President Barack Obama bends over so the son of a White House staff member can pat his head during a visit to the Oval Office May 8, 2009. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.
Progressives who are not policy wonks all seem to want to be.
It’s true, perhaps, that Barack Obama’s campaign oversold what his election would mean for the country. Some of the leftiest of the left now hold the man in near contempt for failing to fulfill their fantasies of a progressive nirvana.
Obama was not left enough for them. Too timid. Too tied to the financial industry. They could have done more in his shoes — would have done more — if they’d been sitting at the Resolute Desk.
Most of them are white.
Other white people (and one very spray-tanned one) had a very different idea of what Obama’s presdidency meant for the country. Many of them own revile immigrants and brown people. They own AR-15s and speak of civil war. Some do more than play soldier. Some attempted the overthrow of the government. Some commit mass murder. They want to take back their country. Their country. The people they want to take it back from look like Obama or supported him and what he represents.
Policy successes and failures aside, Obama’s election 40 years after Martin Luther King’s assassination represented an important milestone in the quest for a more inclusive union. Obama reflects this morning on that legacy.
Jacob Philadelphia was five years old when he visited the Oval Office and asked if his hair was like mine. That photo became one of our favorites – a reminder of the power of seeing yourself in your leaders.
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Republicans mean to wait out the public once again in the wake of the Buffalo mass shooting and Uvalde, Texas school massacre. To “now is not the time.” To shame anyone who asks the most human of questions: “how and why and who allowed this.” They will disparage anyone who demands they take action to deliver on the security for which taxpayers pay hundreds of billions each year including their salaries.
It took DNA tests to match bodies of 10-year-old victims with their parents. People asked if Emmett Till-style open caskets might finally flip the switch in the public mood from shock and grief flight to mad as hell and not going to take it anymore fight. Republicans are betting that shaming and waiting out the public until resignation sets in will work again. It has time and time again.
I’d be a fool to think this time things are different. But there are signs.
After a moment of silence for Uvalde victims ahead of an NBA game this week, the Miami Heat’s arena announcer added, “The Heat urges you to contact your state senators by calling 202-224-3121 (the crowd began cheering) to leave a message demanding their support for commonsense gun laws.”
There was more: “You can also make change at the ballot box. Visit heat dot com slash vote to register and let your voice be heard this fall.”
A moment of silence was held in FTX Arena for the victims of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas before Game 5 of Celtics-Heat.
The Associated Press has a list of statements by sports figures who used their celebrity to express shock and outrage. They can expect attacks from Republlican officials who want to nip that shit in the bud.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) attacked the Heat in multiple tweets for “politicizing a horrific tragedy” and tried to change the subject to the NBA’s business deals in China.
Note that some in the audience cheered the suggestion that lawmakers pass gun-safety measures. This might be what really got Rubio angry: A private business exercised speech that might successfully get people politically engaged in opposition to the Republican position.
[…]
What’s revealing is Rubio’s anger over the NBA’s political speech. In one sense, this is part of a broader trend: Republicans have escalated attacks on private companies and threatened legislative punishment to keep them in line on cultural issues.
Republicans themselves are quick to offer policy suggestions after mass shootings so long as they have nothing to do with staunchiung the blood or the supply of weapons. Republican candidates display weapons prominently in commercials as a cultural signifier to Real Americans™ that they are not liberal elitists. But the public, Sargent suggests, is finally catching on to the GOP game and sports figures are not as easy to wedge as un-American.
Should the spotrts world take up the issue, and should the GOP attempt to demagogue against athletes en masse, says sports podcaster Dave Zirin, “it will put Republicans in a position of having to defend the indefensible in front of an audience that might be more likely to listen to athletes than members of the Democratic Party.”
Also, the National Rifle Association has lost Lee freakin’ Greenwood, at least for this weekend.
Statement from Lee Greenwood, who was scheduled to perform in Houston this weekend: pic.twitter.com/MOLp18W0bV
Holding my breath on whether the tide is turning. Or if there is even a tide.
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It will be a tragedy if Raphael Warnock, a truly outstanding Senator, is replaced by this ignorant sports celebrity Donald Trump chose to replace him:
Herschel Walker, fresh off his Republican Senate primary victory in Georgia, appeared on Fox News. The interview began, “Herschel, you are so loved all over the country, but especially in the state of Georgia.”
Oddly enough, it got a little worse after that.
