in the United States, making Americans the most heavily armed people in the world per capita. Yemen, a tribal nation with no history of strong central government or the rule of law, comes in a distant second.

Even if the political will existed to do something meaningful, numbers like 270 million are too large to reasonably do anything about. The American military couldn't even begin to disarm an Iraqi insurgency, even without the inconvenience of the Bill of Rights getting in the way.

Let's assume that you could get an effective gun control ban through Congress, which I don't believe that you can. That would almost certainly only affect the manufacture and sale of new weapons. There would still be 270 million existing guns out there in America.

People still own perfectly functional firearms from the Civil War, which was a century and a half ago. How long do you suppose that a modern AR-15 is designed to last?

Not only does the Sandy Hook massacre not "change everything," it won't even change the United States Senate.

The Senate was deliberately designed to frustrate passionate calls for immediate change. The Founders knew that good rarely comes from the inflamed masses, but lasting damage to a constitutional republic often does.

A gun control bill might actually the pass the Senate. I'm not discounting entirely the idea that it will. However, I can assure you that it will be so gutted that it will only give the appearance of doing something, a legislative phenomenon that the Senate specializes in.

Always remember that there was an assault weapons ban that looked like it accomplished something during the Clinton administration. It, like the bill likely to be introduced soon, was written by Senator  Dianne Feinstein.

The practical effect of the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994 was as follows;

That law banned 19 specific types of semiautomatic weapons – guns that reload new rounds of ammo automatically – and magazine clips that could hold more than 10 rounds.

It also banned guns with at least two "military-style features," effectively eliminating 118 models, according to this 2004 University of Pennsylvania study commissioned by the DOJ's research arm.

Despite these limitations, critics of the law say, people could still get their hands on semiautomatics.

The U Penn report suggested that semiautomatic weapons could maintain their essential functions even if gun makers got rid of the "military-style features" banned by the 1994 law.

The report found the assault weapons ban "targets a relatively small number of weapons based on features that have little to do with the weapons' operation, and removing those features is sufficient to make the weapons legal."

For example, after the ban, gun makers marketed "legalized" versions of the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, which was exactly the same as the outlawed version, but came without accessories such as threaded barrels.

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the NRA, also made that point when speaking to PBS in 2004. The government only sought to limit guns containing certain "cosmetic features" such as a bayonet mount, according to LaPierre.

"The guns have been marketed the last 10 years without the cosmetic accessories," he said. "The same guns have been there for the past 10 years."

And, under the ban, gun enthusiasts could buy any semiautomatic they wanted to – as long as it was made before 1994. (emphasis in original)

Were I to make an educated guess, I would say that any new bill will closely resemble the 1994 law. And that will make it meaningless. After all, there were a number of mass shootings - including school shootings - with assault weapons between 1994 and 2004, when the law expired.

On the other hand, threaded barrels will probably disappear again. And that will probably be enough to make most people feel better.

The assault weapons ban only made cosmetic changes and primarily existed to make Democrats feel good about themselves while providing the American people with the illusion of reform.

It's notable that the National Rifle Association didn't challenge the '94 ban in court. Senator Feinstein said yesterday that they didn't because they knew the ban would be upheld. One of the Supreme Court's staunchest conservatives, Antonin Scalia, has also said that such a ban would likely survive judicial review.

But the fact is that the ban wasn't challenged because it was exactly what the lobbyists wanted. Why would they want to draw attention to the fact that it was entirely cosmetic and fundamentally changed nothing?

I'm about to tell you something that isn't just an important thing to know about democracy, it's the only thing you need to know about democracy.

You don't matter to your representatives a tenth as much as the lobbyists do. Why should you? After all, the lobbyists are usually former staffers or colleagues of your representative. There are far deeper relationships there than you'll ever share, even if you ignore the money and political support involved.

If you look at the innards of any "major reform" over the last 30 years, you very quickly come to understand that they not only don't do what they advertise, they don't do much of anything at all, except serve the interests of an impacted lobby somewhere. They lobbyists don't usually win, folks, they always win. And as long as the revolving door between government and lobbying is allowed to exist, they always will.

So does Sandy Hook "change everything?" Not even close. A lot of people will make a lot of noise and make a huge display of rending their garments until the funerals are over, at which point business as usual will resume. Then there will be another Sandy Hook, perhaps with even younger victims, and the process will repeat itself.

As I said both yesterday and in this post, I don't think that any ban is going to be especially effective for the many practical reasons that I listed. But you will probably get a sideshow of people appearing to do something to placate you for maybe six weeks.

Here's how I know that nothing is going to change in a serious way. Because your democracy is what you make it, and nobody is particularly interested in their democracy. Learning how your government works and why is hard, often tedious work, which is why very few people bother doing it.

What I haven't seen anyone point out is that this is so much bigger than Sandy Hook. This is about everything your government does. If you leave it to the politicians and their lobbyist cronies to stop the next Sandy Hook, you're guaranteeing that there will be another one. And another one after that. Just as there will be another massive bank failure that takes down the economy, there will be another Sandy Hook.

And people will look everywhere except the one place they should look first: the mirror.