NEW YORK TIMES POLITICAL REPORTER STILL SEES TRUMP AS REPUBLICAN DADDY

In The New York Times today, Trip Gabriel writes about possible demonstrations at the upcoming conventions and tells us that unrest at both gatherings could be excellent news for Donald Trump:

The potential impact on Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton as they formally enter the general election is asymmetrical.

In Cleveland, Mr. Trump -- who will be confronted by left-wing demonstrators, not fellow Republicans -- could potentially benefit from scenes of mayhem that allow him to call for law and order and project strength, as he did recently when opponents punched his supporters and burned their “Make America Great Again” hats in California. Street chaos, if it occurs, could overshadow disunion in the convention hall as an increasing array of party leaders nervously break ranks with Mr. Trump.

Democratic leaders are worried about emerging from their convention with an unmollified “Bernie or Bust” contingent whose protests could provide jarring split-screen images as the party seeks to rally around Mrs. Clinton.

Where to start with this?

First of all, I don't know why Gabriel assumes that all the unrest at the Republican convention will come from the left. A move to stop Trump at the convention seems to be gaining steam again, and let's not forget that Roger Stone was promising in a while back to lead "Stop the Steal" demonstrations if the convention threatened to be anything other than a Trump coronation. Stone also warned that he and his allies would reveal the hotel room numbers of stop-Trump delegates if Trump's nomination was in doubt.

But even if Gabriel is correct and all the unrest comes from the left, why would that "overshadow disunion in the convention hall"? That's not what happened to the Democrats in 1968. That year, America saw chaos outside the conventional hall and chaos inside, and the negative effect on perceptions of the Democrats was additive; the two didn't cancel each other out.

But what's most obnoxious about what Gabriel writes is the assertion that Trump could use demonstrations to "project strength" -- an option clearly not available to Hillary Clinton, in Gabriel's eyes.

I know that we all believe Republicans benefit from political unrest -- that's been the way of things at least since Nixon -- but it ought to be clear by now that Trump simply doesn't have it in him to shift into righteously-indignant-stern-father mode. He's not Nixon, he's not Reagan, he's not Giuliani. He's too adolescent (or maybe pre-adolescent). When there's unrest in his presence, he expresses glee -- he doesn't come off as Dad grabbing his belt so he can whup the perpetrators.

Remember, he didn't get a poll bounce from the Orlando massacre -- which isn't exactly comparable, but it did give him the opportunity to come off as the vengeful embodiment of morality. He just doesn't, except to his fans -- to the rest of America, he comes off as a giddy, insubordinate child. He seems to be part of the chaos, not the stern presence who's going to restore order.

Trump doesn't come off as a rule-enforcing Republican Dad. We need to stop assuming that old frame fits him.

NO, THE BROOKLYN VOTER PURGE WAS NOT A CONSPIRACY TO DEFEAT BERNIE SANDERS (updated)

WNYC, New York City's NPR affiliate, has analyzed the voter purge that preceded the presidential primaries here and found that Hispanic voters were disproportionately targeted:

Ever since New York State’s presidential primary in April, officials from the city Board of Elections have been trying to explain what led to two illegal voter purges that removed more than 120,000 voters from the rolls.

Board officials have said repeatedly that the purges were a mistake. The two top clerks at the Brooklyn office have been suspended without pay since shortly after the primary. Executive Director Michael Ryan announced earlier this month that the board would return all the purged voters to the rolls in time for Tuesday's congressional primary.

... Under the state Freedom of Information Law, WNYC obtained the list of every voter the board says was removed from the books in a major purge over two days last summer. When mapped by election district, our analysis shows that Hispanic voters were disproportionately purged from the rolls when compared to all other groups....

The concentrations of purged voters generally align with election districts where the majority of the population is Hispanic, based on the population of individual blocks that make up each election district in the 2010 Census.

In fact, 13.9 percent of voters in Hispanic-majority election districts were purged, compared to 8.7 percent of voters in all other election districts. That means voters in Hispanic-majority election districts were removed at a rate about 60 percent greater than everyone else.

WNYC also analyzed the purge list by surname and found that the surnames with the highest purge rates were Santiago, Soto, Vega, Rivera, Colon, Torres, Ortiz, Perez, Ramos, Cruz, and Gonzalez. (See the complete list at the link.)

The purge absolutely was unlawful:

No voter should have been removed from the rolls before that voter was first designated “inactive” - a classification strictly delineated by election law. A voter is classified as inactive only if the post office returns the annual notice, and then the voter does not participate in two subsequent federal elections. The board is only supposed to send an intent to cancel notice to voters who are already on the inactive list. The Brooklyn staff skipped the inactive voter step when it conducted the 2015 purge, Ryan has said.

But while it's not clear why the purge happened, it's preposterous to suggest that it was part of a sinister conspiracy to deny Bernie Sanders a victory in New York State.

Here's one version of that conspiracy theory:

... New York’s flagship public radio station, WNYC, reported that tens of thousand of registered Democrats had been purged from the voter rolls. The New York State Attorney General opened an investigation into how that could have happened, and Diane Haslett-Rudiano, a Brooklyn county clerk working at the New York City Board of Elections, was soon suspended without pay.

Some Sanders supporters quickly noticed something suspicious about Diane Haslett-Rudiano. This was not the first time she had been in the New York City press. A few years before, a real estate deal had made her a multimillionaire, when she sold a severely dilapidated apartment building in Manhattan’s Upper West Side for $6.6 million, despite having only bought it for $5,000 in 1976.

Curiously, the buyer in that deal was Dana Lowey Luttway -- the daughter of Nita Lowey, Democratic Congresswoman for New York’s 17th District, a strong ally of Hillary Clinton -- and a superdelegate to the upcoming convention in Philadelphia.

All this begged a rather unsettling question: Was that real estate deal for 118 West 76th Street, giving a massive windfall in exchange for a property that was described at the time as “an ol’ bag of rats,” really just a front for a payment to a well-situated election official, who could, when the time was ripe, rig the election for Lowey’s ally Hillary Clinton?

But that makes sense only if you think that pro-Clinton conspirators would purge voters in a pro-Clinton voting bloc. Exit polls revealed that Clinton won Hispanic voters in New York State by 28 points.



Yes, there was a poll just prior to the New York primary showing that Hispanic voters were split nationwide between Clinton and Sanders:

A poll released Thursday shows Latino registered voters are relatively divided between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as the New York primary looms.

Latinos voters were essentially divided 48 percent for Sanders and 47 percent for Clinton in the poll conducted March 30-April 3 by Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with The Atlantic.

