Ed Kilgore on 'Second Amendment Theology'

But there is one habit of conservative rhetoric that is relevant to the events in Tucson, and it would be helpful to single it out for condemnation instead of indulging in broad discussions about the “climate of hate.” It’s the suggestion that Americans have an inherent “right of revolution” which entitles them to deploy violence when they are convinced that government officials are trammeling on their liberties, and that we are at a stage of history where such fears are legitimate.

This is the nasty underlying implication of Sharron Angle’s remark last year that “Second Amendment remedies” might be necessary to deal with policies supported by her Senate opponent, Harry Reid. And it’s been the subtext of many years of conservative rhetoric about how the Second Amendment is the crown jewel of the Constitution because it ensures a heavily armed citizenry that can take matters into its own hands if government goes too far. In combination with Tea Party militants’ open assertions that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 and marginal increases in the marginal tax rate represent an intolerable tyranny, reminiscent of the British oppression that made the American Revolution necessary, this belief that Americans should be stockpiling weapons in case they have to stop voting against government officials and start shooting them is extremely dangerous.

via tnr.com

This is part of what I was trying to get at with my first post the other day. I don't get my panties in a wad because anybody uses a metaphor, and I *try* not to get upset at an entire movement because fringe nutjobs show up at rallies with provocative signs. (Although I've been guilty of making that generalization: Apologies.) But it does seem to me that there's an ideology on the right that embraces talk of armed revolution in the face of overreaching government -- idle talk, perhaps, but not metaphorical.

That doesn't mean Jared Loughner can be blamed on the right. He can't. Guy was crazy, and crazy does what crazy does.

But like I said Sunday: Some of us on the left take that kind of talk seriously. And when violence actually happens -- even if it turns out to not be related -- we'll be looking pretty closely for tie-ins as a result. I think lots of liberal commenters overstepped in making the tie-in here, but I understand why it happened.

How many bases does America have overseas?

The United States has 460 bases overseas! It has 507 permanent bases! What is the United States doing with more than 560 foreign bases? Why does it have 662 bases abroad? Does the United States really have more than 1,000 military bases across the globe?

In a world of statistics and precision, a world in which "accountability" is now a Washington buzzword, a world where all information is available at the click of a mouse, there's one number no American knows. Not the president. Not the Pentagon. Not the experts. No one.

via thenation.com

I realize that providing for the common defense is pretty solidly a constitutional duty of American government. But I wonder what my conservative friends who believe in "limited government" think of this. Did the Founders really envision a military establishment so far-reaching that it's difficult to know how many bases our country has overseas?

Will Saletan on Sarah Palin

That's what Palin believes. Each person is solely accountable for his actions. Acts of monstrous criminality "begin and end with the criminals who commit them." It's wrong to hold others of the same nationality, ethnicity, or religion "collectively" responsible for mass murders.

Unless, of course, you're talking about Muslims. In that case, Palin is fine with collective blame. In fact, she's enthusiastic about it.

via slate.com

Me @Macworld: Posterous Review

The era of insta- and micro-blogging has been notable for its proliferation of options—from Twitter to Tumblr to everything in between, there’s no shortage of ways to publish your thoughts online. Posterous stands out in the crowded field because of its simplicity and easy of use. The company’s free Posterous app for Apple’s iOS devices emulates those great qualities.

via macworld.com

It was writing this review that actually persuaded me to move most of my blogging activity to Posterous. Working for Macworld is changing my habits.

Michael Chabon on the 'n-word' and Huck Finn

Great punchline to Michael Chabon's story of how he dealt with the n-word while reading "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" to his children last summer:

"Hey, Dad," the little guy asked me at one point. "How come if you can't say you-know-what, when you were reading Tom Sawyer you kept saying INJUN Joe, because that's offensive, too."

"Because I'm an ass," I said. Only I didn't say "ass."

