In other words, Republicans don’t trust the government, unless a Republican is in the White House. In that case, Republicans trust the government more than any other demographic has since before the Vietnam War and Watergate. The right-wing echo chamber has certainly done its job hasn’t it?

But instead of complaining about the hypocrisy involved in not trying to whip people into a fit of terror and madness about this incident, I think it makes more sense to congratulate everyone on handling this in a calm and sensible manner. The key point, that all authorities seem to agree on, is that while this is a serious crime and a genuinely Bad Thing To Have Happen, that you need to put the likelihood of this sort of incident into a broader context. Simply put, the odds of “death by disgruntled anti-tax activist flying an airplane into your office” are extremely small and it’s extremely difficult to think of cost-effective and efficacious methods of ensuring that this never happens again. Off the top of my head, this looks to me like a demonstration of the desirability of better mental health services in the United States, but that’s something that I would think was true one way or the other.

The problem with this is that what you’re seeing isn’t a rationally subdued response to a terrorist attack so much as people arguing that this wasn’t actually a terrorist attack. Which is absurd, of course, Stack used violence for the same cause al Qaeda uses it; to provoke an over-reaction from the government in the hope of furthering their ideological cause with the populace. It’s certainly nice that we’re probably not going to over-react to this attack, but given the freakout over the attempted underwear bomber, who failed to kill or injure a single person, it’s seems much more accurate to say that racial/religious factors are playing an outsized role in peoples’ response to terrorist acts than to assume we’ve suddenly gotten rational about our response to small scale terrorist actions.

Technorati Tags: Joe Stack

Peace on Earth.

Responding to a previous post, commenter J made some very good points. I’ve been pretty busy recently between work and assignments and screaming children, so not yet having a chance to address them, I figure they deserve their own post. The response comes in two parts. The first:

if the rhetoric thus far has been of little importance, would there have been a big price to pay if the President had made his message “the public option is a really important piece of reform” rather than “the public option would be kinda nice” (which is at least how the White House position is being perceived)? I can’t imagine those messages would be that different if the desired end result is to “exhaust” the bipartisan process.

As far as I can say, the only thing I can take away from this is that the White House has basically wanted to take an ambiguous stance on the specifics of the bill. There’s a couple of reasons for that. First of all, you don’t really want to clearly define the “liberal Obama position,” because that sets up a pretty bright marker for “centrist” Democrats in Congress for ways in which they can alter the bill and then run to the cameras to proclaim they “broke with the White House” and “put a check on Obama.” Secondly, I’m really not sure you can overstate the degree to which the Obama team is trying to avoid what they see as the mistakes the Clinton administration made in pushing healthcare, chief among which was burning the gunpowder far too soon, and exhausting their capital before the Congressional meatgrinder did its dirty work. For better or worse, there really isn’t any way to work around that messy process, and the Obama team has made the decision upfront that they’re going to let Congress work, and try to keep the powder dry until they can be most effective, which is probably somewhere around the conference committee. But up until that point, I wouldn’t expect too many bright policy lines from the White House.

Secondly:

don’t you think that less “faulty messaging” on behalf of the White House could increase the pressure on some right-wing democratic senators, making them more likely to support a public option?

No. There really aren’t any mechanisms by which Obama can pressure truly intransigent Democrats, particularly in the Senate. If you look at Mary Landrieu, for example, she doesn’t have to run for re-election until 2014 when, presumably, Obama could have been voted out of office. Evan Bayh and Max Baucus are safe in their own right, and other marginal Democrats have their own agendas. I know some progressives imagine Obama threatening to cut off DNC or DSCC money, but the real truth of the matter is that Senators, by and large, don’t really need that money. Thanks to their long terms and disproportionate impact on policy, it’s fairly easy for incumbent Senators to amass substantial war-chests, even if they don’t really need them. Evan Bayh, for example, is currently sitting on about $14 million in available funds, even though he isn’t likely to face any sort of credible challenge. And institutionally, this sort of pressure has to come from the larger Senate caucus, not the President.

I’m certainly not of the generation of Americans who are usually considered to be enamored with the Kennedy brothers, but it was, and still is, impossible not to be awed and moved by Ted Kennedy. Teddy doesn’t get nearly the credit he deserves, and is obviously not thought of nearly so fondly as his older brothers, yes, in part because his life was not artificially cut short. People can imagine what Jack and Bobby might have done, and impute their own vision of their better angels to them, but with Teddy, we actually have a full life and body of work to look at, warts and all.

There’s a lot of things that deserve to be said, both about the life he lived and what this means for the rest of us going forward, but for now, at least for me, the passing is too sad for words. Thank you Teddy. That’s really all that needs to be said today.

Watching MTP today I was struck by how Dick Armey and Tom Coburn avoided any responsibility for the right wink kooks who are gathering weapons and ammunition, joining militias, buying gold and stockpiling cans of beef stew. Certainly it should be as obvious to those two gentleman as it is to everyone else that these nuts are being riled up because they are being told – by the Republicans – that the Obama administration is doing everything from wanting to kill grandma to destroying the American way of life. The right needs responsible leaders who will stand up and loudly repudiate the violent threats.

But after all, what the right wing wants is to preserve the status quo. They want those who “have” now staying that way, and as for those who “have not?” Well, the Republican party is pretty sure that those who have not are illegal aliens, lazy African Americans, Marxists, just plain evil or a combination of all of those things, and not deserving of having anything like health care in the first place. Certainly they are people who made “poor choices” in their lives and thus deserve to die young and leave nothing behind for their children.

Yes, the people like the idiot who brought a gun and threatening signs to the Portsmouth town hall, and the nutbag who held up the “Death to Obama and Family” signs in Maryland are a small percentage of even the right wing nuts, but all of them want to preserve the status quo. What about those who don’t?

What if the 46 million people without health care decided to form their own militias? It seems to me that the “have nots” in this country should be more motivated to change the way things are than the “haves.” Latest estimates are that 37 million people live in poverty in the United States. If only 1% of those who either live in poverty or who do not also have health care coverage decided that our system – despite overwhelming Democratic majorities – was not going to respond to them in general, and to the health care crisis in general, that would be an army of between 370,000 and 460,000 people. What percentage might it be if we see the moneyed interests come away with a “win” here? 3%? 5%? 10%?

And none of their anger would be based upon lies.

This is why I am anxious to see some leadership from those on the right. They threaten us with military coups to “restore” the GOP to power, and the Republican leadership winks and says that they know nothing about that. Then they turn around and say that they “understand” the anger that infuses the radical right.

They miss those with grievances on the left, those who worked last year to put huge Democratic majorities in place to effect change, those who worked within the system to try to make this a better country.

They Republicans play the “we know how to use a gun” schtick a bit too loosely, and they forget that they’re not the only ones who do…