Month: June 2016

Love, wingnut style

by digby

I just had to share this one. The scope of right wing grift is truly astonishing. They are masterful.

Below please find a special message from one of CHQ’s advertisers. My wife won’t stop hitting on me ever since she watched this video. It’s not that the video is “dirty” or anything like that . . . In fact, it was created by a devout Christian from Ohio! But the reason my wife is so worked up into a frenzy is because inside this video . . . The man shares a startling discovery he made while on a mission trip to Africa. You see . . . The married villagers he met in Africa were all having the loudest . . . craziest . . . most passionate lovemaking sessions imaginable . . . And it was going on night-after-night. Finally the missionary had to know what the heck was going on . . . And that’s when the villagers told him about this powerful “arousal recipe” . . . Something that consists of just a handful of natural ingredients . . . But that’s now been proven in 200+ studies to dramatically increase arousal and heal “performance issues.” You can see the full list of ingredients by clicking here now. I do have to warn you though: this recipe is pretty darn powerful. And since my wife and I started using it for ourselves . . . We haven’t been able to keep our hands off one another! Sincerely, Dan Colburn Christian Marriage Coalition

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It wasn’t meant for “fun”

by digby

The family of the man who invented the AR-15 speaks out:

The AR-15 is the most talked about gun in America.

But the AR-15’s creator died before the weapon became a popular hit and his family has never spoken out.

Until now.

“Our father, Eugene Stoner, designed the AR-15 and subsequent M-16 as a military weapon to give our soldiers an advantage over the AK-47,” the Stoner family told NBC News late Wednesday. “He died long before any mass shootings occurred. But, we do think he would have been horrified and sickened as anyone, if not more by these events.”

The inventor’s surviving children and adult grandchildren spoke exclusively to NBC News by phone and email, commenting for the first time on their family’s uneasy legacy. They requested individual anonymity in order to speak freely about such a sensitive topic. They also stopped short of policy prescriptions or legal opinions.

But their comments add unprecedented context to their father’s creation, shedding new light on his intentions and adding firepower to the effort to ban weapons like the AR-15. The comments could also bolster a groundbreaking new lawsuit, which argues that the weapon is a tool of war — never intended for civilians.

Eugene Stoner would have agreed, his family said.

The ex-Marine and “avid sportsman, hunter and skeet shooter” never used his invention for sport. He also never kept it around the house for personal defense. In fact, he never even owned one.

And though he made millions from the design, his family said it was all from military sales.

“After many conversations with him, we feel his intent was that he designed it as a military rifle,” his family said, explaining that Stoner was “focused on making the most efficient and superior rifle possible for the military.”

He designed the original AR-15 in the late 1950s, working on it in his own garage and later as the chief designer for ArmaLite, a then small company in southern California. He made it light and powerful and he fashioned a new bullet for it — a .223 caliber round capable of piercing a metal helmet at 500 yards.

The Army loved it and renamed it the M16.

But after Stoner’s death in 1997, at the age of 74, a semi-automatic version of the AR-15 became a civilian bestseller, too, spawning dozens of copy-cat weapons. The National Rifle Association has taken to calling it “America’s rifle.”

The bullets that tore through the Pulse nightclub in Orlando were Stoner’s .223 rounds, fired from a AR-15 spin off made by Sig Sauer.

The idea that people have turned this weapon of war into a recreational toy is sickening. I heard someone say the other day that in gun culture it’s like a “Barbie” for men. (An equally suspect cultural symbol but at least Barbie dolls don’t literally kill people.)

It wasn’t meant to be for fun. If Mattel came out with a toy that killed as many people as this hideous toy, they’d have been put out of business a long time ago. Just because it’s used by adults doesn’t make it any more acceptable.

I have been asked how I, as a civil libertarian, could support using the watch list and the no-fly list to keep people from buying guns. My answer is this: I don’t think owning guns are a fundamental civil right so if an innocent person is denied a gun, I just don’t care. I don’t happen to believe that anyone needs a gun to be free. In fact, I think it’s the opposite.

I believe the right to travel is fundamental, however, so there should be a reformation of the no-fly list and the terrorist watch list should have rights of due process as well. Innocent people should not be caught in a Kafkaesque black hole where they have no right to defend themselves.

