HOW TRUMP WILL WALK HIS MUSLIM PROPOSAL BACK (SLIGHTLY), IF PRESSURED (updated)

It's all fun and games until someone dons some jackboots:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called Monday for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" ...

The proposed ban would apply to immigrants and visitors alike, a sweeping prohibition affecting all adherents of Islam who want to come to the U.S. The idea also raised immediate questions about whether it could pass muster under constitutional protections of the free exercise of religion.

The proposed ban wouldn't just apply to immigrants and visitors:

When asked by The Hill whether that would include Muslim-American citizens currently abroad, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks replied over email: "Mr. Trump says, 'everyone.'"

As Charles Johnson notes, the commenters at Breitbart love this idea:

Couldn't agree more.

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Mr Trump: "Cease All Muslim Immigration , NOW "
the people want this
TRUMP2016

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Trump is the only one with common sense.

When you are at war, you do not let the enemy in.

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WHERE THEY CAME FROM

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yes and NOW!

David Brody, of Pat Robertson's CBN news organization, thinks it's a gutsy move:

Here is the truth whether you like it or not:@realDonaldTrump is only candidate to have the bravery to put out that statement on Muslims

— David Brody (@TheBrodyFile) December 7, 2015

But it's all too much even for the rest of the GOP field:

Donald Trump is unhinged. His "policy" proposals are not serious.

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) December 7, 2015

On the Michael Medved Show, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called Trump’s position “ridiculous.”

“There’s no question in my mind, but there are folks in this race who don’t care about what the law says because they’re used to being able to just fire people indiscriminately on television,” Christie said. “So, they don’t have to worry about laws say or not say.”

“And you do not need to be banning Muslims from the country,” Christie added. “That’s, in my view, that’s a ridiculous position and one that won’t even be productive.”

John Kasich calls the plan "outrageous divisiveness." Ben Carson's spokesperson says Carson "would not advocate" what Trump is advocating. Ted Cruz says Trump's proposal is "not my policy."

I think Trump may have gone too far this time -- not too far to suffer in the polls, of course (he'll probably get a bump), but so far out there that even fellow Republicans and pundits will make it uncomfortable for him to defend this position.

So will he walk it back? Maybe, a little.

Remember when we were told (accurately) that Trump had spoken approvingly of the notion of implementing a Muslim-tracking database? Trump accused the media of being "dishonest." Breitbart and Ann Coulter accused the press of smearing Trump. Dishonest LIEberal media! Trump was talking about tracking people arriving from overseas! he and his backers insisted. He'd had plenty of time to clarify his position in real time, and hadn't, but the guy who never walks things back did so in this case -- because he could then turn it all into an attack on the media.

That's what he'll do if he's put under enough pressure in this case. He can't claim that he didn't mean what he said, because the proposal is right there on his website.

But what he'll do is claim that we misunderstood his words. He'll base the claim on this sentence from his press release:

Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.

He'll say,

I didn't mean we'd ban Muslims forever -- I meant just until we can figure out what's going on. In a Trump administration, we're going to know what's going on very, very quickly. We'll know who's dangerous and who isn't. It won't take us very long to figure that out, because figuring it out is just good management.

It'll all be the media's fault for misunderstanding him.

And the media will just report that and move on, as if nothing disturbing happened.

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UPDATE, TUESDAY: Told ya.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News' Barbara Walters today, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, currently at the center of a political firestorm over his proposed ban on Muslims entering the U.S., responded to critics' concerns....

"It's short term," he said today of the proposed ban. "Let our country get its act together. ... It could be very quickly if our country could get its act together. ... We need toughness and smartness and we have to do it quickly."

OBAMA WAS NOT THE CHEERLEADER IN CHIEF

Jim Geraghty's National Review post about the speech President Obama delivered yesterday evening is titled "Obama Actually Thought He Was Being Reassuring Last Night." Geraghty, of course, was harshly critical of the president; I don't want to spend a lot of time rebutting him, but I do want to question the assumption in his title. Did the president think he was being reassuring last night?

The Atlantic's Peter Beinart, who was far less critical of the speech, suggested in his response that Obama is confident in his approach to ISIS, which he doesn't consider an existential threat:

... [Obama] considers violent jihadism a small, toxic strain within Islamic civilization, not a civilization itself. And unlike Bush, he doesn’t consider it a serious ideological competitor....

While Republicans think ISIS is strong and growing stronger, Obama thinks it’s weak and growing weaker. “Terrorists,” he declared on Sunday, now “turn to less complicated acts of violence like the mass shootings that are all too common in our society.” In other words, the Islamic State probably can’t do anything to America that we Americans aren’t doing to ourselves all the time, and now largely take for granted.

Obama also argued that the Islamic State is losing in the Middle East, where the “strategy that we are using now -- air strikes, special forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country” will produce a “sustainable victory.”

I'm not sure I heard what Beinart heard in the speech. The president said that the U.S. government ihas improved its ability to prevent complex plots like 9/11, although simpler plots are still a threat -- but to me he didn't convey any great satisfaction at that. He says the current strategy will "achieve a more sustainable victory" -- but the allusion to the "steps I and future Presidents must take to keep our country safe" suggests that he doesn't think victory is coming anytime soon. I didn't hear the speech as reassuring; I heard it as realistic. The president wanted us to know that steps are being taken and that they're blunting the impact of what ISIS is trying to do. But it's going to take a while.

Greaghty writes:

At this point in his presidency, Obama speaks with only one tone, the slightly exasperated and sometimes not-merely-slightly exasperated “adult in the room” who constantly has to correct his fellow Americans, who are always flying off the handle, calling for options that “aren’t who we are,” betraying our values, and so on. He’s always so disappointed in us.

I disagree I think the president was -- probably naively -- hoping that he was speaking to fellow adults, people who, if there's reason for hope in the long run, can tolerate some bad news. As I said yesterday, I fear that the American people want just the opposite from him: They want fist-pumping, rally-'round-the-flag talk and empty promises that we'll lay waste to ISIS before you know it. He's doesn't believe in that message, so that's not what he said. He said:

My fellow Americans, I am confident we will succeed in this mission because we are on the right side of history.

This strikes me as similar to one of his favorite sayings: The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

The speech reminded me of Obama's first inaugural, which also surprised a lot of people with its somber tone:

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly, our schools fail too many -- and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable, but no less profound, is a sapping of confidence across our land; a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this America: They will be met.

Obama can give a rousing, rallying speech when he wants to. He didn't want to last night -- and yet he clearly hopes Americans will stay strong and not lose heart. Unfortunately, they may not be capable of that if they're not given the rah-rah talk and get the crowd-pleasing actions they crave.

A MORE SERIOUS REBUTTAL THAN SALON'S LATEST HILLARY-HATING DUDEBRO DESERVES

Salon is now making a regular habit of publishing long, self-righteous essays in which Bernie Sanders fanboys explaining why it would be an awesome idea not to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election. Here's the latest one: Shane Ryan's "Just Let the Republicans Win: Maybe Things Need to Get Really Bad Before America Wakes Up." This has already been well rebutted by Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns & Money and Allison Hantschel at First Draft, but I'll add to the pile-on.

Ryan writes:

If Hillary lost because progressives abstained from voting, it’s possible that Republican incompetence would be laid bare, and that they’d run the country into the ground over the next four years. If that’s what it takes to show the people that a leftist political revolution is the only viable way forward, it will have been worth watching Hillary bite the political dust. Come 2020, we could be looking at a landscape where progressive politics can finally gather enough momentum to sweep the country, and usher in a new era of FDR-esque reforms.

It isn't merely that a lot of irreversible bad stuff happened after 2000, when we also heard this (or 1980, when Your Aging Correspondent first heard that a bad right-winger's election might fan the flames of lefty revolution in Hearland America). It's that, when the disgust with the GOP finally reached critical mass six years after Bush won the presidency, the Democrats elected in response were, in many cases, from the centrist wing folks like Ryan abhor. The Democratic winners tin 2006 included Blue Dogs like Heath Shuler in the House and Claire McCaskill in the Senate, not to mention the rejected-but-reelected Joe Lieberman. The large Democratic majorities elected in 2006 and 2008 included the folks progressives (understandably) railed against when they watered down President Obama's stimulus plan and rejected a public option on healthcare. Sorry, years of GOP awfulness may eventually lead to the election of Democrats, but those Democrats aren't necessarily going to live up to the progressive ideal. And in the interim, Republicans can do a hell of a lot of damage.