Jonah Goldberg is right about 'blood libel'

I should have said this a few days ago, when my friend Glenn Reynolds introduced the term to this debate. But I think that the use of this particular term in this context isn’t ideal. Historically, the term is almost invariably used to describe anti-Semitic myths about how Jews use blood — usually from children — in their rituals. I agree entirely with Glenn’s, and now Palin’s, larger point. But I’m not sure either of them intended to redefine the phrase, or that they should have.

via nationalreview.com

Today in Philadelphia police ickiness

Philadelphia Police officer was arrested today on charges of drinking and driving on the job, police said.

Officer William Haviland, 42, a seven-year veteran of the force, was suspended in November for 30 days with the intent to dismiss, said Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey.

via philly.com

Today in Glenn Beck screen shots

I do wonder how many people quote Martin Luther King while dressed up as a faux facist.

beck.png.png on Aviary.

A pox on both their houses?

My post yesterday on the rhetoric of violence brought some pushback from some of my conservative friends -- as I expected. I don't want to be some lily-livered simp who doesn't have the courage of his own convictions, but I'm not interested in clinging to my convictions despite all relevant evidence, either.

My core argument revolved around this set of propositions:

 

* The Obama Administration stands on the cusp of becoming a tyranny, is a nearly unprecedented threat to the freedom that all Americans cherish.

* And the Tea Party movement sees itself as heir to an earlier generation of Americans who threw off the shackes of tyranny with a violent revolution.

 

And I concluded: "We'll stop believing in your propensity for violence when you stop telling us all about it."

Of course, some responses are more substantive than others. Here's Emaw, from my old Kansas stomping grounds:

This is one of the best rationalizations for your own prejudice I've read yet. Good job!

This one got under my skin the quickest, until I realized that Emaw hadn't bothered to make an argument for why I'm wrong. 

More substantively came this response from namefromthepast, a high school friend of mine whose anonymity I'll respect. He posted this link of anti-Bush death threats, and commented: "Just a little reminder. Confusing how you quite innocently nearly skipped over the moonbat left and their history of violence and threats of violence. " 

And no doubt, those pictures are ugly, stupid stuff. I repudiate it--and I repudiate other lefty hints of violence that a conservative friend privately relayed to me. There are undoubtedly idiots throughout the political spectrum. I make no excuses, and I condemn them fully and wholeheartedly.

But I look at this -- and at Michelle Malkin's very, very long list of liberals who crossed lines, both rhetorical and otherwise -- and I have a couple of thoughts: 

* All of the links in Malkin's post go back to years of posts she's done, documenting "the left's" outrages. Everybody tries to police the lines of acceptable discourse and action, and for conservatives to suggest that liberals are somehow uniquely cynical in this effort is, well, cynical. (There. Nyah-nyah-nyah! You guys do it too! That's how we're playing this, right? That makes it ok, right?)  

* But ok, so I was wrong to say that the rhetoric of violence occurs "exclusively on the right." Clearly, that was an overstatement.

A more accurate way of saying it is that the rhetoric of violence -- language that seems to indicate a desire for action, instead of just colorful use of metaphors -- is embraced more fully by thought leaders, candidates and elected officials on the right. 

Steve Benen:

I realize major media outlets feel contractually obligated to embrace the false equivalency, but folks should know better. Remember the Senate candidate who recommended "Second Amendment remedies"? How about the congressional candidate who fired shots at a silhouette with his opponent's initials on it? Or maybe the congressional candidate who declared, "If I could issue hunting permits, I would officially declare today opening day for liberals. The season would extend through November 2 and have no limits on how many taken as we desperately need to 'thin' the herd"? Or how about the congressional candidate who said he considered the violent overthrow of the United States to government an "option" and added that political violence is "on the table"?

All four of these examples came from 2010 -- and all came from Republican candidates for federal elected office. And this doesn't even get into Republican activists and media personalities.

