SO IF RICK PERRY IS CONVICTED, SHOULD HE HAVE TO REFUND THE COST OF YOUR T-SHIRT?

Rick Perry is selling indictment swag:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) seems to be enjoying the spotlight that has come with pushing back to his recent indictment.

The latest move: His new political action committee unveiled a T-shirt featuring Perry's mug shot. The back of the shirt features the mug shot of District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, whose character Perry has repeatedly tried to attack while making her the poster child of his pushback.

I guess this doesn't quite fall under the rubric of profiting from a crime, does it - at least not yet? Innocent until proven guilty and all that. Still, "law and order" types in this country tend to be appalled at the notion that you can make money from felonious activity -- many states and the federal government have "Son of Sam" laws that legally prevent felons from making money off their misdeeds. Texas passed a law of that kind in 1979, though it was repealed in 1993.

On the other hand, a 2013 Austin American-Statesman article tells me that since the repeal of that law, prosecutors in Texas have "prevented felons from profiteering by attaching stipulations to their sentence regarding restitution." Will that happen to the profits from these shirts if Perry is convicted?

That article appears on the Senate site of Perry's fellow Texas Republican John Cornyn. I learn from the article that Cornyn wants to expand the federal Son of Sam law:

Spurred in part by new controversy over the online offering of a letter written by convicted Fort Hood mass shooter Nidal Hassan, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn on Friday proposed legislation to block high-profile criminals from selling "murderabilia" for their profit.

Cornyn, who tried unsuccessfully in 2010 to ban the sale of such items as artwork, letters and other memorabilia by serial killers, mass murderers and others convicted of heinous crimes, said the legislation would be the first federal law to prevent criminals from bolstering their notoriety through "murderabilia" sales....

Senator, your thoughts? Should Governor Perry have to refund any money he raises this way if he's convicted? Should Texas pass a new Son of Sam law? At what point do felonies become "heinous crimes"?

AND SPEAKING OF PRESIDENTIAL RECREATION DURING CRISES...

Yes, President Obama continued to play golf after the murder of James Foley -- but remember that an aide to President Kennedy summoned Mimi Alford, a college student with whom JFK was having an affair, to the White House in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to Alford's 2012 memoir, Once Upon a Secret.



Although it should be noted that they didn't actually have sex, according to Alford:



But he wanted her there for him. And yet the world survived.

GOOD PRESS FOR A REPUBLICAN? IT DOESN'T TAKE MUCH

There's a story in The Washington Post today about Rand Paul's trip to Guatemala to do eye surgery for indigent patients. Although the story notes the partly self-serving nature of the trip -- Paul is accompanied by, among others, his top political aide, David Bossie of Citizens United, two politcal admakers, and someone obtaining releases so that Paul can later use footage of the Guatemalans for (presumably) electoral ends -- it's largely a positive write-up. Paul Waldman responds by describing the senator as a "press management wizard":

How does Rand Paul do it? He's not someone who can give a speech that'll make you cry, like Barack Obama can, and he's not someone who lights up a room like Bill Clinton. He's never written a law, let alone an important one that improved people's lives. Nobody thinks he's some kind of super-genius.... And yet he gets way more attention than anybody else running for president.... So how does he do it?

... in the end, just because this is a story about Rand Paul doing charitable work on his August vacation, the reader unavoidably comes away thinking, "Isn't that Rand Paul a nice fellow?"

This is yet another demonstration of just how good Paul is at working the press. As the article says, this trip was planned months ago, and it's convenient ... because that's when congressional reporters have nothing else to write about. It can be hard to come up with things to fill your news pages about in August.

Except that it's not particularly hard to come up with things to fill up news pages this August. ISIS? Ebola? Ferguson? I'd say it's quite a newsy summer. So that's not it.

I don't think Paul is a "press management wizard." Yes, he gets good press, even when he's not doing charitable work. But there's a simple reason for that: He's a Republican, and he sometimes seems like a non-traditional Republican. The mainstream press is desperate for a Republican to love.