Ryan thinks Republicans are showing Democrats the way:

There’s an analogy here to the far-right conservative movement, which has become so influential in the Republican party that establishment candidates are finding no traction in their own circus of a primary contest. Unlike progressives, the conservative far right has realized the extent of its power -- they had a certain psychological advantage in the early days, propelled as they were by religious fervor -- and for Sanders supporters to do the same, it’s imperative that we don’t capitulate to the Democratic party’s big money wing. If we do, we’ll never be taken seriously.

But the way "the conservative far right" has asserted its power in recent years is not by getting its candidate nominated for president -- it's by winning primaries in races for the House and Senate (and contests even further downballot). I don't see any evidence that the Hillary-haters are doing the hard work of insinuating themselves into state and local Democratic parties in order to wield influence in non-glamorous off-year races.

Ryan has contempt for Hillary Clinton's attempts to embrace progressivism in this campaign:

... she has tacked leftward merely to combat Sanders’ progressive momentum -- going against a lifetime of pro-Wall Street, pro-business action ... not because she actually espouses any of her shiny new positions....

But if Ryan envies the success of Republican ideologues, he should recognize that a great deal of that success has come precisely because GOP Establishment hacks -- most notably, Mitch McConnell and, until recently, John Boehner -- have saved their seats by imitating their party's zealots just the way Hillary is trying to imitate progressives. See also Lindsey Graham and John McCain. They've allied themselves with ideologues in order to save their own political necks -- and that's helped their party move rightward. Clinton's newfound progressivism, sincere or not, might be doing the same thing for her party, in the other direction.

However, zealots don't automatically start winning every battle when they decide to fight. Look at what's happened in the GOP in the Tea Party years: The zealots got a lot of their people into office in 2010 and 2012, and yes, they intimidated Establishment figures, who moved to the right -- but the Establishment fought back, suppressing Tea Party insurgencies in a lot of races in 2014. And now the zealots are striking back in this year's presidential primaries. To some extent, it's a conservative crackup. Zealots have had a lot of success, but they're still fighting with the Establishment, and the party, as a result, could be about to lose its third straight presidential election -- something that's happened only once to one of the major parties since Harry Truman left office. Ongoing intramural war is a potential consequence of a revolt of the zealots. How would that be good for progressivism? And who suffers in the interim? Wouldn't it better to do the best we can this coming November, and inject a little more progressivism into the party from the bottom up now and in the future?

MR. PRESIDENT, WE DEMAND JOHN WILLIAMS MUSIC AND CGI EXPLOSIONS

This is happening tonight. I'm not sure what good it can do:

On Sunday, December 6, at 8:00 pm ET, President Obama will address the nation from the Oval Office about the steps our government is taking to fulfill his highest priority: Keeping the American people safe.

He will provide an update on the ongoing investigation into the tragic attack in San Bernardino. He will also discuss the broader threat of terrorism -- including the nature of the threat, how it has evolved, and how we will defeat it.

He will reiterate his firm conviction that ISIL will be destroyed and that the United States must draw upon our values -- our unwavering commitment to justice, equality, and freedom -- to prevail over terrorist groups that use violence to advance a destructive ideology.

It's hard to imagine this speech being well received. The discussion afterward will be dominated by conservatives, who'll judge it on one main criterion: He didn't say "Islamic extremism"! (Or "Islamic terrorism" or "radical Islam" or whichever phrase they think will magically eliminate terrorism.)

The president also won't call for a ground war in Syria -- not that very many Republicans, apart from Lindsey Graham, will suggest that either, but they'll upbraid him for not being tough enough regardless. Also, he might bring up gun control, which will really set them howling.

But it's not just the right. Yesterday I quoted this Patrick Healy story, which The New York Times published on Wednesday. However, I didn't quote one of the main points Healy made: that voters anxious about terrorism not only want a tough president, they want the sort of president who exists only in movies:

“Get off my plane,” growls the president of the United States to a terrorist hijacker in the 1997 movie “Air Force One,” before snapping the enemy’s neck and shoving him out the cargo door.

Triumphal music swells. The good guys have won. And no less than Harrison Ford has shown what a president can do if he is Han Solo and Indiana Jones rolled into one.

With the Islamic State suddenly rivaling the economy as their top concern in recent polls, many voters are looking for wartime strategies from the 2016 presidential candidates. But after seven years of a cerebral President Obama, there is no denying that some also want a leader who radiates gutsiness and a take-charge resolve. Not simply the “strong leader” that pollsters ask about, but someone who makes them feel safe on a visceral level.

Older voters point to Ronald Reagan, standing up to the Soviet Union. Others find inspiration in film, America’s dominant cultural form, and the grit of a Bill Pullman in “Independence Day,” a Jamie Foxx in “White House Down.” No one expects a president to be an action movie star, but anxious voters want a leader who will go to courageous lengths to protect the United States against attacks like the ones in Paris on Nov. 13.

Healy writes, "No one expects a president to be an action movie star," as if voters wish for that but are mature enough to realize it's impossible. However, the voters he quotes convey the impression that an action-hero president is precisely what they want:

“In scary times, you want heroes as presidents,” said Barbara Hovland, the Republican chairwoman in the Mason City area of Iowa. “Who doesn’t want a president who can take care of himself, his family and the country at the same time, like Harrison Ford did? When Donald Trump said recently in Iowa that he would cut off the heads of ISIS, the crowd went wild.”

... “We need someone who understands that ISIS is 10 times more dangerous than Al Qaeda was,” said Dean Nason, a Republican in Wakefield, N.H. “Movie presidents make you feel good....”

Obama's not going to give Americans that tonight, is he?

And he's going to be competing with tough-talkin' Ted Cruz:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Saturday is rolling out a series of TV ads in Iowa, including one aimed at bolstering his credentials to fight terrorism if elected president....

“If I’m elected to serve as Commander-in-Chief, we won’t cower in the face of evil. America will lead,” Cruz says directly into the camera. “We’ll rebuild our military. We’ll kill the terrorists. And every Islamic extremist will know, if you wage jihad against us, you’re signing your death warrant.”

And, of course, with Trump:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said in an interview aired Sunday that he would "go after" family members of terrorists because they "know what's happening" when their loved ones commit acts of terrorism.

Trump said on CBS' "Face The Nation" that he would've gone after the wives of the terrorists in the World Trade Center attacks because they knew it was going to happen.

"At least I would certainly go after the wives who absolutely knew it was happening, and I guess your definition of what I'd do, I'm going to leave that to your imagination," Trump said.

Centrist pundits know this is empty -- and, in Trump's case, alarming -- bombast, but they'll still lament that Obama's speech didn't rally the nation the way bombast would.

Obama's slower, more patient approach may be correct, but we're children -- we don't want to hear that. We want Daddy to make it all better now now now.

RELAX -- IT'S PROBABLY JUST A REGULAR AMERICAN WITH A GUN (updated)

Omigod -- is this more jihadist terrorism in Wisconsin?

A suspect was taken into custody after police responded to a “high-risk situation” in Neenah, Wis....

Neenah Mayor Dean Kaufert told FOX11 that around 30 shots were fired at the Eagle Nation Cycles motorcycle repair shop.

The suspect reportedly barricaded himself inside of shop and held hostages in the basement for several hours. He was armed with a MAC-10-style weapon, according to local reports.

A cop was injured:

The [police] chief told reporters a citizen and a police officer were taken to the hospital during the standoff....

But I suspect this isn't ISIS-related:

Eagle Nation Cycles and its owner, Steven Erato, have been in the news before.

Most recently, the motorcycle shop, Erato and three other people connected to the business, filed a $50 million federal lawsuit claiming their rights were violated during a September 2012 drug raid....

The 2012 raid resulted in 15 felony charges against Erato. He was eventually convicted of misdemeanor possession of marijuana, but all other charges were dismissed.

Also, please note that even though a cop had to go to the hospital, the suspect was taken into custody alive.

So I'm betting the suspect is a white guy, not a Muslim (or a black person). Therefore, it's just another day in America -- shots were fired, citizens were terrorized, but the culprit was a regular American, so it's cool.

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UPDATE: Yup.