On Tuesday night, CNN’s Manu Raju asked the former football player, “Do you support any new gun laws in the wake of this Texas shooting?” Walker responded, “What I like to — what I like to do is see it and everything and stuff.”
This morning, the Republican candidate shared some additional thoughts on the subject. After reminding viewers that “Cain killed Abel” — I’m not entirely sure how that’s relevant — Walker added:
“What we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You know, they talk about doing a disinformation, what about getting a department that could look at young men that’s looking at women that looking at social media. What about doing that? Looking into things like that? If we can stop that that way?”
He proceeded to add some related garbled thoughts on mental health and the abandoned Homeland Security effort related to combatting foreign disinformation campaigns.
Keep in mind, this wasn’t a gotcha moment in which an aggressive journalist caught Walker off-guard with a difficult question on an obscure issue. It was two days ago when a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school. Over the course of 48 hours, this U.S. Senate candidate and his team had time to come up with his position on this life-or-death issue.
Walker then sat down with an overly friendly media outlet, and pitched creating a federal agency that would apparently be responsible for surveilling “young men that’s looking at women that looking at social media.”
My point, of course, is not to pick on someone who doesn’t appear to have any idea what he’s talking about. Walker expects to be a powerful federal policymaker next year. Scrutinizing his policy ideas, especially related to the nation’s most pressing issues, is an important part of the process.
When he moved to Georgia last year and became a Senate candidate, Walker effectively invited people to examine his record and his governing vision.
And as we do exactly that, it’s not going well.
If this were simply a matter of a candidate who struggles to communicate substantive ideas on camera, it’d be a certain kind of problem. But as we’ve discussed, Walker’s troubles run deeper.
Republican primary voters in Georgia were obviously unmoved by all of this — Walker defeated his next closest GOP primary rival by nearly 55 points — and polling suggest he will be a highly competitive general election candidate against Sen. Raphael Warnock in the fall.
Maybe once they realize what they are dealing with, some Independents and Republicans will decide to vote for Warnock or sit out the race in November. Faint hope, I know. But I really do hope for it and not just to stop Walker. Warnock is great:
A fourth grader who survived the mass shooting at Robb Elementary has shared gut-wrenching details about what he witnessed inside that classroom.
“He shot the next person’s door. We have a door in the middle. He opened it. He came in and he crouched a little bit and he said, he said, ‘It’s time to die,'” the boy recalled.
“When I heard the shooting through the door, I told my friend to hide under something so he won’t find us,” he said. “I was hiding hard. And I was telling my friend to not talk because he is going to hear us.”
The boy and four others hid under a table that had a tablecloth over it, which may have shielded them from the shooter’s view and saved their lives. The boy shared heartbreaking details about what happened in that room.
“When the cops came, the cop said: ‘Yell if you need help!’ And one of the persons in my class said ‘help.’ The guy overheard and he came in and shot her,” the boy said. “The cop barged into that classroom. The guy shot at the cop. And the cops started shooting.”
He said that once the shooting stopped, he came out from under the table.
“I just opened the curtain. And I just put my hand out,” he said. “I got out with my friend. I knew it was police. I saw the armor and the shield.”
They have not yet released the information about what went on in that classroom. But those who have heard about it are hinting broadly that it was a horrifying nightmare in there. This one account certainly suggests that it was.
The calculation behind Republicans’ steadfast opposition to any new gun regulations — even in the face of the kind of unthinkable massacre that occurred Tuesday at an elementary school in Texas — is a fairly simple one for Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota.
Asked Wednesday what the reaction would be from voters back home if he were to support any significant form of gun control, the first-term Republican had a straightforward answer: “Most would probably throw me out of office,” he said.
That guy is a cretin so he often blurts out the truth. His voters would throw him out of office. He’s a coward — and they are nihilist sociopaths.
His response helps explain why Republicans have resisted proposals such as the one for universal background checks for gun buyers, despite remarkably broad support from the public for such plans — support that can reach up to 90 percent nationwide in some cases.
The reality is that that 90 percent figure probably includes some Republicans who are open to new laws, but would not clamor for them or punish a lawmaker for failing to back them, and the 10 percent opposed reflect the sentiments of the G.O.P. base, which decides primary contests and is zealous in its devotion to gun rights.
Most Republicans in the Senate represent deeply conservative states where gun ownership is treated as a sacred privilege enshrined in the Constitution, a privilege not to be infringed upon no matter how much blood is spilled in classrooms and school hallways around the country.