But as far as I’m concerned a no-gun list is fine. There is no God-given right to own a killing machine and until 2008, there wasn’t a constitutional right to own them either.

I wrote this for Salon a couple years back after yet another horrific massacre:

In the wake of the horrific Isla Vista, California, mass killing, Americans have once again engaged the debate over gun proliferation. Victims’ families issue primal cries for regulation of these deadly weapons and gun activists respond by waving the Constitution and declaring their “fundamental right” to bear arms is sacrosanct. Indeed, such right-wing luminaries as Joe the plumber, who not long ago shared the stage with the Republican nominees for president and vice president, said explicitly:

“Your dead kids don’t trump my constitutional rights.”

Iowa Republican Senate candidate Jodi Ernst, known for her violent campaign ads in which she is seen shooting guns and promising to “unload” on Obamacare, had this to say when asked about Isla Vista:

“This unfortunate accident happened after the ad, but it does highlight that I want to get rid of, repeal, and replace [opponent] Bruce Braley’s Obamacare. And it also shows that I am a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. That is a fundamental right.”

This argument is set forth by gun proliferation advocates as if it has been understood this way from the beginning of the republic. Indeed, “fundamental right to bear arms” is often spat at gun regulation advocates as if they have heard it from the mouths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson themselves. But what none of them seem to acknowledge (or, more likely, know) is that this particular legal interpretation of the Second Amendment was validated by the Supreme Court all the way back in … 2008. That’s right. It was only six years ago that the Supreme Court ruled (in a 5-4 decision with the conservatives in the majority, naturally) that there was a “right to bear arms” as these people insist has been true for over two centuries. And even then it isn’t nearly as expansive as these folks like to pretend.

For instance, that gun-grabbing hippie Justice Antonin Scalia went out of his way in that decision to say that beyond the holding of handguns in the home for self-defense, regulations of firearms remained the purview of the state and so too was conduct. He wrote that regulating the use of concealed weapons or barring the use of weapons in certain places or restricting commercial use are permitted. That’s Antonin Scalia, well known to be at the far-right end of the legal spectrum on this issue. Most judges had always had a much more limited interpretation of the amendment.

Justice John Paul Stephens discussed his long experience with Second Amendment jurisprudence in his book “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution,” and notes that when he came on the Supreme Court there was literally no debate among the justices, conservative or liberal, over the idea that the Second Amendment constituted a “fundamental right” to bear arms. Precedents going all the way back to the beginning of the republic had held that the state had an interest in regulating weapons and never once in all its years had declared a “fundamental right” in this regard.

So, what happened? Well, the NRA happened. Or more specifically, a change in leadership in the NRA happened. After all, the NRA had long been a benign sportsman’s organization devoted to hunting and gun safety. It wasn’t until 1977, that a group of radicals led by activists from the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms took control and changed the direction of the group to one dedicated to making the Second Amendment into a “fundamental right.”

What had been a fringe ideology was then systematically mainstreamed by the NRA, a program that prompted the retired arch conservative Chief Justice Warren Burger to say that the Second Amendment:

“Has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime”

The results are clear to see. Mass shootings are just the tip of the iceberg. Today we have people brandishing guns in public, daring people to try to stop them in the wake of new laws legalizing open carry law even in churches, bars and schools. People “bearing arms” show up at political events, silently intimidating their opponents, making it a physical risk to express one’s opinion in public. They are shooting people with impunity under loose “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” legal theories, which essentially allow gun owners to kill people solely on the ground that they “felt threatened.” Gun accidents are epidemic. And this, the gun proliferation activists insist, is “liberty.”

Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice (at NYU School of Law) has thoroughly documented all this history in his book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” a bit of which was excerpted in Politico magazine. He recommends that progressives who care about this issue think long and hard about how the right was able to turn this around, making a specific case for taking constitutional arguments seriously and using their “totemic” stature to advance the cause. He suggests that they adopt a similarly systematic approach, keeping this foremost in mind:

Molding public opinion is the most important factor. Abraham Lincoln, debating slavery, said in 1858, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.” The triumph of gun rights reminds us today: If you want to win in the court of law, first win in the court of public opinion.