FOR BETTER OR WORSE, HILLARY CLINTON MIGHT BE THE MOST EFFECTIVE 2016 DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE, BECAUSE FEAR

In The New York Times today, Michael Barbaro and Trip Gabriel note that the Republican presidential candidates are beating war drums in sync:

The Republican candidates for president angrily demanded on Friday that the United States face up to a new world war, one that has breached its borders, threatened the safety of Americans and brought the menace of Islamic terrorism deep into the homeland.

With striking unanimity, they accused President Obama and his fellow Democrats of shrinking from a long-overdue assault on the Islamic State and its frighteningly effective tools of global recruitment....

“Our nation is under siege,” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said at a cafe in rural Iowa. “What I believe we’re facing is the next world war. This is what we’re in right now, already.”

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas seethed with disgust for Democrats, declaring, “This nation needs a wartime president.”

... Their language was almost apocalyptic. Jeb Bush described the looming threat of “Islamic terrorism that wants to destroy our way of life, wants to attack our freedom.”

He gravely added: “They have declared war on us. And we need to declare war on them.”

You know you're succeeding with your partisan memes when campaign journalists parrot them as if they're objective fact. Republicans succeed at that a lot. Here's what Barbaro and Gabriel say about Hillary Clinton:

As the Republicans spoke of the deadly shooting by a Muslim husband and wife as a clarifying moment, Democrats seemed to offer a more muddled response....

In Sioux City, Iowa, on Friday, Hillary Clinton spoke not of war but of the need to ferret out “those folks who are on the Internet radicalizing people” and called for fighting “terrorist networks” from the air and from the ground, avoiding the phrase “Islamic terrorism” and urging sensitivity toward Muslims.

Oh, I see -- she "called for fighting 'terrorist networks' from the air and from the ground" but "spoke not of war." How does that work exactly? Oh, right -- I guess she called for aerial bombardment and boots on the ground but SHE DIDN'T SAY 'WAR'!!!1!1!1!1!" It's sort of like not saying "radical Islam" or "Islamic terrorism" or "Islamic extremism" or "radical Islamic terrorist extremism" or whatever magic phrase Republicans insist that Democrats utter to prove they're not appeasers. (Gabriel and Barbaro also retransmit Republican that talking point, saying that Clinton was "avoiding the phrase 'Islamic terrorism' and urging sensitivity toward Muslims" in Sioux City.)

But on Thursday in the Times, Patrick Healy told us that voters on the trail seem to be looking for a tough candidate -- and Hillary qualifies:

With the Islamic State suddenly rivaling the economy as their top concern in recent polls, many voters are looking for wartime strategies from the 2016 presidential candidates. But after seven years of a cerebral President Obama, there is no denying that some also want a leader who radiates gutsiness and a take-charge resolve. Not simply the “strong leader” that pollsters ask about, but someone who makes them feel safe on a visceral level....

[Donald] Trump and Hillary Clinton, and to a lesser extent Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, were the candidates most mentioned as likely to strike fear into the hearts of America’s adversaries during interviews with about 20 voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, which hold the first nominating contests in February.

“We need someone who understands that ISIS is 10 times more dangerous than Al Qaeda was,” said Dean Nason, a Republican in Wakefield, N.H. “Movie presidents make you feel good. Trump makes people feel good. And Hillary Clinton, she may have problems, but she knows how to survive.”

... While Mrs. Clinton denounced Mr. Trump last week for “trafficking in prejudice and paranoia,” she is calibrating her own gung-ho style of leadership to people’s insecurities.

She has proposed more aggressive actions in Syria -- like imposing a no-fly zone and ordering more airstrikes -- than Mr. Obama has taken. And while some voters see Mr. Obama as weak because he is unwilling to risk American troops and avoids blunt language like the Republican catchphrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” Mrs. Clinton is open to more Special Operations troops in Syria and has been using the phrase “radical jihadism” to try to counter the buzzwords of the right.

Exactly what Gabriel and Barbaro said wasn't enough to make Clinton seem tough impresses Healy as a sign of her toughness.

Well, if Hillary can impress some of the journos on the campaign trail with her "resolve," that's something.

It seems likely that terrorism is going to be one of the main issues of this election, so if we want to keep Trump, Cruz, or Rubio out of the Oval Office, given all the damage they can do in so many areas, it might be necessary to have a Democrat who's widely seen as bellicose as the nominee. You can tell me that the Democratic electorate will show up and guarantee defeat for the Republican no matter who the nominee is, the evidence being that Democrats have won the popular vote in four of the last five presidential elections, but the one recent presidential election Democrats didn't win was the one in which there was the greatest fear of terrorism. I don't want 2016 to be a repeat of 2004.

I think Democrats are going to need a candidate who inspires at least some journalists to write what Healy wrote on Thursday:

Many Democrats now say they believe that Mrs. Clinton would be a more formidable commander in chief than any of the men running in either party....

“I get the sense that Hillary hates backing down, that she really believes in fighting, and I think our enemies would realize that she would make life harder for them,” said Darlene Nulk, a teacher and Democrat in Lee, N.H.

... In a poll released last week, Quinnipiac found that among Democrats, 94 percent saw Mrs. Clinton as a strong leader.

So she may turn out to be the right nominee for the times -- and if it upsets you that I'm saying that, consider that the alternative will be a Republican president and GOP Congress who'll restrict abortion rights and voting rights, slash taxes on the rich, expand access to guns, gut Medicare and Social Security, repeal Obamacare, further deregulate Wall Street and the energy industry, deny human involvement in climate change, and fight every war we thought Hillary would fight, plus a couple more. "Lesser of two evils"? Yeah, a lot lesser.

LIBERALS SOFT ON "BOMB CONTROL"? ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO GO THERE, MARCO?

At Raw Story, Tom Boggioni reports:

Appearing on Fox & Friends, 2016 GOP presidential contender Marco Rubio hammered at Democrats for proposing additional gun control laws after the San Bernardino attack, adding that “the left” never talks about “bomb control.”

Rubio ... took to the Fox & Friends couch to complain that liberals jumped to conclusions about the shooting before any of the facts were revealed.

“When this first came out, without knowing anything about the case, the first thing they started talking about was gun control, and gun control, ” the junior senator from Florida said. “I don’t hear anybody talking about bomb control. They put bombs, they left bombs behind on the scene of attack, intending to kill even more people than they did with the guns.”

Ignoring the fact that the San Bernardino bombs were not successfully deployed and that guns actually killed and injured people, does Rubio really want to argue that Democrats are indifferent to the threat from bombs?

I'd like to take Young Marco back to the mid-1990s, when a number of terrifying incidents -- the first attack on the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Olympic park bombing in Atlanta -- led to calls by President Bill Clinton and other Democrats for a requirement that traceable "taggants" be included in explosives. The NRA was having none of it, and therefore neither was the GOP:

President Clinton's attempt to pass an anti-terrorism bill ... ran into the brick wall of National Rifle Association opposition. The most desirable item in Mr. Clinton's proposal was a plan to make it easier to trace explosives by adding chemical markers known as taggants to black powder and gunpowder during their manufacture. The President, in deference to the powerful gun lobby, had already watered down his idea before it hit the House of Representatives. Then Republicans substituted a meaningless non-government study on the already exhaustively studied taggant issue.

The requirement never passed, and the NRA/GOP taggant blockade still hasn't been broken, as we were reminded after the Boston Marathon bombing:

One avenue of investigation is already closed off to forensic officials working the Boston Marathon bombing case due to efforts dating back decades by the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers.

... a crucial piece of evidence called a taggant that could be used to trace the gunpowder used in the bombs to a buyer at a point of sale is not available to investigators.

“If you had a good taggant this would be a good thing for this kind of crime. It could help identify the point of manufacturer, and chain of custody,” Bob Morhard, an explosives consultant and chief executive officer of Zukovich, Morhard & Wade, LLC., in Pennsylvania, who has traced explosives and detonators in use in the United States and Saudi Arabia, told msnbc.com. “The problem is nobody wants to know what the material is.”

Explosives manufacturers are required to place tracing elements known as identification taggants only in plastic explosives but not in gunpowder, thanks to lobbying efforts by the NRA and large gun manufacturing groups.

... In the past, the NRA has argued that taggants could affect the trajectory of bullets and would also be a de facto form of weapons registration....