The press hates President Obama now, and is sick of the Clintons. The press regards Joe Biden as a joke and thinks the alleged Democratic up-and-comers (O'Malley, Castro, Gillibrand) are nonentities. Eliabeth Warren is okay, but she's a favorite of (ick!) ideologically committed progressives. Plus, she's an old lady! So there's a limit to her appeal to the boys on the bus. (The press is interested in her only to the extent that she might vanquish an even older lady, Hillary Clinton.) The boys fell for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama when they were young and had New Democrat bro appeal, but those days are long gone.

The political press really, really wants to love a Republican, though it can't just be any Republican. The members of the press corps are fairly urbane, so they don't want to embrace a Republicans who's anti-gay or who doesn't believe in climate change or who favor suppression of the black vote or who questions evolution. Of course, that's pretty much all Republicans. But the desire to love a Republican is strong, so any time one seems to deviate from the GOP norm, he looks really dreamy to the press corps.

Rand Paul does that a bit more than most -- he questions vote suppression and war (sometimes) and drug laws (to some extent) -- so he gives the press a tingle. But the press always feels a tingle when a Republican seems not quite Republican. Look, Paul Ryan put out a poverty plan! Marco Rubio talked about the poor, too! And Mitt Romney acted like a human being in that documentary about his campaign! Swoon, swoon!

It's Bush 2000 all over again. And if the press gets one of these guys elected president, it's going to end the same way.

DON LEMON MAKES SAME GUN TERMINOLOGY MISTAKE AS NOTORIOUS LIBERAL TED NUGENT

National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke is upset because of a gun terminology error made by CNN's Don Lemon:

Lemon's central claim was that, after the shooting in Colorado in 2012, he was able to go out and, in "20 minutes" or less, buy a machine gun. "I think," he added, "most people can go out and buy an automatic weapon."

... "A semi-automatic weapon," radio host Ben Ferguson explained, "is a gun that you and I are allowed to own, and in different places they have different rules. But to imply that anyone can walk out and buy an automatic weapon is just not true, Don."

Ferguson is correct, and Lemon is wrong. Under the law, "automatic" is the word we use to describe weapons that continue to fire for as long as the trigger is depressed. "Semi-automatic," by contrast, is the word we use to describe weapons that will fire once with each trigger pull....

Having been corrected, what Lemon should have said was, "you’re right, I meant 'semi-automatic.'" But he didn't. Instead, he said:

“For me, an automatic weapon is anything that you can shoot off a number of rounds very quickly.”

What?

... the item that the panel is discussing was a semi-automatic weapon. There is no "dispute" over this. This is not an ongoing "debate." It’s not a matter of "opinion." It's not an issue on which we can "agree to disagree." It’s not an "altercation" that can give way to "compromise." It’s a fact. An undisputed fact. And yet, for some reason, Lemon seemed to believe that he could talk his way out of his mistake.

Yes, Lemon got his terminology wrong. Gun extremists fixate on such mistakes, as a way of signaling to fellow members of their tribe that these gun-grabbers are arrogant elitist metrosexual pantywaists who don't know the first thing about our way of life. I think everyone who wants to report on gun violence or advocate for gun control needs to learn not to make such errors, if only to deprive gunners of this trump card.

On the other hand, Lemon is hardly alone. Here's a gentleman who's actually quite fond of guns, in an onstage appearance in 2007:

Obama, he's a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine gun. Let's hear it for him. And then I was in New York. I said, "Hey, Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch." Since I'm in California, how about [Senator] Barbara Boxer [D-CA], she might want to suck on my machine gun. And [Senator] Dianne Feinstein [D-CA], ride one of these you worthless whore. Any questions?

As an op-ed columnist for Oregon's Salem News noted at the time of this incident:

In the video clip capturing the rocker's antics, you see Nugent standing onstage with AR-15 semi-automatic rifles in each hand. He references the weapons as "machine guns." My first thought was that such an outspoken gun advocate should know that the AR-15 IS NOT a machine gun. Sorry, good try Ted. The AR-15 is the civilian version of the M-16 and it does not fire fully automatic.

A libertarian columnist for the Orange County Register -- a Nugent defender -- also identified the firearms as AR-15s, not machine guns.

Has Charles C.W. Cooke has ever chided Nugent for this error? If so, I'm not aware of it.