But if you were going to carry out a sinister plot to purge voters in order to win an election, why would you purge them primarily from a voting bloc in which you were either leading or tied? Why not purge by age? (That exit poll says Sanders won 81% of 18-to-24-year-olds in the New York primary.) Why not purge voters in hipster neighborhoods? Why purge the Santiagos and the Colons?

Please, can we put this conspiracy theory to rest?

****

UPDATE, WEDNESDAY: WNYC posts a follow-up informing us that the purge affected almost exclusively voters over the age of 29. Here's part of a graphic at the link. On the left you see the percentage of Brooklyn voters who share each birth year. On the right you see the percentage in each birth year who were purged:



Go to the link to see the full chart. Voters of every age from 30 to 101 were more likely to be purged than voters under 30. (That's because voters 29 and under are much less likely to have gone from active to inactive over a period of years.)

If you were trying to screw Bernie Sanders out of a victory through skulduggery, this is the exact opposite of what you'd do.

THE ONLY THING MORE PATHETIC THAN THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN

The only thing more pathetic than the flat-broke, understaffed, internally squabbling Donald Trump campaign is the Republican Party, which theoretically still has an opportunity to dump him from the ticket, but won't, because anti-Trump forces will never agree on a replacement candidate, and party establishmentarians don't have the guts to stand up to Trumpite intimidation.

I understand that Ted Cruz has second-largest number of Republican delegates, and also loves infighting, which means that he'd put up a huge fight if a Dump Trump movement seemed inclined to go with any other substitute candidate. Well, fine -- in that case, the GOP should just suck it up and go with Cruz, even if much of the party hates him. He'll run on GOP issues, he'll do fundraising and campaign infrastructure building like a normal politician, and so it'll be a much more normal election. Yes, Trump will rant and rave, threaten to sue and threaten to run third party. But don't worry about the latter threat. If Trump doesn't have the infrastructure to run a fall campaign, why would he have the infrastructure to run ballot-access drives in dozens of states? He simply won't be able to do it.

And, no, he won't campaign for Hillary Clinton out of revenge -- he wouldn't embarrass himself by turning on a dime that way. And the worshipers from whom he's getting so much ego gratification now wouldn't follow him there.

As a Democrat, I'm happy knowing that the GOP probably can't get its act together to dump Trump and replace him with someone else. But the party should do it. You guys are crazy if you don't.

WILL BERNIE SANDERS BE #JUDAS SOON?

Here's a story from Massachusetts that I missed last week:

NORTHAMPTON -- Sen. Elizabeth Warren's endorsement of Hillary Clinton has sparked more backlash in Northampton -- this time in the form of roadside graffiti.

On Sunday, a small crowd of Bernie Sanders supporters dressed in black and demonstrated silently as Warren delivered a speech at the World War II club, in outrage over Warren's support for Clinton.

And now, graffiti reading "#JudasWarren Sellout" in large red letters marks a concrete structure on Route 5 just before the entrance to I-91.

The related tweets aren't subtle:

This is why @elizabethforma is now #JudasWarren and should take her 30 coins of silver and leave. #Turncoathttps://t.co/5bVbINyPv7

— Guccifer2.0=Hero (@BernBrigade) June 14, 2016

ALL BOW BEFORE YOUR QUEEN #unitebluefuckyou #judaswarren #anyonebuthillary #hillaryforprison #FBImWithHer https://t.co/j0rPY2XJJN

— flask ehrlenmeyer (@eflask) June 19, 2016

It's widely assumed that a Bernie Sanders endorsement of Clinton is inevitable, although it may take a while. But it seems to me that Sanders has to choose between endorsing Clinton and remaining the leader of his movement -- a significant percentage of his followers will simply declare him #JudasSanders immediately after he endorses, assuming he ever does.

That's one more reason I think he won't endorse, even if he mounts an anti-Trump campaign. I don't think the angriest Berners will accept even massive platform concessions as sufficient reason to make common cause with Clinton. Or it's possible that if he gets what he wants, even he'll start to feel that some of the purists are too pure, and he'll blow them off. We'll see.

COREY LEWANDOWSKI IS NOT GOING TO SCREW UP DONALD TRUMP'S NEXT EGO TRIP

I'm sure you already know this:

Donald J. Trump has fired his divisive campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski....

The loss of Mr. Lewandowski was intended as part of a larger shift toward the final sprint of the race, according to those briefed on the matter.

Mr. Trump had faced increasing concerns from allies and donors, as well as his children, about the next phase of the campaign....

The campaign manager was seen as having a hostile relationship with many members of the national press corps who cover Mr. Trump, and many officials at the Republican National Committee had strained relationships with him.

Charlie Pierce writes:

Somehow, I don't see Trump firing this guy because he was mean to the national press corps. I suspect some members of the extended Trump clan lined up against Lewandowski and that was the ballgame.

And that appears to be exactly what happened. NBC reports that Ivanka Trump has wanted Lewandowski out for some time, but only now has her father agreed:

Trump's children, especially Ivanka, have been unhappy with Lewandowski. She has been unnerved "for months," especially after Lewandowski was accused of physically assaulting female reporter, Michelle Fields. But Trump had remained loyal to his campaign manager.....

After Trump's drop in the polls, his children were able to make the case that Lewandowski was no longer fulfilling a need. Ivanka and his other children, Donald Jr. and Eric, attended the meeting Monday morning when Lewandowski was let go.

And according to CNN, there was one more issue:

Contributing to Ivanka Trump's recent dissatisfaction with Lewandowski were intensifying tensions between Lewandowski and Ivanka Trump's husband, Jared Kushner, an influential force behind the scenes. One source said rumors swirled that Lewandowski had attempted to plant negative stories in the press about Kushner -- a final straw for Ivanka Trump.

A threat to Kushner is also a threat to Donald Trump's next ego gratification scheme, if a story published last week by Vanity Fair is correct:

Trump is indeed considering creating his own media business, built on the audience that has supported him thus far in his bid to become the next president of the United States. According to several people briefed on the discussions, the presumptive Republican nominee is examining the opportunity presented by the “audience” currently supporting him. He has also discussed the possibility of launching a “mini-media conglomerate” outside of his existing TV-production business, Trump Productions LLC. He has, according to one of these people, enlisted the consultation of his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who owns the The New York Observer. Trump’s rationale, according to this person, is that, “win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.” For his part, Kushner was heard at a New York dinner party saying that “the people here don’t understand what I’m seeing. You go to these arenas and people go crazy for him.” ...