Salon's Alex Pareene adds similar examples from Red State blogger (and CNN contributor) Erick Erickson and Fox News' Dick Morris, among others. I've tried to limit myself to examples where commentators seem to me to have strayed beyond the bounds of metaphor into concrete calls for or musings about the possibilities of political violence.

Now: I don't know if we just went through an unusual cycle where grassroots-slash-fringey Tea Partiers managed to obtain high-profile candidacies that they wouldn't normally, and thus bring fringe views-slash-rhetoric to the table, or if this really is the elite of the GOP and and prominent allied commenters signalling to the rest of the party what kind of norms are acceptable in discourse. But it's there, and it's happening.

And in my view, it's bad. Do both sides do it? Undoubtedly.

Do both sides' elites do it to the same degree? Not from what I can tell; this really does look to me like it is primarily (though not exclusively, perhaps) a practice of the right.

But I might be wrong. Perhaps it's simply a function of who is in power and who feels disempowered as a result.

For what it's worth, I don't blame the actions of Mr. Loughner on this rhetoric. He's crazy. I still wish a lot of commentators would have (ahem) held their fire before launching this debate. They didn't.  My purpose here is to explain why I find the rhetoric coming from across the aisle so alarming. That's all. Perhaps it is merely rationalizing my own prejudice, but my prejudice in this case isn't against conservatives, but against those who employ the threat or promise of violence as a means of rallying political support or otherwise achieving political ends.

If we come back four years from now, when Sarah Palin is president, and you have Democratic members of Congress and prominent liberals talking about overthrowing the government through violent means, I hope and believe you'll find me castigating them in unequivocal terms. (You might find me reminding you of the current debates, as well; I'm only human.) Suggesting that your political rivals need to be shot is wrong, no matter how cutely or coyly phrased -- and no matter who does it.

Matt Yglesias on national security and defense spending

Another way of looking at this is that we don’t really know what the world will look like in 25 years. But it’s predictable that whatever military challenges we face, they’ll be easier to deal with if we have a better-educated crop of twenty-somethings rather than a worse-educated one. That they’ll be easier to deal with if we have a productive economy with a modern infrastructure than if we don’t. And it’s predictable that the more we spend on the military in the next ten years the fewer resources will be available for non-military purposes. But it’s the civilian side that ultimately supplies the capacity to engage in military activities over the long run. Obviously the long run does you no good if your country can’t defend itself in the short-term, but a strategy based on perpetually higher commitments to defense spending is self-defeating over time.

via yglesias.thinkprogress.org

Bad idea, Bob Brady

It's legitimate -- and right -- to call out vitriolic and violent speech and name it for what is. But this seems a step down a road we'd rather not go down:

Representative Bob Brady of Pennsylvania told The Caucus he plans to introduce a bill that would ban symbols like that now-infamous campaign crosshair map.

"You can't threaten the president with a bullseye or a crosshair," Mr. Brady, a Democrat, said, and his measure would make it a crime to do so to a member of Congress or federal employee, as well.

Asked if he believed the map incited the gunman in Tucson, he replied, "I don't know what's in that nut's head. I would rather be safe than sorry."

He continued, "This is not a wakeup call. This is a major alarm going off. We need to be more civil with each other. We need to tone down this rhetoric."

I'm always leery of any idea to restrain speech -- bad speech is generally best met with more and better speech. Threats aren't free speech, of course, and graphic-design bullseyes and crosshairs can definitely be used to signal that certain individuals are marked for death. But the reason I didn't make a big deal of Sarah Palin's infamous crosshairs graphic in my earlier post today is because I didn't think she was really trying to send assassins after members of Congress. And I think Bob Brady's proposal is a step (possibly inadvertent) towards the prohibition of, well, metaphor. 

If you want to prohibit threats against Congress, prohibit threats against Congress. But it's a bad idea to simply ban potentially ambiguous symbolism irrespective of context. (And it's maybe less-than-egalitarian to ban the use of those symbols when they're associated with federal officials while leaving the rest of us at the mercy of a crosshair-laden world.) I understand nerves are frayed right now; that's precisely why everybody should step back and take a deep breath before passing any laws we might regret someday.