****

Cooke goes on to offer this video to demonstrate the difference between an automatic and a semi-automatic:



In the clip, you watch the use of an automatic weapon -- a belt-fed machine gun -- and, yes, it gets off a lot of rounds in an extremely short time. But then, at 1:25, you watch the shooter use a semi-automatic. He carefully spaces his trigger pulls so that he gets off eight shots in eighteen seconds. Cooke's point in embedding this video: This is what you liberals are so afraid of. Look at it. Heck, it's no faster than a standard hunting rifle.

Well, it's no faster if it's used that way. Cooke chose not to embed a video like this, which demonstrates how many shots you can get off with a semi-automatic weapon (an AR-15 or AK-47) if you're really trying:



With the AK-47, this shooter swaps magazines midway through the demonstration (and briefly fumbles the swap), yet still gets off 30 rounds in 30.66 seconds. And that's the second test -- in the first test, with the AR-15, he gets off 30 rounds in 23.1 seconds. Is that machine-gun fast? No -- but it's pretty freaking fast.

That's BooMan's point:

The first police officer arrived at the Sandy Hook Elementary School a mere four minutes after the first 911 call. And everything was already over. Twenty-six people were dead, including 20 first graders. As the police arrived, Lanza made it twenty-seven when he took his own life. Are you going to tell me that things could have been substantially worse if he had had a fully automatic M-16?

How fast do you need to be able to get off 30 rounds before we're not living under fascist tyranny?

NAHHH, NOTHING RACIST HERE

There's a thread over at Free Republic titled "Sign Ideas for Ferguson Counter-Protests." Here are a few suggestions from that thread:

I’d be there to help you protest
But I have to work instead.
So with the EBT I pay for
Your children will be fed.

PANTS UP!!!
DON'T TOOT!!!

("TOOT"? What decade are we in?)

How 'bout:
"Blacks are a protected species".
(Same with any minority.)

WE SHOULD HAVE PICKED OUR OWN DAMN COTTON.

There's concern trollery:

If you have time to protest and loot, you have time to study and work.

Get off welfare, get a job and quit crying about criminals dying committing a crime.

BOOKS, NOT BRUTALITY!

"Get even by getting an education and job"

And one Freeper comments:

Won't work. None of them can read.

It might be a good time to interject this, which is not from the Freep thread:

An officer told Lillian Guthrie to "go get a job" as she and her son protested Monday. She's a financial analyst. pic.twitter.com/n1EL1hjlFR

— Antonio French (@AntonioFrench) August 20, 2014

There's this:

NEED A NEW TV ?
Re-ELECT JAY !! WORKBOOTS OPTIONAL

Which is met by this:

Amazingly, not one pair of workboots was reported stolen during all that looting and pillaging.

And by this:

Workboots are the only thing still available at all of the looted stores!

Now, where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah -- Joe the Plumber's Facebook page:



There are the usual attacks on Eric Holder and the Obamas:

Your slave masters, obama and holder love that they can manipulate you so easily.

Why didn't/don't Obama and Holder live in Ferguson ?
If Obama had a son, he'd look like Holder!
If Holder had a son, he'd look like Michele!

And, of course, many of the signs presuppose that Mike Brown attempted to murder Darren Wilson:

1)THUG TRIES TO KILL COP
2)THUG IS SHOT DEAD
WHICH PART OF "DUH!!"
DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

"GENTLE GIANTS"
DON'T SMASH
PEOPLE'S FACES
BACK INTO
THEIR SKULLS

"Live like a thug, die like a thug"

Good grief, the cop got his eye punched out.
What don't you understand about a cop being attacked???

Sorry, We're Not Going To Make Beating Cops Legal!

And, of course:

Wilson/Zimmerman—2016

CNN is reporting that, contrary to reports that made their way up the wingnut food chain, Darren Wilson did not have fractured eye socket, although he did go to the hospital after the shooting and was treated for a swollen face. But Fox News hasn't updated its story "Missouri Cop Was Badly Beaten Before Shooting Michael Brown, Says Source," which is still among the "trending" stories on the Fox News home page as I write this. The story is also still on the Fox Nation front page.

Trust me -- America's right-wingers will never, ever stop believing that Brown broke Wilson's eye socket and nearly killed him, just as they'll never stop believing that Trayvon Martin nearly killed George Zimmerman. (Recall that a medical examiner at Zimmerman's trial called Zimmerman's wounds "very insignificant"; even Marc Siegel, a doctor who's a regular medical commentator for Fox, agreed with that.) The point of spreading the eye socket story was to plant the narrative in the minds of people who want to believe the shooting was justified. That effort succeeded.