Trump, this person close to the matter suggests, has become irked by his ability to create revenue for other media organizations without being able to take a cut himself. Such a situation “brings him to the conclusion that he has the business acumen and the ratings for his own network.” Trump has “gotten the bug,” according to this person. “So now he wants to figure out if he can monetize it.”

... “Even old Fox News didn’t have the right read on what the base is,” one person briefed on the conversation told me. “And we do.”

Trump may be trying to right the campaign ship, and he may be trying to please his children, especially his daughter. But everything with Trump is about Trump. One reason he loves Ivanka and Jared is that they're on board with his ego trip -- the current one and possibly the next one.

TRUMP VS. GOP AS JUDEAN PEOPLE'S FRONT VS. PEOPLE'S FRONT OF JUDEA

Thank you, Aimai, Tom, and Yastreblyansky, for doing some amazing work here after I had to leave on very short notice. I really appreciate it.

Right now, I'm looking at yet another effort to try to prevent Donald Trump from being the Republican presidential nominee. This one has no famous names (no Romney, no Kristol) and apparently no million-dollar consultants, so it doesn't seem like either an ego trip or a scam:

Supporters of a growing anti-Donald Trump movement announced plans Sunday to raise money for staff and a possible legal defense fund as they asked new recruits to help spread the word with less than a month until the Republican National Convention.

Having started with just a few dozen delegates, organizers also said Sunday that they now count several hundred delegates and alternates as part of their campaign....

The group is led by delegates seeking to block Trump at the GOP convention next month in Cleveland by changing party rules so that they can vote however they want -- instead of in line with the results of state caucuses and primaries. It is quickly emerging as the most organized effort to stop Trump....

This comes at a time when Trump's poll numbers vs. Hillary Clinton are plummeting:



There are many complaints that Trump has squandered the opportunity to turn his sights on Hillary Clinton in the weeks since he became the presumptive nominee. But Trump thinks he's doing the right thing -- outraging people, spouting off like a Free Republic thread in human form, garnering free media. So he doesn't really have a campaign infrastructure and he hasn't raised much money? Hey, that worked for him in the primaries!

But that's the problem for Trump: He can't figure out how to beat Clinton, but he doesn't understand that because it was relatively easy for him to beat the GOP establishment. And the campaign and movement he's built are still very effective at defeating, or at least intimidating, the GOP establishment. Let's go back to that article about the Republican delegate revolt:

Some [anti-Trump delegates] reached out on the condition of anonymity, saying that spouses are fearful of physical threats if they speak out publicly about their plans....

A delegate from Colorado supporting the campaign ... spoke by email and on the condition of anonymity because he said he's already being harassed by other Republicans and is concerned for his safety.

I'm not endorsing intimidation tactics, but if they're the Trumpites' best weapon, I can't help noticing that they're still being used only against fellow Republicans. As we pivot to the general election, you might imagine that there'd be attempts to intimidate Democrats and independents into supporting Trump -- that's what a truly determined fascist movement would do -- but as far as I know, no non-Republicans are being scared into posting Trump yard signs and enthusiastically attending Trump rallies. It seems as if Trumpite Republicans are just turning their rage on their own kind. The Judean People's Front hates the People's Front of Judea -- oh yeah, and the Romans, I guess.

I still think we shouldn't be complacent about Trump, given the fact that the public isn't wild about Hillary Clinton, either. But some of the excessive intramural anger I'm seeing on the Democratic side is surfacing again over in the GOP. I don't think that will dissipate until the convention is over -- if then.

And no, I don't think the #NeverTrumpers will beat Trump at the convention. They still don't have a candidate. The person who probably has the most anti-Trump delegates is the widely loathed Ted Cruz. Trump's going to win at the convention, I think, because there still isn't anyone else who can put together a winning campaign.

I smell a rat. Do you smell a ship?

I didn't want to duplicate Tom's post on the Dowd column, but time and Twitter provided a couple of additional punch lines, so...

Does this Rattus rattus creeping down the guy rope have a hint of red hair? (Can't get a good credit for the image.)

So Dowd's reconsidering her relationship, or whatever it is, with the Trump:

HE won’t pivot. So I have to.

Time was, she was certain Trump wasn't the apotheosis of evil:

Having seen Donald Trump as a braggadocious but benign celebrity in New York for decades, I did not regard him as the apotheosis of evil.

That's right, benign. Now she's not so sure. Maybe he is the apotheosis of evil. We just don't know. Who can say? Maureen's never been wrong before.

I certainly never would have predicted that the Trump name would be uttered in the same breath as Hitler, Mussolini and scary menace, even on such pop culture staples as “The Bachelorette.”

The Bachelorette brouhaha also involved a sweet potato. And George Bush. Dan told Chad hanging out with him (Chad) would be dangerous for his (Dan's) reputation, in the same way as hanging out with Hitler, Mussolini, Trump, or Bush.

This is not stuff I'm familiar with, I got it from the Washington Post. Maureen didn't mention the Bush part. Chad has absolutely volunteered for Trump's vice presidential short list, but I don't know if Trump has responded.

Maureen was not discouraged when Trump "jumped into the race with an explosion of bigotry," because hey, "privately, he assured people that these were merely opening bids in the negotiation." He would presumably work his way down to paroxysms of bigotry, blasts or bursts, eventually nothing but the occasional pop or flare.

Incidentally I've always wondered about that aspect of Trump's Art of the Deal, the way he makes some outrageous proposal and then explains that it's just his opening bid. When he says he's going to slap China with a 45% tariff on whatever product it is, and the experts tell him that this would be a bad thing, and he tells them not to worry because that's merely his opening bid in the negotiation, does he or does he not realize that he is tipping off his whole strategy? Does he not know they have television in China, or people who know English? Now when President Trump tells China he's going to put the duties up to 45% they're going to laugh in his face. "No you are not, Chump Trump. You cannot bluff the Chinese people, who are up to your silly tricks. Sad!"

But then Maureen wasn't worried about that kind of thing. She couldn't help admiring how original and sharp he was on policy issues, and capable of coming up at least once in a while with a positive move:

He has made some fair points. A lot of our allies do take advantage of us. Our trade deals have left swaths of America devastated. And it was a positive move to propose a meeting with the N.R.A. on gun control for people on the terrorist watch list.

Well, he came up with one on Wednesday. And the racism had its good side, too, in the provision of teachable moments:

His obnoxious use of ethnicity only exposed the fact that Republicans had been using bigotry against minorities and gays to whip up voters for decades. 

I mean who wouldn't want to vote for somebody who exposed the Republican use of bigotry? You wouldn't? Just because he's a bigot himself? Isn't that kind of small-minded? I mean he's performing a valuable public service here.

Trump, the Lovable Scamp...Or NOT???