“We don’t want to take away the rights of law-abiding citizens,” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican, explaining why members of his party have no interest in imposing new regulations on gun purchases, even after the murder of 19 children and two teachers, the latest in a seemingly unending series of shooting massacres in the United States.
It seems to me that law-abiding citizens ought to be willing to undergo background checks and only use guns that are not exclusively designed to mow down massive numbers of human beings. What kind of law-abiding citizen needs one of those? For fun? To show off to their friends? Why?
We know why. Many of these people are nihilists. After all, we just watched these same people refuse to wear masks and get vaccinated in the face of a deadly virus and now we have over a million dead which is hundreds of thousands more than needed to die. They are fine with massive gun violence because it makes them feel good to have weapons of war — for fun.
If these right wingers want to talk about mental health maybe they should take a look in the mirror.
Philip Bump talks about how the infuriating “don’t politicize this tragedy” bullshit from Republicans always works:
Consider the comments of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), speaking in Washington hours after the massacre in Uvalde.
“As sure as night follows day, you can bet there are going to be Democrat politicians looking to advance their own political agenda,” he said, “rather than to work to stop this kind of horrific violence and to keep everyone safe.” Democrats, in other words, want to politicize this.
“Politicize” can means lots of things. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting spree, Cruz tweeted his condolences to those affected. It’s a sort of politicization — politician expressing his condolences — to which no one would object.
On Wednesday, though, Cruz was making comments like this on television.
We have seen the face of evil.
The Senate needs to act by passing legislation to harden schools so this doesn’t happen again. pic.twitter.com/vUxNxxHHCo
Is this not a “politician looking to advance their own political agenda”? Why is this not “politicizing” the attack?
What often emerges at moments like this is a vague sort of “not yet”-ing generally applied to those who advocate for restrictions on the availability of firearms. That the time has not yet come for any such discussion, given that parents (or, more vaguely, “communities”) are still grieving. Sometimes, the proposed boundary is that the victims have not yet been buried, suggesting that discussion of politics wait until that’s happened.
The immediate intent of this chiding, obviously, is to cast the person raising the political issue as somehow morally deficient or unsympathetic to the victims. The broader intent is to let anger dissipate — something that happens very quickly.
Since 2010, there have been 77 mass shootings in which three or more people were shot and killed, according to data compiled by Mother Jones. It’s hard to gauge how long it takes for attention to fade after those incidents, but it appears to be about four or five days. That’s the average duration that cable-news networks spend an unusual amount of time talking about shootings in the wake of a major incident.
This is how that looks visually. (Each darker-purple block indicates that the cable network had more 15-second blocks mentioning “shooting” on a given day than its annual average for a day.) You can see that some shooting incidents led to longer periods of discussion.
There were between 16 and 19 shooting incidents in which the cable networks subsequently spent more than seven straight days talking about “shooting” more than normal. At least three-quarters of the time, the networks lost interest before then.
Presumably, so too did many Americans. If your goal is to keep people from transmuting their anger into political advocacy, insisting that your opponents muffle their rhetoric for a few days helps get you to that point.
The other challenge, of course, is that incidents in which multiple people are shot to death occur so frequently that there’s almost never a time in which no community in America is suffering from the aftermath. Data from the Gun Violence Archive shows that the longest stretch this year in which no place in America saw an incident in which at least two people were killed and two injured is nine days, ending on Jan. 18.
If the boundary is victims being buried, we’re always in a “don’t politicize” period. The massacre in Uvalde occurred before the victims of this month’s mass shooting in Buffalo had been buried.
Not all of the demands that tragedies not be politicized are offered in bad faith. Partisans often see their opponents’ concerns as invalid or insincere in ways that are not warranted. And, of course, there are hard-to-define ways in which boundaries of propriety might be crossed.
We should however recognize this demand for what it often is: itself an effort to politicize tragedy. Demanding that people not advocate their own responses to tragedy because it’s “politicizing” things is, itself, a political tactic. It is politicization, leveraging the suffering of those affected to bolster one’s own political position.
Using victims’ pain to deflect your opponents’ political goals is no different from using victims’ pain to advance your own.