That doesn't mean that the rhetoric of violence is somehow a good or productive thing. I still think it's a problem for the right, and for our politics. I'm not convinced, however, that banning speech is the right response. 

Having your cake of violent rhetoric and eating it too

Except for an initial intemperate Tweet, I stayed largely silent -- on the Internets, at least -- during the early hours of the Gabrielle Giffords saga on Saturday afternoon. I don't think myself exceptionally wise or laudable for the silence: I was covering my butt. There's nothing like holding forth on What It All Means in the early aftermath of an event, only to find out the story is completely different. I didn't want to completely embarrass myself.

But I had my suspicions. I thought a Tea Partier did it.

I'm glad I kept those suspicions to myself, though. Turns out the alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, is just plumb crazy. Unless he had an accomplice, trying to suss out some larger meaning from this story is going to turn out to be a fool's errand.  Sometimes, crazy is just crazy. It's tragic and awful and stupid. Period. No bigger lesson to be learned.

As I say, though, I spend the first hour or two of the unfolding story convinced -- and deeply angered by that conviction -- a Tea Partier (or somebody influenced by the Tea Party) had committed the awful crime. 

I don't think it was unreasonable for that to be my instinctive reaction. I do think many of my fellow liberals would've been better served by waiting for facts to emerge, but I also don't think their assumptions were entirely unreasonable either.

Why?

Because we take Tea Party rhetoric seriously.

Let's back up, and let me see if I can frame this in a way my conservative and TP-inclined friends understand. Remember when Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995? I'll bet you assumed Arab-Muslim terrorists committed that awful act in the first hours of that unfolding story. Lots of people did. Why? Well, because of the track record. America had been through the first World Trade Center bombing a couple of years earlier, the Beirut barracks bombing a decade before that, and we'd generally been conditioned to understand that there was one likely source of big, bombastic violence against Americans. Turned out we were all wrong, though.

Well, Tea Partiers, I hate to tell  you this, but that's how a lot of liberals see you these days. 

Why?

Because we take Tea Party -- and Republican -- rhetoric seriously.

And that rhetoric has been liberal, to say the least, in its use of language deploying terms of violence and revolution.

* "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." A Jefferson quote that found great currency at Tea Party rallies.

* "I hope that's not where we're going, but you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies. They're saying: My goodness, what can we do to turn this country around?" Sharron Angle, 2010's Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, in her campaign against Harry Reid.

* "I'm not saying the Democrats are fascists. I'm saying the government under Bush and under Obama and under all of the presidents that we've seen or at least most of the presidents that we've seen for quite some time are slowly but surely moving us away from our republic and into a system of fascism." Glenn Beck, sounding off on a theme he has pursued tenaciously over the last two years. 

* "This bill is the greatest threat to freedom that I've seen in the 19 years I've been in Washington." Then-House Minority Leader John Boehner, upon passage of the Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare.

I could go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. But I won't. Some of these folks are at the fringe of respectable discourse, but a remarkable number of them are well within the mainstream of our country's dialogue. The message from both elected officials and Tea Partiers in the street has been clear and consistent:

* The Obama Administration stands on the cusp of becoming a tyranny, is a nearly unprecedented threat to the freedom that all Americans cherish.

* And the Tea Party movement sees itself as heir to an earlier generation of Americans who threw off the shackes of tyranny with a violent revolution.

All this comes from a movement that cherishes the Second Amendment -- not just because folks want to go hunting and keep their families safe, but in large part because they believe that the threat of armed rebellion will keep the government in line. 

As Matt Yglesias says: "If you believed, as Beck purports to, that progressive agenda is a form of totalitarianism wouldn't violent remedies be appropriate?"