In his book, Justice John Paul Stevens suggest a modest tweak to the Second Amendment to finally make clear what the founders obviously intended:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”

Emotional claims that the right to possess deadly weapons is so important that it is protected by the federal Constitution distort intelligent debate about the wisdom of particular aspects of proposed legislation designed to minimize the slaughter caused by the prevalence of guns in private hands. Those emotional arguments would be nullified by the adoption of my proposed amendment. The amendment certainly would not silence the powerful voice of the gun lobby; it would merely eliminate its ability to advance one mistaken argument.

This is important. As Waldman notes, where the NRA Headquarters once featured words about safety on the facade of its building, it is now festooned with the words of the Second amendment. Well, some of them anyway:

Visitors might not notice that the text is incomplete. It reads: “.. the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” 

The first half—the part about the well regulated militia—has been edited out.

If they truly believed the 2nd Amendment was absolute and totally clear, you’d think they’d show all the language, wouldn’t you? One can only conclude that they are trying to hide something: its real meaning.

Guns are selling like hotcakes

by digby

I wrote about guns again for Salon this morning:

Back in 2000, Donald Trump published a book called “The America We Deserve” in which he endorsed the assault weapons ban and pointedly called out the GOP on the gun issue writing, “The Republicans walk the NRA line and refuse even limited restrictions.” After Sandy Hook in 2012, Trump tweeted “President Obama spoke for me and every American in his remarks in #Newtown Connecticut,” Those remarks included an emotional call for gun safety regulations. But since Trump announced his run for president, he’s been NRA all the way, with all that that implies.

He has fetishized guns daily on the stump, often pantomiming a quick draw and a sniper shot, insisting that the problem with gun violence is a simple matter of not enough people having enough guns. He says he is against all firearm or ammunition bans, including bans on assault rifles and proposes that concealed-carry permits be recognized in all 50 states. His answer to school shootings is to end the practice og gun-free zones anywhere. His full-throated support for the second amendment is one of center pieces of his rallies, and it’s always greeted with ecstatic cheering.

Last month, he was the recipient of the NRA endorsement where he appeared at their lavish convention and was greeted as a conquering hero. He gave one of his patented rambling rants showing that he hadn’t given the speech even five minutes of thought before delivering it. It came down to this:

Hillary’s pledge to issue new anti-gun executive orders. You know that. This is the behavior, you could say, of a dictator. This is the behavior of somebody frankly I think that doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s not equipped to be president in so many different ways. But this is the thinking of a person that is not equipped to be the president of the United States. Believe me. She doesn’t understand it. Bad judgment.

The Second Amendment is on the ballot in November. The only way to save our Second Amendment is to vote for a person that you all know named Donald Trump. Okay? I will tell you.

I will never let you down. I will protect our Second Amendment. I will protect our country. Our military will be strong. Our border will be enforced.

The crowd went wild. It was a good thing the NRA had declared the auditorium in which he spoke to be a gun free zone or there is every chance some of these gun zealots would have exuberantly fired into the air like drunken cowboys.

One would have thought that NRA members, of all people, would be a little bit suspicious of Trump considering his past squishiness. But research into gun ownership may explain why he is so popular with this crowd despite all the cultural signals that would otherwise raise suspicions. This Washington Post article from a couple of months back explains that NRA gun culture is largely based on racial identity. And that’s what Trump is all about:

Filindra and Kaplan say their research does not imply that all white gun owners are racist, nor that all support for gun control carries racial baggage. But for a certain subset of white gun-rights supporters, particularly those who are inclined to hold certain prejudicial beliefs, messages about individualism and liberty and rights are understood in a very specific way. 

In the mind of this type of gun owner, “I am showing my white nationalist pride in a sort of generic way through gun ownership,” Filindra posits. “This is my way of expressing my ‘more-equal-than-others’ status in a society where egalitarianism is the norm. I can’t say that some people are better and some are worse in terms of racial groups. But I can show it symbolically. I can show I’m a better citizen.”

There are other studies going back decades which come to similar conclusions. For a certain minority of gun rights activists — let’s call them Trump voters — race is the motivating factor in their single-minded zeal. This second amendment fetish is a dog whistle. One can certainly see why they would look at this man as a leader of their cause despite his clear lack of gun zealot credibility.