Ted gets hot under the collar when confronted by a foreign reporter:
No matter how many die, it seems we can do nothing about guns
This analysis by Sarah Binder spells it out. I wish I was more optimistic that it will change any time soon:
Attention is fleeting
Roughly half of Americans favor stricter gun laws, including proposals such as banning assault weapons or creating a federal database to track gun sales. But support for tightening background checks is near universal: Overwhelming supermajorities of Democrats and Republicans support expanding background checks and preventing people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns.
But strong public support is not enough to force Congress to act. Intense media focus on the tragic deaths in Uvalde will soon fade. Economist Anthony Downs called this the “issue attention cycle”: A dramatic event like a shooting attracts reporters’ attention, provokes a great deal of coverage, and then fades from view when the news media move on to the next big event. What’s more, public pressure for change typically fades as well, letting opponents off the hook.
For lawmakers to harness public interest, Congress would need to act soon. But legislative time moves slowly. This time, legislators are due to leave town on Thursday for a 10-day Memorial Day break. House Democratic leaders announced lawmakers will vote on a “red flag” bill after their June 6 return to Washington — a measure that would empower family or law enforcement to temporarily prevent someone dangerous to others or themselves from securing firearms. In response, one House freshman urged the House to come back to vote this week.
To be sure, Congress could act in June. But the Uvalde tragedy will likely have slipped from the headlines, lessening public pressure to act.
The parties are intensely divided
Legislators used to be far less polarized on gun laws by party, with GOP voters supporting gun regulations at higher rates than they do today. Even as recently as 1993, a sliver of Senate Republican votes helped to pass a 10-year ban on semiautomatic weapons, which several Southern conservative Democrats opposed.
Today, parties take opposite stands on most gun policy proposals. True, four Republicans crossed the aisle in 2013 to support a compromise measure by Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.V.) and Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) to tighten up background checks. And Congress by bipartisan votes in 2018 bolstered state and federal reporting of criminal histories to a national background registry. But those are exceptions that prove the rule: There’s little common ground between the parties on most proposals.
Keep in mind that overwhelming public support for tightening gun laws is limited to just a few measures. Proposals like renewing the assault weapons ban attract over 80 percent of Democrats but barely a third of Republicans. And while two-thirds of Republicans want to arm teachers in secondary schools, just a quarter of Democrats agree. What’s more, gun owners — more likely to be Republicans than Democrats — are especially opposed to tightening gun laws and more likely to vote solely on this issue than gun-control supporters. Such activism stems in part from NRA tactics, whose political appeals for decades have aimed at cultivating its members’ identities as gun owners threatened by regulation.
Senate rules increase the power of GOP opposition to tightening gun policies. Absent 60 votes to end debate to advance or adopt a measure, Republicans can — and typically will — filibuster measures opposed by the NRA. Even near-universal public support for some gun regulations isn’t enough, at least so far, to overcome GOP fealty to organized opposition back home.
Send a message or write a law?
Democrats face a choice after Uvalde: Message or negotiate. The Senate majority often puts a matter to a floor vote to grab the media’s spotlight, send a message to voters, force senators to take a side and raise money for their campaigns. This time, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has put aside for now such “accountability” votes, saying, “This isn’t a case of the American people not knowing where their senators stand. They know.”
Instead, Schumer threw his backing to Democratic colleagues who prefer a law to a message. Democrats are certainly aware of the very long odds of securing 10 GOP votes for a compromise measure. And weeks could pass before negotiators even get to the bargaining table, by which time the media’s attention will surely have moved on.
But Democrats who have tried to improve background check rules in the past (such as Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Manchin) are eager to engage amenable Republicans to try again. Messaging first, Murphy acknowledged, would provoke a filibuster — putting any chance of negotiations out of reach.
Godspeed to Chris Murphy. But this is an election year and the Republicans are feeling their oats. They are not going to agree to anything. They’ll just keep vamping until the news cycle changes.
Shortly after hundreds of rioters at the Capitol started chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” on Jan. 6, 2021, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, left the dining room off the Oval Office, walked into his own office and told colleagues that President Donald J. Trump was complaining that the vice president was being whisked to safety.
Mr. Meadows, according to an account provided to the House committee investigating Jan. 6, then told the colleagues that Mr. Trump had said something to the effect of, maybe Mr. Pence should be hanged.
It is not clear what tone Mr. Trump was said to have used. But the reported remark was further evidence of how extreme the rupture between the president and his vice president had become, and of how Mr. Trump not only failed to take action to call off the rioters but appeared to identify with their sentiments about Mr. Pence — whom he had unsuccessfully pressured to block certification of the Electoral College results that day — as a reflection of his own frustration at being unable to reverse his loss.