It's not as though we haven't been down this road before. Those of us on the left remember the Clinton Administration for many unhappy events, but chief among them was (coming full circle) Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government radical who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. We remember G. Gordon Liddy telling listeners to take "head shots" at ATF agents and somehow remaining a member in good standing on conservative talk radio to this day.

I know a number of my conservative friends believe that political point-scoring was behind the left's immediate effort to blame the Giffords shooting on right-wing rhetoric. I have no doubt there was some of that. We all know how the cycle works by now.

But Tea Partiers and conservatives have spent two years employing the rhetoric of violence and revolt. Yes, there are occasional similar efforts on the left -- but really, the phenomenon belongs almost exclusively to the right. Some of us take the rhetoric seriously. We're meant to take the rhetoric seriously, I think. 

So while I think it was wrong for my friends on the left to jump to conclusions, I have frankly little pity for conservatives who are indignant about that jumping. You've spent the last two years crying wolf. Are we to be blamed for believing you believe what you say? And if we believe that you believe what you say, can you blame us for making certain assumptions when a Democratic congresswoman ends up with a bullet in her brain?

If you don't like those assumptions, friends, there's something you can do: Stop playing make-believe with the language of armed revolt. We'll stop believing in your propensity for violence when you stop telling us all about it. 

Philly police corruption watch

Inky:

"A 21-year veteran Philadelphia police officer has been arrested and charged with falsely claiming he was assaulted while making an arrest last year, the department said this morning.

Aleksande Shwarz, 54, who was assigned to the 2nd District, also has been charged with simple assault stemming from the arrest on March 4.

He was arrested Wednesday, the department said in a statement."

Slashing the defense budget

The Slatest:

"Defense Secretary Robert Gates presented his proposed defense budget Thursday, unveiling the most significant proposed cuts to military spending since Sept. 11. Gates called for the military to cut $78 billion in program spending and reduce personnel by 70,000 over the next five years. Most of those cuts wouldn't be felt for years, and the reduction in troop size (a loss of about 49,000 Army soldiers and 20,000 Marines) wouldn't begin until the U.S. starts to draw down its presence in Afghanistan next year. At a press conference Thursday, Gates cast the cuts as a matter of national security: 'This country's dire fiscal situation and the threat it poses to American influence and credibility around the world will only get worse unless the U.S. government gets its finances in order,' he said. 'My hope is what had been a culture of endless money will become a culture of savings and restraint.'"

And we'll still have the scariest, most-expensive armed forces in the world.

Is ObamaCare a losing issue for Democrats?

Tevi Troy at The Corner: "The New York Times reports that the Obama administration is pursuing a full-scale effort against the Republican’s planned repeal vote of the Obama health-care law. As I argue in this month’s Commentary, the Democrats are continuing to operate under the misperception that health care is a winning political issue for them, despite considerable and continuing evidence to the contrary. New York Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner recently acknowledged losing “round one” of the health-care debate to the Republicans. It’s not clear why Democrats think that things will go better for them in round two."

Two possible answers:

* There have been similar conservative freak-outs over the decades about previous entitlement programs. We've all heard Ronald Reagan's 1960s speech about the socialistic perils of Medicare; it blew over, and is a relatively uncontroversial part of the American fabric. History has tended to be on the side of Democrats on these issues.

* There's also the possibility that a lot of Democrats simply think that universal health insurance is the right thing to do, for a host of reasons. My impression on the day of the big vote was that a number of Democratic congressmen knew they were throwing away their career with their vote. They did it anyway -- and despite some real flaws in the bill itself -- hopeful that history will one day judge them the ultimate winners.

Huck Finn and the 'n word'

Here's the Scripps Howard column this week. I'm not sure I agree entirely with myself about the argument I make here. I don't favor censorship at all. But I think a lot of anti-censorship folks might be too cavalier about the feelings of people who legitimately find "Huckleberry Finn" hurtful, and I think it might be useful to contemplate that a little bit more.

