Over at the National Review, Charles C.W. Cooke says that President Obama was giving a pretty good speech at the memorial for fallen Dallas, Texas cops when he made a critical error. The president made the mistake of introducing divisive rhetoric into a solemn occasion when he asserted that it’s sometimes easier for kids to get access to a Glock than a computer or a book.
Twenty minutes ago, almost everyone I know thought that the president was doing a good job with his address. Now, at least half of them are irritated and upset. On Twitter, a debate over books and Glocks has broken out. People are shouting at one another. Where there was harmony, now there is discord. This, remember, was a funeral — a funeral for one of the police officers who was murdered last Thursday. It wasn’t a rally. It wasn’t a White House press conference. It wasn’t a public statement, hastily arranged on the airport tarmac. It was a funeral. Presumably, those attending had all sorts of political opinions. Presumably, some of the cops were Republicans. Presumably, there was some serious disagreement in that room as to how the country should move forward. Wouldn’t it have been better to wait until the proceedings were over to call for change? Wouldn’t it have been more politically effective for the president to have made his push somewhere else?
This is just another example of aggressively missing the point. I don’t know how easy it is for a twelve year old living in the North Philly ghetto to get access to a MacBook Pro, but it’s not an impossible task to find a firearm. But, who really cares about the absolute literal accuracy of the president’s comments?
The Dallas shooter once bought an AK-47 for $600 from someone he met on Facebook. The sale took place in a Target parking lot. The seller is hoping that it’s not the weapon he used to kill and wound police officers, but that’s his personal business. The rest of us just know that you can go on Facebook and find a semiautomatic rifle in a few minutes, and there’s no regulation of these kinds of sales.
We’re all supposedly endowed by our creator with the inalienable right to buy or sell highly lethal firearms, and then the police have to deal with the consequences.
And even this wasn’t the whole point that the president was trying to make. He wasn’t just talking about the easy availability of guns. He was also talking about the lack of positive resources that we provide for our most vulnerable kids.
To get back to Mr. Cooke’s objection, I have to ask what he’s really objecting to. Is he really quibbling that it’s a bit harder to buy a Glock than check out a book at the library?
Meanwhile, the notoriously racist National Review is churning out one post after another after another after another that dismisses the validity of Black Lives Matters’ complaints and accuses them of racial divisiveness and radicalism.
Given their sordid history and sorry record on race, you’d think they’d be at least a little more reticent about demonizing the most prominent and active black civil rights movement we have in this country right now. But that’s not how they roll.
In context, it’s hard to accept that Charles C.W. Cooke was willing to listen to anything the president had to say in Dallas with an open mind.
I’m so goddamn tired of this “most divisive president ever” bullshit. It’s such transparent projection, and I hate that people who should know better keep falling for it.
That is not missing the point. That is launching a messaging campaign to blunt the impact of the President’s speech.
And although Glock is a recognizable brand-name, it is more likely that a kid could come up with a less expensive handgun that was just as devastating. Watch the NRA nitpick this.
This and worse is what my Facebook friends were pumping out last night. The white supremacists and their peer-pressured friends are trying to unspin Obama’s very (white) Christian Protestant eulogy (totally different in delivery from Charleston) so they can continue to believe the Kenyan muslim socialist nonsense.
As a headline put it today, “Trump” is the new dog-whistle for “white supremacy”.
wasn’t it an inter-faith memorial service for all 5 murdered Dallas cops that Obama spoke at, not an individual funeral for just one officer?
For what seems the majority of people now, their cognitive filters are now deeply and permanently entrenched. There is little to no ability for them to see, hear or process anything that does not pass through their filters. It is virtually impossible to even consider anything else. Under those conditions, even considering the possibility of an open mind is nothing more than a fanciful, aspirational notion of a naive dreamer.
There are probably more gun stores than bookstores. So it might be true in that respect.
But really, it was an ill-advised piece of hyperbole.
I would also point out to Mr. Cooke this actually wasn’t a funeral for the officers, it was a memorial service, which is not the same thing. So, if his claimed point was “think of the families who came to mourn!”, he needs to rework it.
Now, not everyone would choose a memorial service to make the connections Pres. Obama was making, but the previous week kinda cried out for those connections to be made. And not just in a policy speech that nobody listened to (which is no doubt what those on the right would prefer).
What public library would that be?
The nitpicking is from the old saying “if you can’t blind ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bullshit”. Society is racist, many cops are racist, and there’s an resultant outrageous bias in unjustified police shootings. There are all simple, incontrovertable, facts, and the conservative intellectuals know this. They throw up all this nonsense to confuse the issue because the disparity in shootings is unjustifiable even to most admitted racists. Their position is that weak.
Strictly in line with what William Buckley did with respect to the legally segregated South in the 1950s and early 1960s.
And then, he reflected more of the prevailing opinion than did the civil rights movement.
But Buckley eruditely slung his bullshit at the wall with a self-conscious arch of the eyebrows at his own brilliance. High school history teachers were impressed. The hoi polloi couldn’t fathom what he was talking about. The David Lawrence would translate for US News and World Report.
some of my family dismissed the President because of his “disrespectful” joke at the very beginning
It’s all fairly ridiculous
but thought it was interesting:
The President published a paper in a scientific journal
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/obama-just-became-the-first-sitting-president-to-publi
sh-a-scientific-paper-all
This is fantastic!