In the wake of the Orlando massacre, Trump has behaved like a cretinous thug showing no empathy, no grace, no intelligence and no restraint in his comments. But he did seem to momentarily forget to dance with the gun nuts who endorsed him and on Wednesday morning betrayed his new NRA fanboys with a tweet:

I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2016

The NRA calmly issued a statement:

We are happy to meet with Donald Trump. The NRA’s position on this issue has not changed.

They went on to explain that they are against terrorists having guns and back the bogus, useless completely phony bill being pressed by Texas Senator John Cornyn which would simply impose a three day delay for anyone on the watch list and require the government to go to court to prove the person was actually a terrorist during that period. (If only these Republicans had the same concern for real civil liberties instead of this single obsession with the founders alleged belief that we are endowed by our Creator with the right to bear the Sig Sauer MCX semi-automatic rifle, also known as the “Black Mamba.”)

It is unknown if Trump wanted something different when he called the meeting but it’s doubtful he has any clue about any of this. The best guess is that the NRA will sell him some bilge about the Cornyn bill and he’ll be good to go.

At this writing the Democrats in the Senate, led by Chris Murphy of Connecticut have been filibustering for hours, talking non-stop to force the Republicans to act on legislation that would deny suspected terrorists from purchasing firearms and require universal background checks. There is talk of some sort of compromise forged between Cornyn and California Senator Dianne Feinstein but the talks had gone nowhere as of last night, with Cornyn reportedly unable to move off of the NRA script.

This is a dramatic response. There has never before been a filibuster over gun control. But we’ve had dramatic moments before in the wake of these gun massacres and the people with common sense inevitably hit that brick wall known as the NRA. They are so powerful, and the gun culture in this country is so ingrained, that we often end up making the situation even worse.

A typical headline after a mass shooting looks like this:

NC gun sales rise in wake of Orlando killings 

June is normally a slow month for gun sales in Charlotte. It was different Tuesday, when Hyatt Guns was filled with customers fearing further gun control in the wake of killings in Orlando.

It happens every time. And there is even more bad news. The New York Times had this depressing report this week:

Lots of gun laws are proposed in the aftermath of an attack, new research shows. But in terms of what actually is enacted, the results aren’t what you might expect.

In states where a mass shooting happened, 15 percent more gun-related bills were introduced in state legislatures, three Harvard Business School professors found in a working paper published last month. But in states with legislatures that were led by Democrats or divided between the parties, a mass shooting wasn’t followed by any statistically significant increase in gun laws enacted.

No intelligent life
by Tom Sullivan

Sketch of a “spaceship” creating crop circles, sent to UK
Ministry of Defence circa 1998. via Wikimedia Commons.

“Writing about a Donald Trump speech is like trying to describe the whiplash,” Jim Galloway wrote in the Atlanta Journal Constitution when Donald Trump visited Atlanta back in February. Trump was back again yesterday. George W. Bush was the U.S. president who thought Africa was a country. Now comes candidate Donald Trump who thinks Belgium is a city.

Trump: "Belgium is a beautiful city." Thank goodness for oceans. https://t.co/4oYS8LuMQp— Andrew Stroehlein (@astroehlein) June 15, 2016

Andrew Stroehlein lives in Brussels.

Trump also thinks America’s “nuclear is old and tired,” but not Russia’s.

Trump on Putin/Russia: "Our nuclear is old and tired and his nuclear is tippy top, from what I hear."— Ashley Killough (@KilloughCNN) June 15, 2016

Trump also believes it costs the government $1 million every time we “turn on” one of our aircraft carriers.

All this from one Trump speech yesterday in Atlanta — a beautiful state, by the way.

Trump takes factoids he half heard on Sunday talk shows and regurgitates them in speeches as if they are truths he’s gleaned through years of careful study and deliberation (which is for losers, believe me). Or he simply pulls stuff out of his ass and crowds cheer. He may not know what the hell he’s talking about, but, like your average street tough, he’s got attitude. In word jazz, coherence just gets in the way of the performance.