As David Cay Johnston noted shortly after the Marathon attack:

But for the NRA-backed policy of not putting identifiers known as taggants in gunpowder, law enforcement could have quickly identified the explosives used to make the bombs, tracking them from manufacture to retail sale. That could well have saved the life of Sean Collier, the 26-year-old MIT police officer who was gunned down Thursday night by the fleeing bomb suspects.

If Marco Rubio is suddenly concerned about bombs, perhaps he'd like to announce his support for taggant legislation right now.

But that isn't going to happen, is it?

WAYNE LaPIERRE, ALAS, GETS THE MOOD OF THE COUNTRY EXACTLY RIGHT

Salon's Sophia Tesfaye is horrified at a new video release from the NRA's Wayne LaPierre:

“The age of terror”: NRA’s new fearmongering ad campaign equates American exceptionalism to more guns

... The ninth installment in the NRA’s “Freedom’s Safest Place” campaign features the group’s leader, Wayne LaPierre and is titled, “Demons At Our Door.” The ad was released just days after 56-year-old Robert Dear entered a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood and shot 12 people, killing three, and days before this latest shooting rampage in San Bernardino. In it, La Pierre makes specific reference to “the age of terror” and goes on to fear-monger over the threat of terror and violence to promote the NRA. The ad is currently running prominently on Fox News.

“Innocents like us,” LaPierre says, addressing his NRA members directly to camera, “will continue to be slaughtered in concert halls, sports stadiums, restaurants and airplanes.”

“They will come to where we worship,” LaPierre warns as ominous music waves over blurred images of American everyday life, “where we educate and where we live.”

“But when evil knocks on our doors, Americans have a power no other people on the planet share,” LaPierre proudly proclaims, touting the Second Amendment. “Let fate decide if mercy is offered to the demons at our door.”

The ad is alarmist -- but, if this New York Times story is accurate, it's perfectly attuned to America's mood:

... As the long roll call of mass shootings added a prosaic holiday party in San Bernardino, Calif., to its list, a wide expanse of America’s populace finds itself engulfed in a collective fear, a fear tinged with confusion and exasperation and a broad brew of emotions. The fear of the ordinary. Going to work. Eating a meal in a restaurant. Sending children to school. Watching a movie.

Wendy Malloy, 49, who lives in Tampa, Fla., said she now worried about being caught in an attack on a daily basis, just doing what anyone does. “When my son gets out of the car in the morning and walks into his high school,” she said. “When I drop him at his part-time job at a supermarket. When we go to the movies, concerts and festivals. When I walk into my office. It is a constant, grinding anxiety. And it gets louder every single day.”

... In the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings, coming close on the heels of the Colorado killings, The New York Times invited people to respond online about their fear of a mass shooting.

More than 5,000 wrote in. In addition, many others were interviewed on Thursday around the country: teachers and students and office workers, even some Army veterans who confided that they felt safer in war zones than on the streets of the United States.

People spoke of being spooked by gestures once ignored as utterly unremarkable. As one young woman from Massachusetts put it: “The guy in the corner always looking at his watch or the woman reaching into her bag too quickly.”

... People are able to recite with precision how often they think about a mass shooting touching them. Every day. Twice a week. Up to four times a day. Every other day. Every two weeks. Every time they’re in a crowded space. Whenever her teenagers are out. Every time she walks into her office and back to the parking garage. Every day. Every day. Every day.

For a 16-year-old in Berkeley, it is “almost constantly.” ...

To some extent, I understand the fear. On the other hand, I was here in New York for 9/11 and anthrax, not to mention the crack years a decade or so earlier. I got here in the bad old 1970s, and I'd grown up in Boston, which actually had a higher per-capita murder rate at the time. Part of me thinks, You now know that you could theoretically be killed at any moment? Welcome to my world. But I'm white, and I was always able to live in neighborhoods that, if not exactly safe, weren't the epicenters of fear. It wasn't that bad.

I don't know what to say about this. Yes, folks, you could draw the worst hand. This could happen to you. On the other hand, the odds are still in your favor. So live your lives.

In any event, conservatives have mastered the art of stoking fear and offering right-wing solidarity, or something similar, as the bulwark against the fear that's stoked. Want to be protected against marauding urban superpredators or undocumented Mexican rapists or terroristic Syrian toddlers with Ebola? Vote Reagan. Vote Trump. Buy gold. Stockpile dried food. And surround yourself with as many guns and rounds of ammo as you can possibly afford.

Now, if you keep the guns and ammo flowing the way the NRA insists we must, evildoers can eagerly join the arms race -- a group that now clearly includes homegrown terrorists. I keep being told on Twitter that the problem in San Bernardino wasn't guns, it was terrorism. Actually -- as any idiot can see -- it was both.

But fear is the national mood. The NRA ad above says, "I feel your fear" -- and adds that the gun demimonde is "freedom's safest place." In San Bernardino and Colorado Springs, it was terrorism's safest place, but never mind.

NO, DAVID BROOKS, REPUBLICAN VOTERS DON'T WANT THE BORING RUG

Because millionaire pundits pay no penalty when they're spectacularly wrong, David Brooks feels free to go out on a limb:

No, Donald Trump Won’t Win

... When campaigns enter that final month, voters tend to gravitate toward the person who seems most orderly. As the primary season advances, voters’ tolerance for risk declines. They focus on the potential downsides of each contender and wonder, Could this person make things even worse?

When this mental shift happens, I suspect Trump will slide....

The voting booth focuses the mind. The experience is no longer about self-expression and feeling good in the moment. It’s about the finger on the nuclear trigger for the next four years.

But as we learn from a new poll -- and this is not the first time we've heard this -- voters think Donald Trump is precisely the person they want with his "finger on the nuclear trigger" and tackling most other critical issues:

Donald Trump is the top choice of more than one out of every three Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters, according to the results of a new CNN/ORC poll released Friday. And it's not even close -- at 36 percent, Trump's closest competitor for the GOP presidential nomination is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, at 16 percent.

Ben Carson, who finished second in the October CNN/ORC poll, fell to third this time with 14 percent....

Regardless of whom they plan to vote for, majorities or pluralities said Trump is best qualified to tackle issues related to the economy (55 percent, with Cruz next closest at 9 percent), illegal immigration (48 percent to Rubio's 14 percent), foreign policy (30 percent to Cruz's 17 percent), the Islamic State (46 percent to Cruz's 15 percent) and the federal budget (51 percent to Cruz's 10 percent).

(Emphasis added.)

Brooks begins his column with an absurd interior-decorating metaphor:

A little while ago I went rug shopping. Four rugs were laid out on the floor and among them was one with a pink motif that was dazzlingly beautiful. It was complex and sophisticated. If you had asked me at that moment which rug I wanted, I would have said the pink one.

This conviction lasted about five minutes. But then my mentality flipped and I started asking some questions. Would the furniture go with this rug? Would this rug clash with the wall hangings? Would I get tired of its electric vibrancy?

Suddenly a subtler and more prosaic blue rug grabbed center stage. The rugs had not changed, but suddenly I wanted the blue rug. The pink rug had done an excellent job of being eye-popping on its own. The blue rug was doing an excellent job of being a rug I could enjoy living with.

For many Republicans, Donald Trump is their pink rug. He does the job that they want done at this moment. He reflects their disgust with the political establishment. He gives them the pleasurable sensation that somebody can come to Washington, kick some tail and shake things up.

Beyond the fact that the typical Republican voter doesn't share Brooks's preference for the tasteful and understated, there's the fact that Republican voters worship a man who called for a party with "no pale pastels." Here's what Ronald Reagan said in his speech to CPAC in 1975:

Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?

Republican voters love that "no pale pastels" quote. They post it on Pinterest boards. They name themselves after it on Twitter.

Ted Cruz has tried to hijack the quote. You can buy A T-shirt that reads, "Ted Cruz: Bold Colors, No Pale Pastels." And Cruz is in second place.

But Trump is perceived by the base as both the "no pale pastels" guy and (to use the word Brooks uses) as "orderly." He's succeeded in business. How could he do that if he's not "orderly"? That's what the base is thinking.

I don't see Trump fading. Brooks, following Nate Silver, argues that the race is still volatile, and will be until February, when the voting starts. But wht's happening is that the expected volatility has been limited to the competition for second place. It was going to be Carson, now it seems as if it's going to be Cruz, and maybe it'll ultimately be Rubio.