Maureen Dowd, today:

Having seen Donald Trump as a braggadocious but benign celebrity in New York for decades, I did not regard him as the apotheosis of evil.

Yes, he always seemed benign.

When an African American showed up to rent an apartment owned by a young real-estate scion named Donald Trump and his family, the building superintendent did what he claimed he’d been told to do. He allegedly attached a separate sheet of paper to the application, marked with the letter “C.”

“C” for “Colored.”

According to the Department of Justice, that was the crude code that ensured the rental would be denied.

Details of this secret system, as well as other practices that the Trump organization allegedly used to exclude black residents from its buildings in Brooklyn, Queens, and Norfolk, Virginia, in the 1970s, were recorded in a lawsuit brought by the DOJ against Trump and his father, Fred, in 1973 for alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act.

Totally benign.

Yusef Salaam was 15 years old when Donald Trump demanded his execution for a crime he did not commit.

Nearly three decades before the rambunctious billionaire began his run for president – before he called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, for the expulsion of all undocumented migrants, before he branded Mexicans as “rapists” and was accused of mocking the disabled – Trump called for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York following a horrific rape case in which five teenagers were wrongly convicted....

Michael Warren, the veteran New York civil rights lawyer who would later come to represent the Central Park Five, is certain that Trump’s advertisements played a role in securing conviction.

“He poisoned the minds of many people who lived in New York and who, rightfully, had a natural affinity for the victim,” said Warren. “Notwithstanding the jurors’ assertions that they could be fair and impartial, some of them or their families, who naturally have influence, had to be affected by the inflammatory rhetoric in the ads.”

Benign like you wouldn't believe.

During Donald Trump’s 1992 divorce proceedings, his wife provided a deposition that detailed an upsetting, ugly sexual assault.

We rejoin Dowd's column just in time for its shattering conclusion:

Now Trump’s own behavior is casting serious doubt on whether he’s qualified to be president.

In related news, Dowd is rethinking her initial positive impression of ISIS.

The Dogs Bark, But the Caravan Moves On

I really just felt like using this as a blog headline. I also considered

"There is a Tide..."  and "Bernie Or Bluster." I was really hoping to be able to use "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it..." but, alas, he won't go.

His dead enders are still squalling around in the dkos diaries explaining to everyone how Bernie's genius plan is receiving plaudits and accolades from President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer (they have put a ban on mentioning Raul Grijalva and Elizabeth Warren who have become unpersons. Much the same way Hillary Clinton's actual name and status were treated as if she were Voldemort by Bernie himself). The obvious fact that the Democratic Party is regarding Bernie like the crying tantruming toddler at someone else's birthday, who must be offered the first piece of cake and an extra present just for showing up, is apparently beyond them.  But the entire discussion of political strategy and tactics in this election, if Bernie comes up,  has devolved into the kind of analysis and fatuous teen snark that enables the same people to tell you Hillary Clinton is a corporate whore of a war monger and also that she is a skilled and gracious politician whose lead should be followed by her voters because she has recognized Bernie's superior power, worth, and historical importance.  Some poor, innocent, soul put up Hillary Clinton's 2008 concession speech to Obama, with a few words changed so it could have been Bernie speaking, and his fervent fans swarmed it attacking the guy for having the temerity to suggest that Bernie would ever have any need to be gracious, that no person would ever have given such a speech, that Bernie's world historic run means he is above and outside the normal rules of good sportsmanship or campaigning.  The teenage snark part comes in when several Bernie supporters swarm the comments to chant "if she's won why are you still talking about him???"

Really the best comment on what is going on was written by some Clinton supporter with a long history with environmental groups. Unfortunately I can't locate it but he or she pointed out that the politics of the environmental groups can be split into those who followed the philosophy of Rachel Carson (we all want basically the same good things for each other and the planet and we need to make coalitions to get what we want together) and the Edward Abbey-niks who organized around the principle that most people were lazy, apathetic, ill informed, or indifferent and that environmental protection would happen only when a committed, aggressive, revolutionary band made it happen.  I'm paraphrasing, of course.  I think its obvious that the Bernie people, at least the most noisy of them, fall into the Abbey style of politics.  People from these two wings of political thought just can't really do politics together. For the Carson-ites/Hillary people, politics is about creating coalitions, discovering people's needs, working short term and long term to satisfy those needs while the Abbey/Bernie people are about big visions, large society wide changes, little attention to detail, no coalition building and no deviation from the original vision.  Hillary people prize winning and governing, Bernie people prize being right and staying on message, whatever real world events interfere. What strikes me about the Bernie people and their attitude towards the electorate is that they are simultaneously elitist and pseudo populist--they represent themselves, to themselves as being by and for "the people" but when the people reject them as they have in this primary, the people are found wanting and need to be dissolved. **

In the short and long run I don't think Bernie matters very much.  Sad to say because I am extremely progressive, myself, and I love the idea of an out and proud progressive Democratic Party, pursuing dominance in all fifty states.  But Bernie didn't have a clue how to make that happen--he's a visionary curmudgeon not a hard worker, down in the weeds, paragon of organizing.  Even his latest attempt at revolutionary relevance is nothing more than a rehash of Dean's 50 state strategy with added griftiness.  Is he fundraising off this page and off this gesture?

Bernie is announcing that he managed the incredible feat of putting up a web page that enables his supporters to click "I will run for office" or "I will volunteer" and he got 6,700 people to click a button.  This is all of a piece with earlier revolutionary acts by his supporters like "liking" Bernie's facebook page and keeping tabs on how many more likes they had than Hillary's facebook page. So who are these 6,700 people and what did they really "sign up" to do? Because if its 100 people in 67 college towns, all proposing to run for the same offices, they rather cancel each other out.  Don't get me wrong--I think its critically important that progressives commit to running for office, support each other, and build a better Democratic Party from the inside out.  But I don't think Bernie's "new" Congressional initiative is going to be the way it happens because I just don't think Bernie or his team can herd their own cats.  (I give Bernie and his team props for running a very successful campaign, but history is littered with pretty good campaigners and their teams, just as the cemeteries are full of indispensable men).