DICK CHENEY IS AN OLD HAND AT POLITICIZING BEHEADINGS

The body of James Foley was barely cold when Dick Cheney suited himself up to go on Sean Hannity's Fox show to blame (as he sees it) the real enemy: the Obama administration.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is predicting that the beheading of American journalist James Foley is just the start of more violence if President Barack Obama doesn't "deal with this crisis" in Iraq....

"... magnify that [beheading] a million times over because that is what's in store for the rest of the world if we don't deal with this crisis."

"I think every single day that goes by [Obama] is finding that there's a bigger and bigger gulf between his hoped-for view of the world and reality," Cheney said. "I think the danger is enormous, I don't think the president understands it."

Cheney commented that he believes Obama's view of the world is "fundamentally flawed" and that his aversion to military action has made other world leaders view the president as "weak and ineffective," saying "there is no question ... he is viewed as perhaps the weakest president in my lifetime." ...

Cheney is an experienced politicizer of jihadist beheadings, although the last time he did this he waited until a couple of years after the murder, so he could do his politicizing during a presidential campaign. That led to a rebuke from the victim's father:

Following a controversial speech by Vice President Dick Cheney, the father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is urging Democrats and Republicans to refrain from turning his son's death into a political football.

Judea Pearl expressed his sentiments after Cheney's August 12 [2004] speech, in which the vice president blasted Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Kerry for declaring that if elected, he would fight a "more sensitive war on terror." In the course of disparaging Kerry, Cheney invoked the Islamic militant killers of Pearl and another American, Paul Johnson Jr.

"The men who beheaded Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson will not be impressed by our sensitivity," Cheney said.

Days later, when asked about the speech, Judea Pearl told the Forward: "The family of Daniel Pearl respectfully requests that his tragic legacy remain non-partisan." Pearl, an Israeli-born computer science professor at UCLA, said that he did not know of any politician -- Democrat or Republican -- other than Cheney who has invoked the killing in order to score points against a political opponent....

But Cheney didn't care, and doesn't care now. He's got a war to win. And it's not a war against the people who cut off Pearl and Foley's heads.

AFTER COMMUNISM'S FALL, THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE, EXCEPT ORGANIZED ULTRAVIOLENCE

This is from a piece by The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson about the killing of James Foley:

Yesterday's guerrillas have given way to terrorists, and now terrorists have given way to this new band, who are something like serial killers. ISIS, an organization of thugs, is the Middle East's answer to the psycho-killer narco gang Los Zetas, trying to out-bad their enemies, to frighten them into submission, and to somehow draw themselves into an ugly cartoon of evil.

Anderson juxtaposes ISIS and brutal drug gangs -- which interests me because I've been thinking that jihadism and narcoterrorism are the only alternatives to capitalism left for anyone who chafes under the established order in a post-communist world. Capitalism triumphed a generation ago, communism is dead, but what remains is deeply unsatisfactory to much of the world, especially after the 2007-2008 economic collapse -- yet there appears to be no alternative.

No alternative, that is, except jihadism in parts of the world, and narcoterrorism in others. They're the only forces that create pockets wherein the Masters of the Universe, and the governments they own, aren't completely the masters.

Anderson goes on to write:

Last week, I met with Faisal Ali Waraabe, a politician in the Justice and Welfare Party, from Somaliland. He is a candidate in next year's Presidential elections. As a younger man, he was a socialist and a devotee of Che Guevara. Last year, he lost his twenty-two-year-old son Sayid, who was born and raised in Finland, to the dark enticements of ISIS.... I asked Faisal what he thought of ISIS, and about what his son is doing. He shook his head sadly, raised his hands helplessly in the air, and said, "They are the new barbarians."

Yes -- but if you're young and thoroughly unsatisfied with the status quo, they're pretty much all that's left. You're certainly not going to get very far in 2014 as a socialist devotee of Che Guevara.

The old bromide says that when nonviolent revolution is impossible, violent revolution become inevitable. Here's a variant: When economic revolt is impossible, nihilist revolution is inevitable. And it's going to be extremely violent nihilism, because that's the only thing that scares the crap out of the universe's Masters enough to hold them at bay.