But there's no volatility at the top. Trump is the voters' favorite rug.

PEGGY NOONAN REMINDS US THAT RIGHT-WINGERS SEE THEMSELVES AS THE REAL VICTIMS OF SAN BERNARDINO

Here's the start of Peggy Noonan's new column:

What gets you about what happened in San Bernardino is the shattering sameness of it. Once and not so long ago such atrocities, whatever their cause, whether the work of schizophrenics or jihadists, constituted a signal and exceptional moment. Now they’re more like this week’s shooting. We are not becoming blasé but increasingly inured. And, of course, armed up.

Yes, and I'm trying to recall which political party did more to ensure that as many Americans as possible are "armed up." Thinking, thinking....

You can see a coarsening in how we respond and react on social media. No one feels ashamed to exploit the tragedy for political purposes even while it is happening.

And by "No one feels ashamed" she means "No liberal feels ashamed." Both sides do it, but, to Noonan, one side really does it, and it's not her side.

We are all free to say what we think, and must be, for without this freedom we will no longer be America. More on that below.

Except that, according to Noonan, some must be freer than others to say what they think. More on that below.

... as the story broke Wednesday afternoon, and while it was still going on, there were accusations and bitter words flung all over the Internet. The weirdest argument came almost immediately. A person named Chris Murphy, who is a U.S. senator representing Connecticut, sent out what struck me as the most manipulative message of recent political history.

Yes, Murphy's tweet was "the most manipulative message of recent political history." More manipulative than, say, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

The background is that Republican presidential contestants responded online to the shootings with the only helpful thing you can say -- or do, frankly, from faraway -- when a story like this occurs. “Praying for the victims, their families & the San Bernardino first responders,” said Jeb Bush. Mike Huckabee said he was “praying.” John Kasich: “My thoughts & prayers go out to those impacted.”

These people are running for president. That means they have the attention of the press, and therefore of the nation. Some of them are sitting governors or members of Congress. They have influence. So prayers aren't "the only helpful thing" they can offer. How about offering some actual solutions?

This managed to enrage the progressive left. You can take your prayers and stuff ’em. The answer and the only answer to this tragedy is gun control, and if you’re not for it you’re not allowed to be part of the conversation.

Noonan is now endorsing the Sarah Palin Theory of the First Amendment, which states that if a conservative's feelings are hurt by someone else's speech, then that speech is depriving the conservative of First Amendment rights. Because the First Amendment says you have freedom of speech, but only if it's not mean to right-wingers, doesn't it?

“Please shut up and slink away,” tweeted a reporter.

Gene Weingarten wrote that. He's a Washington Post columnist, not a reporter. And he has no means of enforcing this demand, as he well knows. Therefore, there is no compulsion or coercion behind it. He's expressing exasperation -- as any rational person reading his words can tell.

But he hurt conservatives' feelings, so they're crying, "Help, help, I'm being repressed." The dead in San Bernardino haven't been buried yet, but, to Noonan, they're not the real victims. Conservatives with hurt feelings are.

Another: “Your thoughts and prayers don’t mean a damn thing.” A reporter at the Huffington Post damned public officials’ “useless thoughts and prayers.” Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos: “How many dead people did those thoughts and prayers bring back to the life?”

Not one of these messages is even rhetorically coercive. And yet it's exquisitely pleasurable for righties to believe they're being silenced.

But wait -- what happened to "the most manipulative message of recent political history"?

... Then the U.S. senator, Chris Murphy, came forward rather menacingly. “Your ‘thoughts’ should be about steps to take to stop this carnage. Your ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness if you do nothing -- again.”

"Rather menacingly"? What ability does Senator Murphy have to compel this behavior? He's hoping to arouse pangs of conscience -- nothing more.

Obviously it didn't work. Obviously all it did was to make conservatives even more self-righteous, and more certain of their own moral superiority.

... All this immediately won a name: “prayer shaming.”

Yes, that's true. What's followed from the right doesn't have a name, but I'll give it one: shame shaming. It more effective than the prayer shaming, because the right has a bigger gang than the left.

Here’s an odd thing. If you really are for some new gun-control measure, if you are serious about it, you just might wait a while, until the blood has cooled, for instance....

And when is that? We have more than one mass shooting a day in this country. When does the blood ever have time to cool?

You might offer information, argument, points of persuasion. Successful politics involves pulling people together. You don’t use a tragedy to shame and silence those who don’t see it your way; that only hardens sides.

Um, Peggy? On guns, your side couldn't possibly be more hardened. It has told us for decades that it will never compromise. Not 1 percent. Not 0.1 percent. Not 0.00001 percent. There is no possibility of persuasion. So we tried something else, because somebody has to do something about gun violence in America, and you people obviously won't.

... I suspect part of the problem is that a number of the progressive finger-pointers do not really know what a prayer is. Maybe no one ever told them. But prayer is a very active endeavor -- it takes time, energy, concentration. You have to stop everything and ask God to hear you.

Yes -- which is why we thought the alleged prayers of professional politicians seemed phony.

... What actually is irritating about politicians saying they’re sending thoughts and prayers is the suspicion you sometimes have that they’re not, actually, thinking or praying.

GEE, PEGGY, YA THINK?

... A connected point, it seems to me, is that Americans are growing weary of being told what they can and cannot publicly say, proclaim and think. We all know what’s going on at the colleges, with the mad little Marats and Robespierres who are telling students and administrators what they are and are not allowed to say or do.

And your response, Peggy, is to tell liberals that we aren't allowed to criticize you. Who's the Marat wannabe here?

... Why doesn’t some thoughtful candidate on the Republican side address the issue of shaming and silencing? Why doesn’t someone give a deep and complete speech on what the First Amendment means, how it must be protected, how we pay a daily price for it in terms of anger, hurt, misunderstandings and crudity, but it’s worth it. Why doesn’t someone note that you fight bad speech with better speech, you don’t try to tape up the mouths of an entire country.

But Peggy, aren't you hoping to tape up the mouths of half of the country, the half that hurt your faux-devout friends' feelings?

And you know what's curiously absent from this column? Any mention of the dead and wounded in San Bernardino. Fourteen people died, twenty-one were wounded -- but hey, my friends were briefly put on the defensive by tweeters and journalists! That's the real story here!

I really believe Noonan is angrier at Senator Murphy's tweet than she is as the murderers. I really believe she thinks insults to conservatives are a greater threat to America than thousands of zealots and psychopaths with AR-15s.

IF A POLITICAL CONSULTANT SCRIPTS YOUR "PRAYERS," THEY'RE NOT PRAYERS

I haven't blogged yet about the "thoughts and prayers" controversy, but right-wingers who post shrieking headlines such as "DISGUSTING! NY Daily News MOCKS REPUBLICANS for Prayers after Cali Terror Attack" (Gateway Pundit) and "Deranged Liberals Attack God and Prayer" (Limbaugh) are missing the point.

As the cover and cover story of today's New York Daily News make clear, the messages about the San Bernardino massacre from Republican politicians seemed strikingly non-spontaneous:

Thoughts & prayers are with #SanBernardino

— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) December 2, 2015

My thoughts and prayers are with the victims, families, and brave first responders during this unspeakable tragedy.

— Dr. Rand Paul (@RandPaul) December 2, 2015

My thoughts and prayers are with the shooting victims and their families in San Bernardino.

— Dr. Ben Carson (@RealBenCarson) December 2, 2015

And here's another one I spotted yesterday as the incident was still under way -- same message:

My thoughts and prayers are with those impacted by the senseless shooting today in #SanBernadino.

— Darrell Issa (@DarrellIssa) December 2, 2015

My response:

Did @FrankLuntz write this boilerplate? Seeing it from every Republican now. https://t.co/MYMGq57gi0

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) December 2, 2015

That's still my response. If your genuinely drop to your knees when you hear about something like yesterday's massacre, this atheist won't attack you for that. But if someone in the GOP consultant class has advised you that "thoughts and prayers" is the response to a mass shooting that tests well in focus groups of swing voters and you go out and post that, then, sorry, you're a phony, and I'm insulting you as a politician, not as a Christian, if I call you on your phoniness.

So I don't want to hear that I'm engaged in "prayer shaming." I'm not -- I'm engaged in politician shaming.