Bernie doesn't matter--or won't by the time the convention rolls around, because he sold the most excitable and unreliable and least informed voters in the country--young people--a bill of goods. He taught them that passion mattered more than strategy, that long distance goals were more important than short term goals, that attacking your allies and co-workers was a viable way to build alliances, that intensity matters more than numbers, that people who don't agree with you on tactics are identical to enemies who don't agree with you at all, that everyone but Bernie is corrupt and deceitful, and that ideological rigidity and boorish behavior is the same as honorable authenticity.  Its being reported that as we head into the convention Democratic voters are "coming home" to Hillary and that Bernie's own delegates are no-showing at the meetings where they would be helped to get housing and information about the convention.  If the rest of Bernie's campaign is any indication Bernie himself probably doesn't have the slightest idea how many of his troops will follow him into battle at the convention.  I wouldn't be surprised if Bernie ends up not showing up, for one specious reason or another, and if he doesn't his delegates won't either.  The purity pouting will be epic, biblical, and if his online supporters are any indication of the generally spiteful attitude towards the Democratic Party if Bernie sulks at home so will his delegates.  Its all of a piece with the "you'll miss me when I'm gone!" arguments the Bernie/Jill Stein wing has been making.


**The strong conviction that the Bernie voters (at least on Kos) have that they are both identical with "the people" and embattled against the people who actually voted, in a landslide, for Hillary Clinton, is what makes them simultaneously mawkish and aggressive.  They are, as I've observed elsewhere, perfect examples of Fred Clark's "persecuted hegemon."  They see themselves as a majority, or at least a majority of righteousness, and simultaneously as persecuted, misunderstood, and vulnerable.  Once you recognize that this is how they understand their position in US society and the Democratic primary everything that they do and say as they follow Bernie down the garden path makes sense. Especially their viciousness against Hillary and her voters.

Cross Posted at I Spy With My Little Eye

West of Eden: Dissent in the State Department

I more or less support President Obama's Syria policy as it is (with a reservation I'll get to below), but there's something I want to say about its critics, including the 50-odd US diplomats who have been circulating the internal cable that was leaked to the WSJ and the Times for today's papers,

urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s five-year-old civil war.

I want to say that I may disagree with them, but they're not bad people. I mean, some of the critics are bad people (hi, Senator McCain, hi, Ron Fournier), whose aims are not to help the suffering people of Syria, about whom they understand nothing, but to further their own misbegotten careers by picking at the president's perceived weakness in any way they can, to make themselves look larger, but some of them, possibly most, are good people responding to a terrible situation in a totally understandable way. (Including candidate Hillary Clinton, who I think is at least somewhat on the State rebels' side.)

Because the Assad regime is a truly dreadful, murderous and criminal, cruel and unusual, wicked operation. It kills far more civilians than any other party in the multilateral civil war. It imprisons citizens seen as dissenters and tortures them on a massive scale that is extremely well documented. It starves them to death and suffocates them. It interrogates them relentlessly though they have nothing to confess. It prevents them from bathing and keeps the hot cells unventilated. Its doctors extract prisoners' vital organs from them without anesthetic.

Outside the prisons, health and education systems are in a state of collapse. The government does nothing for them, but destroys whole neighborhoods including the women and children with barrel bombs. It keeps cities under siege and prevents humanitarian organizations from bringing in food supplies. Probably over half of the prewar population of 23 million has now been driven into homelessness, 6.6 million inside the country and 6.6 million outside (the number of registered international refugees is 4.8 million, mostly in terrible conditions in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan).

And it is very much the fault of the United States, because the United States created the chaos in western Iraq and eastern Syria that collided with the Syrian version of the Arab Spring, bringing in Iranian and Lebanese and ultimately Russian support for the regime, without which Assad would hardly have been able to survive (it needs to be understood that the Russian government absolutely sees itself as threatened by the Salafists in Syria and their connections with violent Islamist movements in the Russian Caucasus).

It is not unreasonable for Americans to want to do something about this, by military means if that's what it takes. It is not "neoconservative", or aimed at preserving a unipolar world order, and it is not "hawkish" in the sense of seizing on military solutions where diplomatic solutions are available; the proposals, for limited airstrikes on regime military targets, are meant to "pressure" the regime toward a diplomatic solution, not to replace the diplomacy.

What's wrong with it, as President Obama has understood, is just that it has no chance of making the situation better, and a strong chance of making it worse. In the almost inconceivable best case, that they somehow succeed in making Assad stand down instead of just making him still more murderously defensive, there's literally nobody to take over—I don't mean to take over the presidency, I mean the entire civil service and medical and educational establishments; every capable person who's not a criminal is a refugee, as they were saying on NPR this morning.

Wishing the US military could do something about it isn't a crime. It's Stupid Shit, but it's well meant. Please try to remember that.

There are two things I think the US could do, though it won't:

• it could accept not 10,000 refugees but something like two million, toward the specific goal of depopulating Syria entirely and making it unviable, leaving Assad and Isis and the Nusra Front with nobody to govern (I've been saying this for years); and
• it could join the International Criminal Court to help in preparing the case against Assad.

The reason we won't do these things is American "exceptionalism"—that we can't accept the risk that one single terrorist might show up in the batch, though we don't mind letting Turkey and Jordan and Lebanon have them, because they're just ordinary, unexceptional countries, and that we can't accept the risk that one of our own war criminals might get charged. We're so special we just can't be expected to put up with that. But we'd be delighted to oblige by killing some more of your people if you think that would help.

These are the ways the US could demonstrate that it's not evil. "Sending a signal", you know. Short of that, I''m afraid what we're already doing is the best we can.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Jo Cox

Photo from the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, via The Guardian.

I can't deal with this story coming out of England, where Jo Cox, Labour MP for Batley and Spen (up in West Yorkshire, near Leeds), was stabbed and shot by a "quiet and polite" middle-aged white man (apparently not so quiet and polite in his Web presence, where he is linked to white supremacists) in the street this morning, as she was coming out of a constituent services session, and has since died of her injuries. The man is said to have shouted "Britain first!" reminding us of course of our Donald, who has adopted the pro-Nazi "America first!" slogan of ca. 1940, though he may be too insistently pig-ignorant to realize that, but Britain First is the name of a political party of sorts (which has said it is "not involved" with the murder), compounded of anti-abortion agitators, Ulster Unionists, and anti-Muslim rowdies, which is probably worse than the Ukip (which is not explicitly anti-Muslim; but Britain First urges its supporters to vote Ukip all the same), as passions rise over the coming referendum over Britain's membership in the European Union. 

She was 41 years old and had two little kids. David Cameron, her opponent (but an ally on the EU question, of course), mentioned her "huge compassion".

I'm feeling as if it's our disease, not because of the violent nationalism, which is as English as lemon curd, as you might say, but because of that gun. But the gun is being described as "an old gun, like a musket." No, of course it's really not about us. But it is about the curse of nationalism. Humans First!