AT FOX, NEEDLESS TO SAY, OBAMA CAN'T WIN

Here are three James Foley stories on the Fox Nation front page right now. First, the oldest one:



Then, of course, we learned that the president sent Special Forces to try to rescue Foley, but the would-be rescuers learned, after a firefight, that Foley wasn't at the targeted location. So we get this at Fox Nation -- even though the original thread is still up:



And then, after that, we get Charles Krauthammer complaining not only that Obama shouldn't have made information about the raid public, he shouldn't be sending missions to rescue kidnapped journalists and fight their captors at all:

A "Special Report" panel discussed this news released by the Obama administration on the attempted rescue mission. Charles Krauthammer called the statement "a political reaction to a horrific event."

Krauthammer said that it could also be interpreted as a message to ISIS that we failed.

According to Krauthammer, the response is not a rescue mission, it's the continuation of airstrikes. He called it encouraging that the U.S. doubled airstrikes today.

Krauthammer also blasted Obama's statements on James Foley's murder as "weak, ambiguous and vague."

Well, it was big of Krauthammer to offer praise for the continued airstrikes -- but note that we're approaching the point at which Fox News bloviators seem prepared to criticize the president even if he launches a successful rescue mission, killing a few captors along the way. Krauthammer seems ready to proclaim that any successful rescue in the future is actually a strategic failure and a foreign policy blunder.

Well, what do I expect? These people attacked Obama for the successful bin Laden raid. Obama took too much credit himself! Obama leaked secret information! Obama isn't really in the Situation Room photo! With these clowns, he can never win.

REBUTTING JOE THE PLUMBER'S RACISM

Talking Points Memo reports that Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher has weighed in on Ferguson. From his Facebook page:



Another (poorly punctuated) Facebook post says, "It's interesting that one of the items NOT being looted in Ferguson is work boots?"

Um, Joe? Here's a photo from a St. Louis job fair that was held in June:



Headline of the story from the local CBS affiliate, KMOX: "Thousands Turn Out for Annual Job Fair."

So shut the hell up with your "All ni... um, liberal Democrats want to stay dependent on government" line of argument, And by the way, Joe: What exactly do you do for a living?

****

UPDATE: Right -- a commenter reminds me that Wurzelbacher got a union job at Chrysler in February.

MITCH McCONNELL'S SHUTDOWN BRINKMANSHIP IS MUCH LOWER-RISK THAN IT SEEMS

In a Politico interview, Mitch McConnell has announced that a GOP majority in the Senate next year could mean another government shutdown:

"We're going to pass spending bills, and they’re going to have a lot of restrictions on the activities of the bureaucracy," McConnell said in an interview aboard his campaign bus traveling through Western Kentucky coal country. "That's something he won't like, but that will be done. I guarantee it."

... McConnell risks overreaching if he follows through with his pledge to attach policy riders to spending bills. If Obama refuses to accept such measures, a government shutdown could ensue.

At The Atlantic's Wire blog, we're being told that Democrats are thrilled:

The only thing that would make congressional Democrats happier than a Republican attempt to impeach President Obama is if Republicans force another government shutdown.

So when Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) raised the specter of a government shutdown fight if Republicans retake the Senate in November, Democrats rejoiced.

And by rejoiced, we mean they feigned outrage.

Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, rapidly released a statement accusing McConnell of "reckless gamesmanship."

... Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's chief spokesman, Adam Jentleson, chimed in on Twitter.

Senator McConnell's tin-ear pitch: vote Republican if you want more shutdowns and more confrontation. http://t.co/8FOnE1XVRJ

— Adam Jentleson (@AJentleson) August 20, 2014

But why shouldn't McConnell threaten a shutdown? Democrats are hoping that the threat will infuriate liberal and moderate voters and drive them to the polls to vote Democratic -- but what might do that is an actual government shutdown, not the threat of one. There's no reason to believe that a threat articulated in late August on a website for political pros and junkies is going to drive voters to the polls two and a half months from now, especially when those voters are actual or potential Democratic voters, who are notoriously hard to motivate. Hell, even the public-opinion impact of the government shutdown we experienced last year was evanescent -- as soon as the shutdown was over, the Democrats' advantage over Republicans on generic-ballot poll questions began to shrink (and eventually reverse), and it took a lot less than two and a half months. The blue hump in the middle is the fleeting moment when Democrats had the greatest advantage over Republicans; that moment ended almost immediately after the shutdown did.