MURDOCH MEDIA OUTLETS ARE DOING JUST WHAT ISIS WANTS

We still can't be certain about the motive for the San Bernardino massacre -- but whatever the motive, it was exactly what ISIS wants. I don't say this just because a lot of Westerners were killed. I say it because the killers were Western Muslims who'd aroused no suspicions and who chose a target that was in no way symbolic of the struggle between jihadists and the rest of the world, apart from the fact that it was in the non-Muslim world. ISIS wants us to fear that jihadists could strike anywhere and kill anyone -- and that the killers could be anyone who's Muslim. That terrifies us -- and makes a lot of us angry at all Muslims. ISIS wants us to hate all Muslims, and thus to make peace-loving Muslims unwelcome in Western society. It wants no one left in the "grayzone" where Muslims and non-Muslims have been able to coexist contentedly. It wants Westerners to reject coexistence and Muslims to feel that coexistence is a pipe dream.

So I'm guessing that this was terrorism, though I know the guess could be wrong. It's just structured so perfectly to accomplish ISIS's goals.

Whatever the truth, Murdoch media outlets are doing just what ISIS wants:

The @nypost changed their front page at some point. First said "murder session" but now screams "Muslim killers" pic.twitter.com/F27rlDLhgE

— Andrew Peng (@TheAPJournalist) December 3, 2015

Also this:

Fox News contributor Dr. Keith Ablow told America’s Newsroom host Martha MacCallum Thursday that if a person named Syed “leaves your party,” you should “call the cops.”

Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik are the suspects in a deadly massacre that killed 14 and injured at least 17 in San Bernardino, CA....

“Listen if somebody named Syed leaves your party and people say, ‘why is Syed leaving?’ -- You know what, call the cops,” Ablow said.

“That’s the point we’re at in this country, and I’m sorry to say it but we’re there. And to do otherwise would be called the psychological force of denial,” he added.

Ablow is saying that even a mildly noteworthy act by a Muslim in your workplace or community is now worthy of suspicion. Basically anything a Muslim does ought to make you think about contacting the authorities.

The message from Murdoch is that the grayzone should be destroyed. Murdoch is one ISIS's best friends in the West.


(Video via Media Matters.)

WHY WON'T THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA SAY THE THING IT'S ACTUALLY SAYING?!?!

Every story I've encountered on the San Bernardino shootings says the same thing. NBC:

Authorities said that no motive had been determined and that terrorism had not been ruled out.

The New York Times:

David Bowdich, assistant director of the F.B.I.’s office in Los Angeles, would not rule out terrorism.

The Washington Post:

San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan ... and other law enforcement officials said that terrorism has not been ruled out.

NPR:

Police have not identified a motive for the shooting. They have not ruled out terrorism.

But the message from the right is: Why won't the mainstream media say, "Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism"?

Everyone tiptoeing around this story on TV. Falling all over themselves.

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) December 3, 2015

Unreal--MSNBC is talking "mental health" and "availability of guns" as the problem.

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) December 3, 2015

NBC Kerry Sanders on scene just said a holiday party called a "Christmas party could have been the trigger."

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) December 3, 2015

All this even though the message is exactly the same at Fox News:

Police, feds probe terror as possible motive in SoCal massacre

And Fox Nation:

Husband-Wife Team Identified as San Bernardino Killers ... Motive Unknown But Terrorism Not Ruled Out By Authorities

(Oh, but I forgot: These days, even Fox is sometimes considered suspect on the right.)

Over at FrontPage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield has already condemned the media for not saying what it actually is saying:

The evolving media narrative is that familiar standby of “workplace violence”. The sort of workplace violence involving an attack by multiple terrorists wearing body armor and throwing pipe bombs shortly after an argument at a party.

If you believe this version of the “workplace violence” story, the shooter stormed out of a party and 20 minutes later had managed to round up multiple heavily armed attackers to avenge his party argument.

It’s certainly a story. Even if it isn’t a very good story. And yet it’s a story that we keep hearing over and over again.

It begins with lies and ends with body bags.

Everything possible was done to deny Nidal Hassan’s terrorist motivations in the Fort Hood Massacre. His attack was deemed workplace violence. Even his own attempts to explain that he supported the terrorists were shut down so that he was reduced to smuggling messages to get his story out.

And despite multiple statements by Hassan that he was a terrorist, the official story is still workplace violence.

Ahhh, "workplace violence." That's one of those phrases, like "JV team," that make right-wingers' blood boil, and need no explanation. Angrily utter one of these phrases in wingnut company and it's like a secret handshake -- you're one of the tribe.

You can read -- even in The Washington Post, courtesy of columnist and ex-Bushie Marc Thiessen -- that President Obama personally referred to the Fort Hood hootings as "workplace violence." As far as I can tell, he never said that. It was a designation used for the incident by the government -- initially because, as AP reported a couple of years ago, "the Uniform Code of Military Justice does not have a punitive article for 'terrorism.'"

"They really didn't have an option," says Silliman, director emeritus of Duke University's Center on Law, Ethics and National Security in Durham, N.C. "He was an active-duty officer. The crime occurred on a military installation. … It was obvious he was going to face a court-martial."

The Defense Department resisted the terrorism label for what Hasan did, and resisted awarding Purple Hearts to victims, because it argued, Hasan's defense might use the designation to advance the claim that he couldn't get a fair trial. I'm not sure I understand that, or agree with the logic, but ultimately Congress passed legislation making the Fort Hood victims eligible for Purple Hearts, By that time, Hasan had been tried and convicted and sentenced to death.

I don't see how any conservative can object to those outcomes -- but conservatives continue to insist that every non-conservative applies the label "workplace violence" routinely to acts that are ultimately determined to be terrorism. It's not true in general, and it isn't true now. We need more definitive information about the San Bernardino incident, but I see no evidence that anyone is denying the possibility that it was terrorism. Yet every right-winger going forward will be certain that that's we all spent this moment in a state of denial.

IF YOU ENJOY DAYS LIKE TODAY, DON'T WORRY, WE'LL HAVE MORE

Coming to your TV soon:

Home shopping network for guns set to launch in January

In just a matter of weeks, Americans will be able to buy a new firearm from the comfort of their own couch while watching TV.

GunTV is set to launch in January, according to The Desert Sun.

Much like other popular outlets such as QVC and the Home Shopping Network, GunTV will feature hosts talking up the items. Viewers will then be able to pull the trigger by going online and ordering or picking up the phone.

Initially, GunTV will air for six hours a day, starting at 1 a.m., with plans to turn it into a 24-hour firearm shopping channel.

Oh, great -- this channel will, at least at first, be pitched at insomniac Travis Bickles. What could possibly go wrong?

We're assured that traditional gun-buying protocols will be in place:

To work within gun laws, GunTV won’t actually sell firearms directly to its viewers. Instead, when a viewer calls GunTV, the network will place an order on behalf of that viewer with Sports South, a Louisiana firearms distributor. Sports South will then ship the weapon to a local gun store, where it can be purchased like normal by the viewer....

The sales process appears to adhere to the laws that regulate gun sales, said [Laura] Cutilletta, the attorney from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. She said she found some relief in the fact that gun stores would still be conducting background checks and record-keeping that is required by law.

Well, that's for now. I'm sure President Rubio will sign the bill dispensing with this formality.

Oh, and GunTV is part of a gun marketing company called ... okay, wait for it ...

I love America.

MAINSTREAM-MEDIA STENOGRAPHERS ARE STILL TAKING DICTATION

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank just discovered something shocking:

Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist

You don't say! Really, Dana? Tell me more.

... Some will think this an outrageous label to apply to the frontrunner for a major party’s presidential nomination. Ordinarily, I would agree that name-calling is part of what’s wrong with our politics.

But there is a greater imperative not to be silent in the face of demagoguery. Trump in this campaign has gone after African Americans, immigrants, Latinos, Asians, women, Muslims and now the disabled....

It might be possible to explain away any one of Trump’s outrages as a mistake or a misunderstanding. But at some point you’re not merely saying things that could be construed as bigoted: You are a bigot.

At Balloon Juice, Betty Cracker looks at this op-ed and other recent media denunciations of Trump and asks the right question -- but I'm not sure I agree with her answer:

Beltway creature Dana Milbank is pointing out the obvious: Trump is a racist and a bigot. But we’ve known that all along. As Milbank himself acknowledges, Trump’s true colors have been on public display for more than 25 years, at least since he purchased newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for the black and Hispanic juveniles who were (falsely!) accused of gang rape in the Central Park jogger case.