Make America Incoherent Again pic.twitter.com/VjXSq7Z2pk— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) June 12, 2016

In the New York Times’ Sunday Review, astrophysics professor Adam Frank reported on new data that suggest even with a healthy dose of skepticism, “a trillion civilizations still would have appeared over the course of cosmic history.” He writes:

In other words, given what we now know about the number and orbital positions of the galaxy’s planets, the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borders on the irrational.

Speaking of bordering on the irrational, it might still be early to count ours as one.

Mid-week Soother

by digby

Life is too horrible right now. So this is for you:

Hey BeiBei! Thai massage has got nothing on u! Upside down planking seems very relaxing! @houseofcubs #pandastory pic.twitter.com/G2IVCQQDIZ

— BooBooPanda (@BooBooPanduh) June 14, 2016

I felt a little bit better for a minute didn’t you?

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by digby

Trump today, very frustrated with democracy:

The Republicans. Honestly folks. Our leaders. Our leaders have to get tougher. It’s too tough to do it alone. But you know what? I think I’m going to be forced to. I think I’m going to be forced to.  

Our leaders have to get a lot tougher. And be quiet. Please be quiet. Don’t talk. Please be quiet. Don’t talk. Just be quiet. The leaders. Because they have to get tougher. They have to get sharper. They have to get smarter. 

We have to have our Republicans either stick together or let me just do it by myself. I’ll do very well. 

Maybe he can have his right hand man Paul Manafort call up some of his Putin ally pals for some tips on how to deal with that little problem.

Trump’s vanguard

by digby

Trump gave a very dark dystopian speech today at his Atlanta rally, pretty much saying that unless we do something very, very drastic about Muslims the country is going down.

“Everntually, it’s not going to survive, just so you understand,” Trump says of the United States.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 15, 2016

He has some supporters who are articulating what they think is truly necessary. Talk show hosts are spelling out the proper response to this allegedly existential threat:

[A]fter declaring that the Orlando massacre represented God’s judgment on America, Rick Wiles said that the U.S. government should “outlaw Islam” and “confiscate Muslims.”

“The left is calling for gun control What we need is Muslim control. We don’t need to confiscate guns, we need to confiscate Muslims. You’re not going to solve this problem until you round up the Muslims and ship them out of this country. End of discussion. Outlaw Islam. Make it an illegal religion. Don’t tell me it can’t be done. Pass a constitutional amendment that says we’re a Christian nation and Islam is illegal. Done. Get rid of it. Stamp it out before it destroys civilization.”

“Anyone who is a practicing Muslim is mentally ill,” he added, before claiming that the U.S. government is bringing terrorists into the country. “We’re all going to die, gay and straight, left and right, Republican and Democrat, we’re all going to die if we don’t get this stopped really soon.”

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State of the race

by digby

New ABC News/Washington Post poll:

Seven in 10 Americans see Donald Trump unfavorably in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, up 10 points in just the past month to a new high since he announced his candidacy for president. But Hillary Clinton reached a new high for unfavorability as well, 55 percent.

The results mark the striking challenges facing both candidates, cementing their position as the two most unpopular presumptive major party nominees for president in ABC News/Washington Post polling dating to 1984.

Trump’s result reverses a boost he received after securing the Republican presidential nomination, from 37-60 percent favorable-unfavorable in mid-May to 29-70 percent now, after a week in which he took sharp criticism for suggesting that he was being treated unfairly by a federal judge because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.Results among other groups also are telling. Trump’s rated favorably just by 65 percent of Republicans, Clinton by 75 percent among Democrats — neither monolithic in their home corner. Independents, often thought of as swing voters (though they don’t always perform that way) don’t like either — 68 percent see Trump negatively; a similar 63 percent, Clinton.

Trump’s challenge is deeper, though, in terms of strength of sentiment as well as absolute numbers. Just 15 percent of Americans see him “strongly” favorably, while a record-tying 56 percent see him strongly unfavorably – a 41-point negative gap in intensity of sentiment. Clinton’s comparable numbers are 25-39 percent, a 14-point gap.

Looking at registered voters doesn’t change the equation. Trump’s at 31-69 percent favorable-unfavorable in this group, while Clinton’s at 43-56 percent.