The fact that voters don't remember government shutdowns helps explain why McConnell's threat might be serious. If you were a Republican and you were looking at this chart, and at other 2014 polls, you'd think: Why shouldn't we shut down the government again, just as long as we don't do it a week or two before Election Day 2016? Voters won't remember. They sure don't remember the last shutdown, otherwise they wouldn't be on the verge of reelecting a GOP House and (probably) a GOP Senate.

And, of course, Very Serious People still think a GOP sweep in November could conceivably lead to a more responsible Republican Party. Here's John Harwood of The New York Times:

With control of both chambers of Congress, Republicans might feel a greater responsibility to join Mr. Obama in governance by striking politically appealing compromises.

STOP. Please stop saying this, everyone in the mainstream media.

I should acknowledge that Harwood offers this as a possibility, while saying that the more likely path is confrontation and gridlock. But why throw this in at all? It's not going to happen. Yet voters still think it might, because, outside the small subset of us angry lefties, most of America still hasn't come to terms with how deeply sociopathic the Republican Party is. Even the main premise of Harwood's piece underestimates the GOP's sociopathy: Harwood writes that if Republicans win the Senate, they might extend Washington's period of "dysfunction," which could give Hillary Clinton a chance to run against Washington in 2016. Yeah, John, and you think they aren't going to extend the period of dysfunction if they lose the Senate? Of course they are.

But they might as well, because they won't be held accountable by voters -- they have trouble winning presidential elections, but they never seem to have trouble winning anything else. So if McConnell needs to send a signal like this to curry favor with the far right in his reelection bid, he should go for it -- the GOP won't suffer any consequences.

PODUNK COPS CAN'T POLICE, BUT THEY'RE WORKING THE MEDIA LIKE SEASONED GOP OPERATIVES

Keeping the peace in a moment of great unrest is clearly a job skill the local cops in Ferguson, Missouri, lack, but someone in the pro-cop community in or around Ferguson clearly has rather sophisticated wingnuttish propaganda skills. We know this in part because someone knew enough to spoon-fed this story to Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft, who's called the Stupidest Man on the Internet by everyone on the left even though he's made his blog into a widely read conduit for questionable stories the "respectable" right-wing press doesn't want to report but is all too happy to retransmit:

BREAKING REPORT: Officer Darren Wilson Suffered "Orbital Blowout Fracture to Eye Socket" During Mike Brown Attack

The Gateway Pundit can now confirm from two local St. Louis sources that police Officer Darren Wilson suffered facial fractures during his confrontation with deceased 18 year-old Michael Brown....

Local St. Louis sources said Wilson suffered an "orbital blowout fracture to the eye socket." This comes from a source within the Prosecuting Attorney's office and confirmed by the St. Louis County Police....

As Charles Johnson notes at Little Green Footballs, Wilson is seen in a witness's post-shooting video displaying none of the likely symptoms of this kind of injury, and he didn't leave the scene to get medical attention. Johnson also notes that Hoft illustrates his post with an X-ray of this kind of injury on which the label "UNIV OF IOWA ETC-CT" has been crudely obscured -- no, it's not an X-ray of Wilson, but you're clearly supposed to think it is.

Prior to this, another dubious story mde its way up the media food chain:

Yesterday [Monday], the controversy surrounding the conflicting stories of Michael Brown's death grew hotter, when Christine Byers, a police reporter with the St. Louis Dispatch tweeted the following information about officer Darren Wilson:

Police sources tell me more than a dozen witnesses have corroborated cop's version of events in shooting #Ferguson

— Christine Byers (@ChristineDByers) August 19, 2014

But she backtracked, tweeting this semi-retraction hours later:

On FMLA from paper. Earlier tweets did not meet standards for publication.

— Christine Byers (@ChristineDByers) August 19, 2014

Yeah, she was spreading this tale even though she's not reporting this story, or any other story -- she's taking a Family and Medical Leave Act leave from her job. But her rumormongering also spread like wildfire -- thanks to sites like The Blaze and (again) Gateway Pundit.