More recently, Trump was a high-profile band-wagoneer in the baldly racist “birther” movement; he claimed to have dispatched investigators to Hawaii to uncover evidence that the president wasn’t a US citizen back in 2011. So why is this apparently lifelong racist and bigot being called out now?

A few days ago, another Beltway media creature, Jake Tapper, called a Trump advisor out for Trump’s lies about thousands of Muslims in New Jersey taking to the streets to cheer the World Trade Center terrorist attacks as well as Trump’s mockery of a disabled NYT reporter. The advisor flat-out lies, and Tapper is moved to display the incredulity and exasperation he might have more properly expressed when he interviewed Trump himself earlier. Again, why now?

Yes, why now?

Betty agrees with what David Roberts wrote in a much-discussed post at Vox: that mainstream journalists and pundits are defending their Beltway turf. They're supposed to be the gatekeepers, the people who decide what's within the pale and what's beyond it. Usually they're passive, but their occasional moments of righteous indignation keep them relevant. Trump, however, doesn't care what they think, and isn't harmed when they say he's violated the rules. So, Betty thinks, they're fighting back on their own behalf, in order to reassert their relevance.

That's an interesting explanation for why there have been little bursts of anti-Trump outrage from the likes of Milbank and Tapper (and Chuck Todd, who pressed Trump on the matter of alleged 9/11 celebrations on TV a couple of days ago). But I think something else is going on.

I don't think a few members of the press are suddenly challenging Trump now as a way of defending themselves. I don't think they have that much self-respect.

I think they're suddenly attacking Trump now on behalf of their buddies in the Republican Establishment.

What have been reading for the past weeks? Article after article after article about the GOP Establishment's deep desire to take down Trump, and its trepidation about actually taking the plunge and going after him. Opposing candidates are skittish about taking Trump on. So are billionaire donors. So are party insiders.

What fool will take this suicide mission on? Hey, let's ask our stenographer pals in the mainstream media! I bet they'll do it!

We know most mainstream political journalists and pundits have lots of friends in the GOP Establishment. We know that most mainstream journos and pundits are deeply committed to the notion that the GOP isn't crazy, therefore the system isn't irreparably broken. So if they're asked by the Establishment to do their bit in the fight to take down Trump, so the game can be played in the usual way next year and everything that's wrong in American politics can once again be reduced to "both sides do it," I'm sure they're more than happy to oblige.

Yeah, they could also be defending their own turf. But I think the main explanation for the uptick in Trump denunciations is that they've been recruited into the war on Trump -- and they're happily volunteering to fight on the GOP Establishment's side.

IF OLD WHITE MEN VOTE, TRUMP TOPPING THE TICKET WON'T HURT THE GOP MUCH

I gather from this New York Times story that Republican insiders are panicking at the prospect that Donald Trump will be their presidential nominee:

... irritation is giving way to panic as it becomes increasingly plausible that Mr. Trump could be the party’s standard-bearer and imperil the careers of other Republicans.

Many leading Republican officials, strategists and donors now say they fear that Mr. Trump’s nomination would lead to an electoral wipeout, a sweeping defeat that could undo some of the gains Republicans have made in recent congressional, state and local elections....

“If he carries this message into the general election in Ohio, we’ll hand this election to Hillary Clinton -- and then try to salvage the rest of the ticket,” said Matt Borges, chairman of the Republican Party there, where Senator Rob Portman is facing a competitive re-election.

Pat Brady, the former state Republican chairman in Illinois, where Senator Mark S. Kirk is also locked in a difficult campaign, was even more direct. “If he’s our nominee, the repercussions of that in this state would be devastating,” Mr. Brady said....

“Senator Portman is a great example I like to use when talking about this,” said Brian Walsh, a Senate campaign veteran. “He’s very well prepared, has tons of cash in the bank, and he got his campaign organized and up and running early. But if we nominate a bad presidential candidate like Trump, senators like Portman or [New Hampshire's] Kelly Ayotte aren’t going to be able to outrun Hillary by that much. And there goes the Senate.”

But when I look at the new Quinnipiac national poll, I see Clinton beating Trump by a mere 6 points. She runs better against Trump than against Marco Rubio, but the difference is not vast:

American voters shift to Clinton as the Democrat gains ground against Republicans:

- 47 - 41 percent over Trump...

- Clinton at 45 percent to Rubio's 44 percent...

- Clinton tops Cruz 47 - 42 percent...

- Clinton at 46 percent to Carson's 43 percent....

(Sorry, Bernie fans: Sanders barely does better against Trump -- he wins by 8.)

In a race against Clinton, Trump wins white men by a whopping 57%-31%. He wins senior citizens 46%-39%. He wins men overall 49%-39%. (Trump beats Sanders in all these groups as well, by slightly smaller margins.) In fact, Clinton's margin against Trump in the Real Clear Politics poll average is only 5 points. (Sanders's margin is just 4.2 points.)

White men are going to vote for any Republican, by an overwhelming margin, no matter who the Democratic nominee is. Older voters are almost certain to vote Republican, because they're the whitest voter group and they now see the Democratic Party as the party of those scary nonwhites.

Voting results in non-presidential elections in recent years suggest that Southern voting patterns -- whites monolithically voting Republican -- are gradually spreading to the Midwest. All the smart people think that will magically change in a presidential year. I sure hope so, but I'm not confident.

Hillary Clinton is not well liked. (In the new Quinnipiac poll, her favorable/unfavorable rating is 44%/51%; among men, it's 36%/59%.) Bernie Sanders is in positive territory (44%/31%) -- but Republicans aren't taking him seriously as a potential nominee (which is probably realistic), so opinions of him could change rapidly in the unlikely event that he's the nominee. Also, he'd be vastly outspent in a general election -- he wouldn't avail himself of any super PACs, and huge amounts of billionaire cash would be used against him.

In either case, this is not going to be a Democratic blowout. GOP senators in very white New Hampshire and largely white Ohio aren't doomed even with Trump at the top of the ticket. Old white men will vote GOP no matter what.

ROBERT DEAR: WHY DIDN'T THE WHITE COMMUNITY INTERVENE?

I'm not going to single out the right's recent anti-Planned Parenthood rhetoric as the sole reason for Robert Dear's shooting spree. We're learning from The New York Times and other sources that -- as we regularly say when we're talking about jihadist terrorists -- Dear was radicalized years ago:

A number of people who knew Mr. Dear said he was a staunch abortion opponent, though another ex-wife, Pamela Ross, said that he did not obsess on the subject. After his arrest, Mr. Dear said “no more baby parts” to investigators, a law enforcement official said.

One person who spoke with him extensively about his religious views said Mr. Dear, who is 57, had praised people who attacked abortion providers, saying they were doing “God’s work.” In 2009, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concerns for the privacy of the family, Mr. Dear described as “heroes” members of the Army of God, a loosely organized group of anti-abortion extremists that has claimed responsibility for a number of killings and bombings.

Dear "did not obsess on the subject"? That wouldn't matter if he were a lone wolf who'd killed people in the name of ISIS or Al Qaeda. The fact that he'd ever spoken favorably about a violent radical group would have led a lot of people to say, "When are the so-called peaceful Muslims going to start dealing with this kind of thing in their own communities?"

So I'm asking the same thing: When are heartland white people going to start intervening to stop these radicals before they can kill?

Dear praised the Army of God in 2009 -- the year abortion doctor George Tiller was murdered by Scott Roeder, who's been identified as an Army of God member, and who is described to this day as an "American hero" on the Army of God website. The group unabashedly advocates violence in the fight against abortion.

So people in the community knew Dear was pro-terrorism. And it was known that he had a propensity for rage and violence:

The man she had married professed to be deeply religious. But after more than seven years with Robert L. Dear Jr., Barbara Micheau had come to see life with him as a kind of hell on earth.

By January 1993, she had had enough. In a sworn affidavit as part of her divorce case, Ms. Micheau described Mr. Dear as a serial philanderer and a problem gambler, a man who kicked her, beat her head against the floor.....

In May of [1991], according to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, Mr. Dear was arrested and convicted in Charleston for the unlawful carrying of a “long blade knife” and the illegal possession of a loaded gun.