Groups

Notably, men overall are disenchanted with both candidates — a record 63 percent see Clinton unfavorably, while 62 percent say the same about Trump. Among women, by contrast, Trump is far more unpopular — 77 percent rate him unfavorably, a new high on his part, vs. Clinton’s 47 percent.

Even more striking is Trump’s unfavorability rating among racial and ethnic minorities — a virtually unanimous 94 percent of blacks see him negatively, as do 89 percent of Hispanics; that declines to 59 percent among whites. Clinton is more unpopular than Trump among whites — 68 percent see her unfavorably — but vastly more popular among nonwhites.

Indeed, their virtually even ratings among men conceal a sharp difference between white men, a much more pro-Trump and anti-Clinton group, and nonwhite men, the opposite, even more so.

Trump’s difficulties are further marked by the fact that he’s rated favorably by just 47 percent of conservatives. Clinton, for her part, is seen positively by 59 percent of liberals — but that means four in 10 in this key Democratic group rate her negatively.

Despite losing young voters to Bernie Sanders by vast margins, there are only minor differences in Clinton’s favorability rating among age groups. The bigger gap is for Trump, rated 15 points more unfavorably by those under 50 (76 percent) than by those 50+ (62 percent).

QOTD: Professor Trump

by digby

Here’s Professor Trump on Hannity last night sharing his vast sociological knowledge with the discerning Fox News audience:

Hannity: Here’s a big broader question. If you grow up under Sharia law, and as a man, you think you have the right to tell a woman how to dress, whether she can drive a car, whether she can go to school or whether she can go to work, and she would need four male eyewitnesses for rape — in some cases they don’t even believe in marital rape. The question is: if you grow up there, you want to come to American how do we vet somebody’s heart and ascertain if they’re coming here for freedom or if they want to proselytize, indoctrinate and bring the theocracy with them?

Trump: Assimilation has been very hard. It’s almost, I won’t say nonexistent, but it gets to be pretty close. And I’m talking about second and third generation. They come, they don’t — or some reason there’s no real assimilation.

Hannity: right …

Trump: And you see it all over the place, And, you know, what are we going to do? I’m not even talking about assimilation. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about there is a percentage of people that want to do what this maniac did in Orlando. There’s a percentage of people., That percentage becomes — the number of people become more and more as we take in thousands and thousands of more people. There’s a hate that’s going on that’s unbelievable, ok? Unbelievable. They don’t mind dying. There’s a hate that’s going on that’s unbelievable. And we allow it to happen.They use the the internet better than we do. ISIS is using the internet better than we do.

He seems smart.

If you have any doubts, read this.

*Hannity might want to rethink bringing up the marital rape thing. Just saying.

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Trump destroying his own terrain


by digby

I wrote about the implications of Trump’s latest lunacy on the presidential race for Salon today:

It’s distasteful to launch back into writing about polls and political strategies even as scores of people are still in the hospital recovering from injuries sustained in Sunday’s terrorist attack but there’s no help for it. The atrocity in Orlando has offered up such a stark choice between the two presumptive presidential candidates and their respective parties that the subject cannot be avoided. The political fallout from this event (and God forbid any similar events between now and November) may very well affect the outcome and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

I have long suspected that barring any intervening economic catastrophes, this would end up being a national security election. The reason for this was two-fold. First, the Republicans believed this would be the more fertile ground for them once again now that there was some distance from the Bush administration’s Iraq debacle and they clearly planned to run the campaign on those issues. And secondly, a woman was likely running for president for the first time and despite everyone’s assumption that she is some kind of bloodthirsty Boudica, the fact is that there were some good reasons to worry that Americans would turn to the traditional party and the traditional (male) candidate if national security came front and center. It was entirely predictable that the Republicans would play “the man card” if they could find an opening.

The two primaries unfolded on separate tracks with the Democrats staging their debate on the economic field and the Republicans staging theirs on the Donald Trump white nationalist field. There were three frightening terrorist attacks during that period, in Paris, Brussels and San Bernardino which all the GOP contenders used to portray the president and Clinton as feckless weaklings at best and terrorist conspirators at worst. But Donald Trump to it to another level by calling for the banning of all Muslims coming to the US and the deportation of Syrian refugees who are already here. As he went on to win the nomination, polls showed that a vast majority of Republicans agreed with Trump on those policies. The question since then has been whether or not the general public would respond to his primitive chest beating and whether they would reject Clinton as being too weak to keep the nation safe.