The account of Mr. Trump’s comment was initially provided to the House committee by at least one witness, according to two people briefed on their work, as the panel develops a timeline of what the president was doing during the riot.
Another witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mr. Meadows who was present in his office when he recounted Mr. Trump’s remarks, was asked by the committee about the account and confirmed it, according to the people familiar with the panel’s work. It was not immediately clear how much detailed information Ms. Hutchinson provided. She has cooperated with the committee in three separate interviews after receiving a subpoena.
A lawyer for Mr. Meadows said he has “every reason to believe” that the account of what Mr. Meadows said “is untrue.”
Jimmy Kimmel tears up addressing Uvalde, Texas school massacre
“It’s crazy that Comedians are doing better jobs than some journalists,” tweeted U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego (R-Ariz.). Gallego on Tuesday hurledexpletives at Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for acting like Ted Cruz.
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The leaders of either party are not built for this moment
“Now is not the time to politicize pain and suffering,” Dade Phelan (R), House Speaker, said after Beto O’Rourke’s outburst in Uvalde, Texas on Wednesday. Nineteeen schoolchildren and two teachers died in the shooting rampage there Tuesday.
“I can’t believe you’re a sick son of a bitch who would come to a deal like this to make a political issue,” Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin yelled at O’Rourke.
But politics is their damned job. It is the job of most of the people on the platform at the press conference O’Rourke interrupted. Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, Phelan, and McLaughlin. All Republicans.
They are all paid by the taxpayers to do politics. As they sat there. Doing nothing, as O’Rourke got up and pointed out loudly.
“You are doing nothing,” O’Rourke said. “You said this was not predictable; this was totally predictable, and you choose not to do anything.”
Worse. What Texas did by loosening the state’s gun laws increased the threat of violence and death. There is a fair chance that the conservative U.S. Supreme Court could loosen gun laws further in a ruling on a pending New York case.
“We’ve all seen how quickly and creatively Texas—your local legislature—can act when it wants to, say, protect the unborn embryo. Why not act with that alacrity to protect living, breathing 10-year-olds in this school behind me?” CNN’s Alisyn Camerota asked Texas state Rep. James White as he stood outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
“We have this thing called the Constitution,” White responded pivoting from guns to mental health. Republicans have no answers, just empty talking points used to evade addressing the problem massacre after massacre.
https://youtu.be/LuOxN93ZriE
There were and will be calls for Democrats to do more, or at least something. Twitter lit up Wednesday night.
“Some people have trouble reconciling the virtually limitless powers American presidents wield over war and security with how important they are on most domestic policy,” began Slate’s Jordan Weissmann. Other reporters chimed in.
Pick a fight w/ anyone. SCOTUS. Abbott. McConnell. Most “do something-ism” is just a cry for Dem electeds to show they give a shit enough to not worry about “looking political” and authentically be pissed. Steve Kerr, Beto, Chris Murphy get it. 80 year olds running the party dont
Adam Jentleson (“Kill Switch,” former chief of staff to Nevada Sen. Harry Reid) responded to Fallon, “The leaders of our party are not built for this moment. They’re too old and too wedded to outdated ways. They still believe in institutions that failed long ago. They still beg Republicans to do the right thing, only to be humiliated again and again. We need generational change.”
Here is Sen. Chris Murphy, 48, Democrat of Connecticut.
Senator Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT): "The 14 kids dead in an elementary school in Texas right now. What are we doing? What are we doing? Just days after a shooter walked into a grocery store to gun down African American patrons we have another Sandy Hook on our hands." pic.twitter.com/IALrVON2mV
And here is Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, 71, bringing all the passion he can muster.
Jentleson is correct. Boat-rocking, coloring outside the lines is frowned upon once politics becomes your paycheck. National Democrats and most at the state level are operating from a playbook decades old and obsolete. Their political reflexes are gone. Thinking outside the box is virtually nonexistent.
There’s an “abused spouse” sense to how many Democrats approach interactions with the GOP. “Let’s not do anything to make father angry. You know how he gets.”
Who wants to elect that to lead them?
UPDATE:
Weak partisan, conflicted and low engagement voters admire decisiveness, for its own sake irrespective of the decision. There's a reason Bush declared "I'm the decider." /2
— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) May 26, 2022
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