... Records obtained from the North Charleston Police Department show that in November of [1992], Mr. Dear was arrested as a suspect in a rape case. But the state Law Enforcement Division, which offers criminal records checks to the public, has no record of Mr. Dear being convicted of such a crime, meaning it is likely that the case was dismissed.

According to the police incident report, the woman told the police that a man named Robert approached her at her job at a Sears store in a mall and asked her out on a date. She refused. The man proceeded to call her two to three times a day, she said, “saying he wanted to see her,” according to the report.

On the afternoon of Nov. 29, 1992, the woman said, the man turned up at the front door of her apartment, put a knife to her throat, forced her inside and sexually assaulted her....

This is another problem: Officials don't connect the dots. Dear's ex-wife accused him of abuse, but the violence was never treated as a criminal act. He was charged with rape, but we're told by the Times that the lone witness refused to testify, and prosecutors urged the woman and her husband to drop the case. Dear has also been charged with animal cruelty and being a peeping Tom, but those charges also didn't stick.

None of this put guns out of reach for him.

We chide Europeans for letting people with jihadist sympathies and a series of run-ins with the law plot new actions seemingly at will -- for instance, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the recent Paris attacks:

Exploiting Europe’s passport-free zone and patchy intelligence sharing, Mr. Abaaoud and his team moved not just across the Continent, but also to Syria and back. They did so despite being questioned at airports, flagged by security services or pulled over during routine traffic stops.

“Abaaoud was in the database of every single European country, but he returned to Europe like he was going on a vacation to Club Med,” said the mother of an 18-year-old Belgian jihadist who died earlier this year after joining the same Islamic State brigade to which several of the Paris plotters belonged.

But future mass murderers whose rage is an open secret to U.S. authorities cross state borders, obtain weapons, and hatch plots at will, too. Why doesn't the community or the government stop them? You tell me.

KEEP IT SIMPLE (AND STUPID), TED

Is this really going to be effective for Ted Cruz?

Ted Cruz on Monday offered his strongest denunciation so far of Marco Rubio's foreign policy views, assailing his Republican presidential rival as a proponent of “military adventurism” that he said has benefited Islamic militant groups....

“Senator Rubio emphatically supported Hillary Clinton in toppling [Muammar] Qaddafi in Libya. I think that made no sense,” Cruz told Bloomberg Politics in a wide-ranging and exclusive interview during a campaign swing through Iowa. He argued that the 2011 bombings that toppled the Libyan leader didn't help the fight against terrorists. “Qaddafi was a bad man, he had a horrible human rights record. And yet ... he had become a significant ally in fighting radical Islamic terrorism.”

“The terrorist attack that occurred in Benghazi was a direct result of that massive foreign policy blunder,” Cruz said....

The Texan portrayed himself as a third way between the stalwart, non-interventionist views of Senator Rand Paul and pro-interventionist policies in pursuit of spreading democracy and human rights through the Middle East that Rubio espouses. Cruz's belief is that trying to democratize those societies can be counterproductive and that U.S. military power should be focused narrowly on protecting U.S. interests.

“If you look at President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and for that matter some of the more aggressive Washington neo-cons, they have consistently mis-perceived the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and have advocated military adventurism that has had the effect of benefiting radical Islamic terrorists,” he said.

I understand why Cruz would want to hang Benghazi around Rubio's neck. But the rest of what he's saying doesn't seem as if it's going to hit the pleasure centers in wingnut voters' brains. "Military adventurism" is bad? The Ron/Rand Paul contingent of the GOP might believe that, but that voting bloc just seems to get smaller and smaller every day. (Seen Rand's poll numbers lately?)

Cruz is trying to articulate his foreign policy philosophy the way candidates have traditionally done it: by making detailed pronouncements and comparing himself to other candidates using traditional categories. He's not an "interventionist"; he's not an "isolationist." Thoughtful panelists on Sunday talk shows will ponder this and consider whether they've assigned him to the wrong"lane" in the presidential race.

But all that is completely irrelevant to the race as it's actually taking place, because the frontrunner, Donald Trump, is going straight for those wingnut pleasure centers, which tingle at the thought of killing lots and lots of brown people. Yes, Trump is somewhat less interventionist than Rubio, which puts him in the same foreign policy "lane" as Cruz, according to the thoughtful pundits. But Trump's "plan" for ISIS, he's told us, is this: "I would bomb the shit out of them." Every wingnut gets a thrill up the leg from that. And even the best-known example of Trump's purported non-interventionism -- "If Putin wants to knock the hell out of ISIS, I’m all for it 100 percent and I can’t understand how anybody would be against that" -- imagines brown-skinned terrorists being killed by a strongman who presumably doesn't care about avoidance of civilian casualties or "political correctness." Those of us who are actually paying attention know that Putin isn't particularly interested in fighting ISIS, but to Trump's fans, this idea probably seems like more red meat.

Cruz can formulate whatever policy doctrine he chooses -- but in public he should emphasize vengeance and rage if he wants to have a shot at defeating Trump. He's trying too hard to be a normal politician. He needs to be a crude simpleton.

RIGHTIES REALLY THINK THEY'VE PROVED TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT JERSEY MUSLIMS CHEERING ON 9/11

Donald Trump continues to insist that he personally saw Muslims in New Jersey celebrating on 9/11 -- yesterday, on Morning Joe, he said they "went wild." Prior to that, on more than one occasion, he said he saw TV footage in which "thousands" of New Jersey Muslims cheered the attacks. Fact checks don't deter him. The recollections of New Jersey residents, up to and including the current Republican governor, an unabashed neoconservative, don't deter him.

His fans never stop looking for more evidence to back him up. They think they have a new smoking gun.

They don't, but here it is. Flagged by some guy on Twitter, touted at a right-wing blog called the Last Refuge (otherwise known as the Conservative Treehouse), and brandished exultantly in a couple of Free Republic threads, it's a column by Fred Siegel that appeared in the New York Post on September 14, 2001, under the headline "The Issue Is Radical Islam." It's not available in the Post's archives (the Conservative Treehouse blogger speculates that it was "scrubbed," for some sinister reason), but it can found in the Internet Archive (here). It reads in part:

Here in New York, it was easy to get angry listening to Egyptians, Palestinians and the Arabs of nearby Paterson, N.J., celebrate as they received word of the murderous attacks in New York and Washington.

Trump is right! Suck it, libtards!

First point: Siegel doesn't say there were "thousands" celebrating. Second point: Siegel doesn't say he saw this. He's not a reporter. He's known as a historian -- he teaches at Cooper Union -- but he's better known as a guy who applies a veneer of intellectualism to the usual right-wing boilerplate, as a New York Post columnist, as the author of a book on Rudy Giuliani that the far-from-liberal New York Sun called "hagiography," and as a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Siegel writes for the Institute's City Journal, where his recent scholarly contributions have borne titles such as "De Blasio's 'Reforms' Will Keep More NYers Dependent on Taxpayers"; "Ferguson Fury: Activists, Journalists Stuck in 1960s Racial Resentments"; "Twilight of the Left"; and "How Public Unions Took Taxpayers Hostage."

So, um, not exactly an agenda-less observer. Siegel is a partisan hack, and he wasn't even claiming that he personally saw any Muslims celebrating on 9/11, in person or on TV. He cites no source.

But the right will call this a smoking gun. And Trumpites will continue to embrace their hero.

****

Oh, and Trump got more backup yesterday from one of his press agents on Fox & Friends:

Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy defended Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump‘s claim that thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrated on 9/11, saying that he knew people who saw it in person and that he saw it on television.

“I actually remember things like that,” Doocy insisted. “I remember, because I live one town away from one of the towns where, according to my neighbors, they saw it with their own two eyes, there were people celebrating.”

“I also remember there was video on television,” he said. “I don’t remember if it was from that town or from New Jersey. Nonetheless, Donald Trump says there are a lot of people out there who have verified the idea of his story.”

Doocy swears his neighbors swear they saw the celebrations! That's all the proof I need!

The clip is below. Stick around for "straight news" anchor Bill Baier saying, "Did it happen in New Jersey? Of course. Did thousands and thousands of people do it? I don't know if we've backed that up." We just can't tell! Trump could be absolutely right!



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UPDATE:

Look at the editorial I was just sent from the NY Post on 9/14/01 - 3 days after collapse of WTC. Any apologies? pic.twitter.com/b6DKEOk8Px

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 1, 2015