Since the Orlando massacre, there have been a number of journalists making the assumption that the attack would inevitably benefit Donald Trump. A Politico piece from yesterday, for instance, conveys the conventional wisdom, with the headline “Clinton braces for fight on Trump’s terrain:”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign knows a national conversation about terrorism will take place on Donald Trump’s terms. 

That’s why Clinton is matching the presumptive GOP nominee speech for speech, interview for interview and sound bite for sound bite in the wake of Sunday’s mass shooting in Orlando.
[…]
Trump already leads Clinton by 4 percentage points on the question of whom voters trust more to handle terrorism, according to Gallup. And many Democrats worry that his tough talk could resonate in the aftermath of a highly charged tragedy like Orlando.

That Gallup poll was taken before the attack. Yesterday’s Bloomberg numbersl show Clinton still with a disadvantage on the issue of terrorism despite taking a strong lead in the head-to-head matchup.

One might assume that women would be the ones to step up in this situation. After all, at this point close to two thirds say they could never vote for Trump. But this particular issue is complicated when it comes to women. Back in April of 2015 I analyzed an article by national security expert Heather Hurlburt in which she examined data about women voters’ attitudes about national security and it was somewhat alarming. She wrote:

Gender politics magnify the electoral effects of anxiety in two ways. First, in surveys and other studies, women consistently report higher levels of anxiety. In fact, women poll twice as anxious as men, largely independent of the specific topic. Women are more concerned about security, physical and economic, than men. According to Lake, Gotoff, and Ogren, women “across racial, educational, partisan, and ideological divides” have “heightened concerns” about terrorism. Those concerns make women “more security-conscious in general and more supportive of the military than they were in the past.”

Walmart-sponsored focus groups found women expressing a significant and steady level of anxiety over the months preceding the 2014 midterms. At one session, the explanation was Ebola; another, ISIS—whatever had most recently dominated cable-news headlines. The pollsters interpreted the responses as “emblematic of anxiety they feel regarding other issues, including national security, job security, and people ‘getting stuff they aren’t entitled to,’ such as health care and other government benefits.”

The majority of voters express equal confidence in men and women as leaders, but when national security is the issue, confidence in women’s leadership declines. In a Pew poll in January, 37 percent of the respondents said that men do better than women in dealing with national security, while 56 percent said gender makes no difference. That was an improvement from decades past, but sobering when compared to the 73 percent who say gender is irrelevant to leadership on economic issues.

I noted at the time that this would all depend upon the individuals involved but it showed that a national security campaign could cut in unexpected ways and that Clinton could be facing some headwinds even with Democratic women if that was the issue on which the election turned.

But as he has in every other way, Trump has scrambled the deck. His performance has been so ignorant and contemptible that it’s hard to believe that women who many be anxious about national security would be in any way consoled by the prospect of this cretinous know-nothing being in charge of ensuring the safety of our country. In fact, any anxious person listening to Donald Trump talk about terrorism would likely have an immediate panic attack.

It’s a political truism that “fear sells” which means that after a terrorist attack it might be expected to disadvantage the first woman candidate who also happens to be a Democrat, the party which has often been portrayed as weak on national security. But Donald Trump does nothing to assuage people’s fears — he does the opposite. He scares people in a more fundamental way, worrying them that he’s going to make a terrible error in judgment and endanger the nation in ways they don’t want to contemplate. According to the latest Fox poll, taken just before Orlando, Trump’s most debilitating weaknesses as a candidate are that virtually nobody believes he has the temperament and the mental stability to be president, a belief which he has thoroughly validated over the past few days.That same poll showed that a large majority of both parties believe Clinton does have the requisite knowledge and disposition to be commander in chief.

Many people may not want to have beers with either one of these candidates but they seem to be able to get past the usual reflexive assumptions about Republicans and Democrats. This may be the election that finally shakes the country out of the absurd notion that bellicose, right wing fear-mongering will keep Americans safe. It has always done the opposite.