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

The Perfect Is the Enemy of Humanity

In the course of smacking down Freddie deBoer's¹ latest nihilist manifesto, Scott Lemieux provides some historical perspective that should be tattooed backwards on the forehead of every progressive who is ever tempted to vote third-party in a presidential election because the Democratic candidate isn't pure enough, so they have to read it every time they look in the mirror:

Three presidents can be plausibly said to have greater records of progressive accomplishment than Barack Obama: LBJ, FDR, and Lincoln. Were these men, as deBoer suggests they must be, consistent left-wing ideologues, men who were committed to consistent left principles who did not concern themselves with practical politics and never had to be “pushed” from the left? Er, no. Good God, no. They were practical men. They were not ideologically consistent. They had progressive records in large part because of the organized pressures from the left placed on them. Lyndon Johnson had a voting record in the Senate that makes Hillary Clinton look like a Wobbly. Did civil rights and labor groups follow deBoer’s advice, refuse to work with him and support him, and seek to throw the election to Goldwater in the hopes that a REAL ally could eventually control the White House? No, they did not, because they understand politics as deBoer does not. And the result was arguably the most progressive domestic policy presidency ever. The Emancipation Proclamation was a compromise motivated in large measure by political expediency. So what? Who wants political leaders who disdain politics, who aren’t responsive to their constituents....

Voting for Johnson, as we’ve discussed, was a classic “lesser evil” vote in the sense that he means it. So was FDR, given the many compromises the New Deal had to make with the white supremacist faction of the party. So was Lincoln, an incrementalist on an issue of the utmost moral urgency. Major progressive reforms are almost always the result of lesser-evil voting and coalition-building, and are virtually never the result of dramatic flounces out of the coalition, as the same-sex marriage movement shows.

Okay, so maybe it would have to be tattooed in a very small font. I'm a big-picture guy; don't bother me with the details.


¹Is Freddie deBoer the most odious purity troll in all of human history, or only the most odious since the French Revolution? You decide.

The least racist person (shorter)

Monday over at my place I wrote a lengthy "investigative" piece on the question of whether the boxing promoter Don King had or hadn't endorsed the presidential candidacy of Mr. Trump, as if anybody cared; it was a lot of fun to write, and maybe fun to read, but I felt it was too long and too silly to post here.

At the end, though, there were a few paragraphs on an important question: How is it that when somebody says, "I am the least racist person that you've ever encountered," you know that person is a racist? Yesterday a commenter kindly wrote to express the wish that I had run it as an independent post, so I'm adapting it for you all.

The passage was roused by Trump, obviously, and an unexpected confluence with the NPR philosophical interview program, "On Being", which I listen to (as long as I can stay awake, which is not the show's fault) very early on Sunday mornings. Last Sunday it featured the social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, and was extremely worth hearing. (I mean you should listen to it, really.)

Banaji's research concerns what we used to call "unconscious bias", for which the term of art is now "implicit bias", the tendency that seems to be baked into the developing human brain to discriminate, in assessing other people, on the basis of identity factors like gender or skin color, at a level below our threshold of awareness; first on the basis of preferring what's more like ourselves, and then on the basis of what's culturally presented as the norm—like the people we see in TV advertisements.

We all have heard a little bit about this work, I imagine, but I'd never heard it presented with so much depth and warmth as Banaji gave it, and it was very stimulating. And since everything is about Trump these days, it made me think about that "I am not a racist" line.

Everybody is, in a very precise sense, a racist and a sexist. It's not how we think, it's how we process when we're not particularly thinking, or beneath the thinking, invisible. It's not a bad thing, in that precise sense, it's just who we are and how we evolved as a species, but it's very inappropriate for the communities into which we've evolved over the past hundred thousand years, and it's a problem to be overcome.

People need to work to overcome their implicit bias. Kids need to spend time in proximity with kids who are different so that they can learn how superficial the differences are, adults need to ask themselves all the time, "Am I doing this? Am I favoring person A over person B for reasons I'd be ashamed of if I were aware of them?" Trying to teach ourselves to use inclusive language, what the wingers call "political correctness", is important too.

Somebody who's doing the necessary work of not being a racist never says, "I am not a racist," because they know how much work it is. This has always been true since people started talking about it (I think the conversation goes back to the 1970s, when Eta Schneiderman was studying biases of children in Welland, Ontario toward French-speaking vs. English-speaking puppets), and it's truer than ever now that so much of the research is in. It's not our fault! But just as it's not natural to delay eating that marshmallow, or to say "please" and "thank you", it's not natural to control our implicit biases. Rodgers and Hammerstein ("It's got to be carefully taught") were wrong, unfortunately. It's un-teaching it that has to be done with special care.

The corollary is that somebody who does say "I am not a racist" is somebody who hasn't tried at all; obviously not an open KKK racist, but somebody who hasn't started doing the work and doesn't know that work is required. And somebody like the Trump, who compares himself favorably on this score to everybody in the world (by which he clearly means the white men in his social circle, not realizing that anybody else in the world has an actual point of view, and he's even wrong about those people, of course), is in deep denial. As well as being the fatuous idiot you always thought he was.

That's what I wanted to say.

The Judgment of Solomon

The Judgment of Solomon

As a party, or at least as people who talk about politics online, we keep going around and around on the same terms.  When we vote, what are we voting for? A candidate? A dream? A program? A party? The future? The lesser of two evils?  Because Bernie and his fans are still arguing over this and refusing to concede and throw their votes to the presumptive nominee,  we have to argue it too.  We find ourselves drawn back, again and again, to what I think are really stupid assertions about Bernie--that he is authentic, that he came from behind, that he is unique because he's an avowed atheist and socialist, that he excites younger voters, that he draws some independents, that a bird landed on his podium.  I would submit that none of that matters.  In fact, it matters so little I'm going to throw out paragraphs discussing it. Because what kind of a candidate Bernie was, and what his voters thought about him, is utterly irrelevant at this point.  Bernie has only one choice about this campaign left--how does he leave it? With honor, or with shame? With generosity, as a team player,  or as a crabbed, pinched, old man.  Embracing the country, including the millions of people who voted for Hillary Clinton over himself, or rejecting those voters, specifically women and AA voters, as unimportant?