Washington PostVerified account
@washingtonpost
Washington got rich during George W. Bush’s presidency. Not so much under Obama
uh huh
uh huh
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A Propagator of Race Hatred and Violence
By JOSH MARSHALL
Published JULY 13, 2016, 2:26 PM EDT
This isn’t getting a lot of attention. But it should. Everybody took note when Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that American Muslims across the river in New Jersey celebrated and cheered as the Twin Towers fell on 9/11 – an entirely fabricated claim. Last night on Bill O’Reilly’s show and then separately at a rally in Westfield, Indiana he did something very similar and in so doing cemented his status an impulsive propagator of race-hatred and violence.
The details of the rapid-fire fulmination are important. So let’s look at them closely.
…………
Trump claimed that people – “somebody” – called for a moment of silence for mass killer Micah Johnson, the now deceased mass shooter who killed five police officers in Dallas on Thursday night. There is no evidence this ever happened. Searches of the web and social media showed no evidence. Even Trump’s campaign co-chair said today that he can’t come up with any evidence that it happened. As in the case of the celebrations over the fall of the twin towers, even to say there’s `no evidence’ understates the matter. This didn’t happen. Trump made it up.
The language is important: “When somebody called for a moment of silence to this maniac that shot the five police, you just see what’s going on. It’s a very, very sad situation.”
Then later at the Indiana rally: “The other night you had 11 cities potentially in a blow-up stage. Marches all over the United States–and tough marches. Anger. Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac! And some people ask for a moment of silence for him. For the killer!”
A would-be strong man, an authoritarian personality, isn’t just against disorder and violence. They need disorder and violence. That is their raison d’etre, it is the problem that they are purportedly there to solve. The point bears repeating: authoritarian figures require violence and disorder. Look at the language. “11 cities potentially in a blow up stage” .. “Anger. Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac!” … “And some people ask for a moment of silence for him. For the killer…”
We’re used to so much nonsense and so many combustible tirades from Trump that we become partly inured to them. We also don’t slow down and look at precisely what he’s saying. What he’s saying here is that millions of African-Americans are on the streets inspired by and protesting on behalf of a mass murderer of white cops… This is not simply false. It is the kind of wild racist incitement that puts whole societies in danger…
in the right place this time.
I’ve been calling him Strongman Trump for over a year everytime I mention him, because that is exactly what Trump is – a Strongman who is a social dominator, which is who right-wing authoritarians inherently follow.
Strongman Trump isn’t inherently dangerous because he is a cunning politician. He’s inherently dangerous because he wields tens of millions of right-wing authoritarians who would have no problem acting in whatever way they were told to act, implicitly or explicitly, if Strongman Trump is elected as President.
Strongman Trump supporters are itching for a race war, and they aren’t typical online bullies – these people are literally the right-wing authoritarians that fascism proper is built upon.
If someone wants to label Trump an inept clown, they are ignoring that giving an inept clown millions of loyal right-wing authoritarian followers is still dangerous.
I still can’t fathom how anyone can look at Trump, hear the things Trump says, see how his right-wing authoritarian followers cheer it on, and then hand-wave away Trump as some unserious joke that can be safely ignored.
What Is Ruth Bader Ginsburg Thinking?! Here’s What.
Her criticism of Trump was unwise, but it didn’t set a dangerous precedent.
BY BRIAN BEUTLER
July 13, 2016
What is Ruth Bader Ginsburg thinking?!
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I see a woman who endured incredible sexism well into her professional career, warning the public about a politician whose sexism would make Don Draper uncomfortable, and who promises to restore a more patriarchal order. I see a Jewish woman with living memory of the Holocaust who is more likely reacting to the normalization of neo-Nazi propaganda than pandering to Notorious RBG readers.
Opioid bill to become law, but not without grumbling
07/14/16 08:40 AM
By Steve Benen
The good news is, Congress has approved legislation addressing an important issue, and with bipartisan backing, the policy is on its way to becoming law. The bad news is, the bill should have been a whole lot better.
This same bill passed the House by a similar margin a few days ago. As the New York Times’ report explained, the measure intends to “strengthen prevention, treatment and recovery efforts, largely by empowering medical professionals and law enforcement officials with more tools to help drug addicts. It would also expand access to a drug that emergency medical workers could use to help reverse overdoses and improve treatment for the incarcerated.”
The White House announced that President Obama will sign the bill, but the administration isn’t exactly thrilled with the way the legislation turned out. “Congressional Republicans have not done their jobs until they provide the funding for treatment that communities need to combat this epidemic,” the White House said in a written statement.
The process wasn’t supposed to work this way. As regular readers may recall, in March, the Senate approved the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA) on a 94-to-1 vote. Stakeholders assumed the bipartisan package was well on its way.
It wasn’t. The GOP-led House said the Senate bill invested too much in prevention, and not enough in enforcement, so the lower chamber went its own way. Both chambers eventually passed their own competing alternatives, and the resulting compromise is what is now headed to the Oval Office for a signature.
But there’s a reason Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) called the bill “a half-measure.”