Anyway, here goes. You know where to send your angry e-mail:

You can't pray a lie. And you can't have Huck Finn -- not the real Huck Finn, anyway -- without his frequent and casual use of the racial slur known as "the n-word." Mark Twain's novel is a document of a brutal time and place in American history, and the depths of that era's brutality to African-Americans cannot be fully contemplated apart from the constant, almost banal repetition of the term throughout the book.

Rather than remove the word from "Huckleberry Finn," though, there's another option that English teachers should consider: Maybe it is time to remove the book from high school curricula and leave it to be taught entirely at the college level.

That seems counterintuitive. "Huckleberry Finn," after all is perhaps the greatest American novel of all. Who can argue with the message of a book in which a young Southern boy grows from seeing a black man as a piece of property to recognizing their shared humanity? That argument is easy to make -- if you are white.

If you are a black reader, though, it is possible a book that makes the case that "African Americans are people too!" seems silly, perhaps even offensively obvious. Wrap that message inside a blanket of racial slurs, and it's easy to see why many readers could care less about context and instead find "Huckleberry Finn" to be almost purely hurtful.

Understand: "Finn" is a great novel. It is not necessarily a novel best read by the youngsters who are the intended audience for Gribben's bowdlerization. You can't take sex scenes out of "Tropic of Cancer" or the sadism from the Marquis de Sade's novels and have them make sense. We let readers discover the unexpurgated texts on their own, and save the classroom discussions for college. Perhaps it's time for "Huckleberry Finn" to join them on the shelf of classics that require careful handling and mature readers.

Test.

This is a test. Contemplating abandoning my Posterous site and returning to Blogspot as my full-time digs. The outcome relies on this test.

My son's gun obsession is becoming increasingly complex and alarming

The angled part to the right? That's what he was using for the stock of the block rifle he built for himself. That's the grip on the left. Kind of an extended Uzi thing going on. He came up to me brandishing it like you'd expect, making shooting noises. The kid is clever.

Harry Reid: 'The American people love government.'

I don't know if I'd go as far as Harry Reid does here:

“The American people love government, but they don’t like too much politics in government,” he said.

I don't think the American people "love" government. I think they even like it, in a generalized and monolithic sense. But I think they like having roads to drive on. An Internet to use. Education for their kids. Social Security and Medicare for their parents. I think they like that Hawaii isn't under Japanese control. I think they like having national parks to visit, and local libraries to aid their learning and reading. I think they like these things -- and a lot more services they receive or use all the time -- but don't always contemplate that it's government doing these things. This is why Republicans frequently talk in a general way about cutting government, but even now seem hesitant to name what, precisely, they would cut. (Paul Ryan, perhaps, being a notable exception.)

And I furthermore don't think they always remember that the idea of governance in the United States is that it derives its power from the citizens. It's not this other thing over there: It's us, either through our cheering support or passive assent. Those things government provides? It's because lots and lots of citizens want government to provide them. Lots of other folks don't. And politics is the process of engaging in and trying to resolve those disputes. Get rid of that, and you've gotten rid of self-governance. 

But, no, Americans don't love government. They just like what government does.

The Philadelphia Inquirer comes home

There's apparently confusion over whether Philly.com is about to suddenly and unexpectedly erect a paywall, but this part of Phawker's report about the Inquirer is good news if it's true: "Also, expect less national and international wire stories and more local news inside the A section of the weekday edition of the Inquirer."

 

I've mentioned a few times that the Inquirer's front page -- and, really, it's entire A section -- is a relic of older days when A) the Inky had reporting assets to spread around the world and B) when readers couldn't easily get worldwide news from other sources. If I want to read reporting that originated in the LA Times or New York Times, I can read those papers! But the Inky has continued to fill its front section with stories from those organizations. I expect I'll retain a slight bias for the Daily News, just because I live in Philly and I expect the Inquirer will remain largely suburban in its outlook. But this decision is overdue for the Inquirer, and I welcome it.