It all boils down to this and only this: there is only one race for the Presidency of one country, and Hillary Clinton is going to be the Nominee and she is going to fight the battle against Donald Trump. Bernie has only one choice in this election, just as his supporters have only one choice. And it is basically this:

Then came there two women, that were harlots, unto the king, and stood before him.
17 And the one woman said, O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house; and I was delivered of a child with her in the house.
18 And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also: and we were together; there was no stranger with us in the house, save we two in the house.
19 And this woman's child died in the night; because she overlaid it.
20 And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me, while thine handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom.
21 And when I rose in the morning to give my child suck, behold, it was dead: but when I had considered it in the morning, behold, it was not my son, which I did bear.
22 And the other woman said, Nay; but the living is my son, and the dead is thy son. And this said, No; but the dead is thy son, and the living is my son. Thus they spake before the king.
23 Then said the king, The one saith, This is my son that liveth, and thy son is the dead: and the other saith, Nay; but thy son is the dead, and my son is the living.
24 And the king said, Bring me a sword. And they brought a sword before the king.
25 And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other.
26 Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it.
27 Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof.

--which of these two women is most like your candidate? Which candidate is willing, and has shown herself willing in the past, to put aside her interests (and her supporter's hopes) and throw herself 100 percent behind the nominee of the party, to win the election for the good of the country? The fact that Bernie has still not publicly conceded and backed the presumptive nominee tells you all you need to know. The fact that he is still bargaining for what he thinks of as goodies while the rest of the country is gearing up to fight the battle tells you all that you need to know.  Bernie is incapable of renouncing anything, even something as absurdly beside the point as his new found obsession for open primaries,   for the good of the country.   This is exactly why he lost and why, over time, his influence will be negligible.  Because people can see, for themselves, that in a time of national crisis, when faced with the horrors of a potential Trump administration, he chose his own ego and the adulation of his fans.

-

Can't You See This Is All About Me?

A commenter on aimai's excellent post had this to say:

You have learned absolutely nothing about the Sanders campaign/movement. It has always stood for something more than the man. Always.

Okay. So let's take a look at Bernie's demands:

Sen. Bernie Sanders called Tuesday for a “fundamental transformation” of the Democratic Party that would include new leadership at the Democratic National Committee, electoral reform and a progressive agenda....

Sanders also called for open primaries -- in which independents could vote for Democratic candidates -- and for doing away with superdelegates, the party officials and leaders who are free to vote for the candidate of their choice at the convention. And he argued for same-day voter registration. [emphasis added]

So Bernie's conditions for helping stop the most dangerous major-party nominee since the Civil War are a) getting rid of a party chair he has a grudge against, b) changing the process in ways that would have helped his campaign, and c) adopting his positions and making his issues the highest priority.

But it's not about him.

Keep in mind that there is nothing at all principled about his 'electoral reforms'. If this were about principle--about making the process more democratic--he would call for eliminating caucuses, the most egregious form of voter suppression in the whole primary system. Open primaries are more likely to favor moderate-to-conservative Democrats in future elections--especially if they're in states where the GOP primary is closed. Same-day registration is a good idea on the merits, and diminishing the role of superdelegates might be, but that's not why Sanders is supporting them; he's supporting them in order to retroactively validate his own campaign.

You could say his call for a "progressive agenda" isn't all about him (though it does seem to assume his role as arbiter of all things "progressive", as opposed to give-and-take about how best to achieve progressive ends), but every other demand is all about him and his campaign.

As I said before, I think he'll ultimately be irrelevant. But it is galling that, thinking himself irrelevant, he would threaten the whole anti-Trump effort for nothing more than his own ego.

Brass Balls, Huge Ego. No, Not Trump.

From the NYT: 

Two advisers to Mr. Sanders said he thought Mrs. Clinton had said many of the right things at the meeting, but described him as concerned that she might embrace more politically moderate positions later if she thinks it necessary to win states like Florida, Ohio and Virginia.
The advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the campaign had not authorized them to speak, said Mr. Sanders felt no pressure to endorse Mrs. Clinton quickly. And he has leverage: He accrued about 12 million votes and nearly 1,900 delegates, and in a New York Times/CBS News poll last month, 28 percent of his supporters said they would not vote for Mrs. Clinton if she was the Democratic nominee. Mrs. Clinton picked up nearly 16 million votes and 2,800 delegates.

From a different version of the NYT story published by Liepar Destin at DailyKos:

Two advisers to Mr. Sanders described him as concerned that Mrs. Clinton might say all the right things now but embrace more politically moderate positions later if she thinks it necessary to win states like Florida, Ohio and Virginia.
The advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the campaign had not authorized them to speak, said Mr. Sanders felt no pressure to endorse Mrs. Clinton quickly. He wants her to take steps to win his confidence in the five and a half weeks before the Democratic convention, where his voters and delegates expect him to speak and Clinton advisers hope he will give a full-throated speech backing her. (Emphasis mine)

There is nothing like the ego of an older white man. It is really something to see.  He worked with Hillary Clinton for 8 years in the Senate, voted for her as Secretary of State, watched her win this primary handily, and he still feels able to demand that she "take steps to win his confidence" in order to receive his endorsement.  I can not wait until Secretary Clinton, President Obama, and everyone else with two brain cells to rub together kicks this old crank to the curb.  

Amputated Love

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

We all need some comic relief. Fortunately there's the opening sentence of today's David Brooks column, "The Building Blocks of Learning":

The ancient Greeks had different words for different kinds of love — like Ludus (playful love), Pragma (longstanding love) and Agape (universal love).

That's a Radio Yerevan joke:

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that the ancient Greek words for different kinds of love included ludus (playful love), pragma (longstanding love), and agape (universal love)?

Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all, ludus is Latin, not Greek; second, ludus meant "game, sport, play" or in the plural "public entertainment", and pragma meant "thing done, fact"; third, when they are used nowadays to mean a kind of love, pragma means "practical" or "convenient love", and agape means "love that is altruistic towards one's partner"; and fourth, these uses come not from the ancients but from the Canadian psychologist John Alan Lee's Colours of Love: An Exploration of the Ways of Loving (1973).

Ludus is one of Lee's primary "love styles" (mapped out like blue, red, and yellow on the traditional color wheel) alongside eros (passionate love) and storge (family love), and pragma and agape are secondary styles, like green, orange, and purple, together with mania (love accompanied by madness and obsessiveness). There are also nine tertiary styles, but we're not getting into those today.

Should we go on?

Sixteen hundred years ago, Augustine argued that the essence of a good life is choosing the right things to love and loving them well.

Augustine definitely did regard choosing things to love as a supremely important component of a good life, though only one choice counts, and it's really not a choice, as Professor Payne explains it for the students of Bellevue College:

He identifies four kinds of things that people can love.  These are physical objects, other people, themselves and God.  In contrast with the Manichaeans, Augustine denied the existence of evil.  Since all things are created by God and God is good, all things must themselves be good.  So all of the things we can love are appropriate objects of love.  All of the things we can love are capable of providing us with some measure of satisfaction.  But not all things can provide us with complete satisfaction.  Unhappiness and suffering are the result of disordered love.  When we expect more satisfaction from an object of love than it is capable of providing, we suffer.  What we need more than anything is the infinite satisfaction that comes from loving God.  When we fail to recognize this and seek complete satisfaction in finite things we are ultimately unhappy and our unhappiness may result in harming others.  All that we perceive as evil, according to Augustine, is the product of disordered love.

You should choose to love God. You can love other things if you want, but  it doesn't especially matter which ones you pick as long as you don't do it in a disordered way. I guess if you love things in a disordered fashion you're not doing it very well ("David, are you going to clean up your love? It's a pigsty in there!"), so Brooks gets partial credit for that. Thanks very much, Gus, that's extremely clarifying.

But over the past several centuries our models of human behavior have amputated love. Hobbes and other philosophers argued that society is a machine driven by selfishness. Enlightenment philosophers emphasized reason over emotion. Contemporary social science was built on the idea that we’re self-interested, calculating creatures.

This philosophical shift has caused unimaginable harm, especially in the sphere of education.

Hobbes famously remarked that schoolboys in the Middle Ages were nasty, brutish, and short. The sphere of education immediately began to decay. I'm not clear whether love lost its limbs in this industrial accident or is a lost limb itself from the unimaginably harmed model of human behavior, but we don't really care, do we?

In any case, as long as Brooks's notion of a model of human behavior with love in its proper place comes not from ancient Greece but from 1973, the situation is probably not quite as dire as he thinks it is, so cheer up.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Demotivating the Republican Base (Update)

I think this should be an extremely effective ad among people who have, like, a pulse. And maybe emotions. But it's also doing something very interesting, which is targeting evangelical (and other religious) conservatives. Anti-choicers love to talk about children born with disabilities; a child born with a disability is always a "gift" or a "blessing". Obviously they don't actually believe every life is special and sacred, but they like to believe they believe that. So they fetishize children born with disabilities as a way of signaling that they do.

This ad plays directly to that sentiment. The first 20 seconds could easily be taken straight from an anti-abortion ad. It's a slice of conservative-friendly advertising designed to reinforce religious conservatives' uneasiness with a twice-divorced libertine who supports Planned Parenthood. I haven't seen polling on just how vulnerable Trump is among them, but it looks like Mormons at least have their doubts. And Priorities USA is smart to try to capitalize on them.

Religious conservatives aren't going to end up voting for Godless Baby-Killing Hillary (whom the ad doesn't mention). But they might stay home, or vote for Gary Johnson, or write in Zombie Jerry Falwell--anyone but Trump. And losing more than a few of them would be disastrous for him.

Update: Priorities USA has expanded its buy for this ad (scroll way down), which suggests they've seen evidence of its effectiveness.

Update: LA

Updated—see below

Authorities say suspect going to L.A. Pride had 3 assault rifles & chemicals for explosives: https://t.co/POZtiPwKIg pic.twitter.com/p0qYMSBRQF

— Ryan Parker (@TheRyanParker) June 12, 2016

Not to stereotype, but I'm betting the James Wesley Howell who was apprehended in Santa Monica on his way to the Los Angeles Pride Parade with a deadly arsenal in his car, pictured above, was not an Islamic terrorist (I'm not a bit afraid to use the words).

But I'll bet you any money he's got something deeply in common with Omar Mateen: a gloomy, hate-filled, and theologically ill-informed and backward interpretation of a fine old religious tradition, a deep-seated fear (first) and hatred (afterwards) of the idea of men having sex with men, presumably rooted in conflict over his own sexual identity, and an attraction to violence and death, including his own. In other words a typical religious conservative male with some (hopefully) very atypical emotional issues.

The particular religion (Muslim, Protestant, Catholic—other traditions have terrorists, but not so marked perhaps with sexual terror) isn't the important thing. The important thing is the attitude. Can you admit that, WASP or Waziristani, al-Qa'eda or Y'all Quaeda, it's the same disease? Can you say the words, "conservative fundamentalist, homophobic terrorist"?

If you can't say them, it's because you've otherized the problem into a place where you can't even see it, probably because you're afraid to see it in yourself, and I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to talk to you. You need to see it in yourself, as you need to see racism if you want to cope with it. What we need isn't a war with Islam, it's a jihad, a struggle that would be better conducted nonviolently, against conservatism in that hidebound, murderous sense. If you can't say the words, you're part of the problem.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

UPDATE: I lose my bet there, as commenter Saurs pointed out after I went to bed; the Powell guy does not fit that profile in any clear way; he doesn't seem to have any ill will toward the the LGTB community, being a 20-year-old out B himself, or any standout religious affiliations. He does qualify as a rightwinger from my standpoint, an NRA enthusiast and a dweller in the mists of Mt. Paranoia, based on what the Los Angeles Times says about his Facebook page:

The site includes political posts, including one in which he compares Hillary Clinton to Adolf Hitler. In another, he repeats conspiracy theories that the government was behind notorious terrorist attacks, including Sept. 11, 2001. That post shares a video claiming that last year’s terror attack on the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was a hoax and attributable to the “New World Order.” 

He absolutely should not have been traveling with all those weapons, since he was on probation since mid-April in lieu of a one-year prison sentence for intimidating neighbors with a firearm, and getting rid of all his guns was part of the terms of his probation. But we have no idea what, if anything, he planned to do with the things.

I'll leave the post as it is as an object lesson on the danger of jumping to conclusions.

Update: Thoughts and prayers

Follow Igor Volsky of Center for American Progress on Twitter for constant updates on all the US congresspersons and senators who have taken campaign contributions from the National Rifle Association and voted against every kind of gun control legislation.

Every time some terrible thing like this happens they send out messages offering their "thoughts and prayers", but no apologies for the lack of action on their part that would help to put an end to it. Igor is there to call them out for it.

One religious leader who calls for thoughts and prayers and DOING SOMETHING:

Pope Francis has condemned “the terrible massacre that has taken place in Orlando, with its dreadfully high number of innocent victims”.

He released a statement through a spokesperson, who said the attack “has caused in Pope Francis, and in all of us, the deepest feelings of horror and condemnation, of pain and turmoil before this new manifestation of homicidal folly and senseless hatred.

Pope Francis joins the families of the victims and all of the injured in prayer and in compassion. Sharing in their indescribable suffering he entrusts them to the Lord so they may find comfort. We all hope that ways may be found, as soon as possible, to effectively identify and contrast the causes of such terrible and absurd violence which so deeply upsets the desire for peace of the American people and of the whole of humanity.

"Contrast" is a bad translation for Italian contrastare, meaning "oppose" or "prevent".

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.