Is local law enforcement just tilting the story the way law enforcement always does with local media, but the result this time is that right-wing propagandists with a national base are listening? Or does someone in this process actually grasp how the right-wing puke funnel works? It's probably the former, but the result is the same either way: rumors and disinformation, once they're out there, get enshrined as fact on the right, and that colors the story for all of Heartland America -- and, by the way, for any potential Darren Wilson jurors. Whatever's going on, it's clear that the other side always work the media more skillfully.

****

UPDATE: More here.

TONIGHT THEY'RE GONNA PONTIFICATE LIKE IT'S 1989

Over at Buzzfeed, Evan McMorris-Santoro published a truly naive story titled "Ferguson Is the Beginning of the End for Conservatives' 'War on Crime.'" I was going to write about it, but Roy Edroso said everything I wanted to say, and more:

... I fear the moment is passing. As I said yesterday, take a look at National Review to see which way the stagnant wind blows. Charles C.W. Cooke, who has been among NR's stronger civil-libertarian voices on this subject, has retreated to his comfort zone -- i.e., nuh-uh-you-stupid-liberals, America still rules -- as his colleagues go full lawn-order all around him.

Edroso goes on to quote a Victor Davis Hanson column that lingers on the fact that Malik Shabazz, a member of the New Black Panther Party, has traveled to Ferguson and claims to have been part of a group responsible for calming the streets on Thursday night. Hanson, linking to an earlier National Review post, declares that we're in a moment of lawless post-modernism because Captain Ron Johnson of the Highway Patrol did not immediately clap Shabazz in irons when they appeared together at a community gathering. To Hanson's horror, Johnson said that he was grateful to whoever helped keep the streets calm. Anarchy!

But this is why McMorris-Santoro is being extraordinarily naive: It doesn't matter now what Rand Paul or Grover Norquist may have said about incarceration rates, because we're entering a dangerous moment -- the first moment in a generation in which, at times, the world actually looks like right-wing nightmares of domestic unrest. Think about it: Over the past twenty years or so, Fox News, the Drudge Report, talk radio, and other right-wing media outlets have peddled booga-booga fantasies of urban lawlessness and black rage while crime nationwide has actually plummeted (and stayed low). Now they've got something real, if isolated, to grab onto -- rioting and looting in a majority-black town! A New Black Panther actually doing something newsworthy! The return of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to relevance!

And this coincides with an uptick in shootings in New York City under a hated liberal mayor who's denounced stop-and-frisk -- never mind the fact that homicides are still down here. The schedenfreude on this subject was evident when National Review (yes, again) told us yesterday that fourteen people had been wounded and two killed in shootings in "De Blasio's NYC" over the weekend. The shooting number is high, but as for the fatalaties, hmmm, let's see: two murdered over the weekend in De Blasio's urban hellhole amounts to one a day; by contrast, under the benevolent reign of Mike Bloomberg, New York had a strikingly low 333 homicides last year, which comes out to about ... um, one a day. Barbarians: not exactly at the gate.

But the right can't resist invoking any evidence of the return in real life of anything matching its most fevered fantasies of the breakdown of civilization. Even the rhetoric has a nostalgic tone. In recent days we've had Fox's Todd Starnes referring to Al Sharpton as a "race hustler" -- a much-beloved Giuliani-era slur. And what drug did Fox's Jim Pinkerton suggest might have been in Michael Brown's system when he was shot? PCP -- y'know, just like in the 1980s.

Right-wingers have been warning one another about the swarthy hordes for years; now they think their nightmares are real again. Nothing Rand Paul and Grover Norquist have to say can compete with any of this.

I THINK MICHAEL LIND IS OVERTHINKING THIS

Michael Lind is a Texan and a very smart political observer, but I think he's wrong about the likely consequences of the Rick Perry indictment:

Chris Christie is perhaps the biggest winner from the Perry indictment. Bridgegate was an enormous blow to Christie, for two reasons. First, it destroyed his carefully crafted image as a nonpartisan nice guy instead of a stereotypically sleazy New Jersey pol. Second, forcing commuters to be stranded in traffic during rush hour to punish a political enemy is the kind of abuse of power that is easy to understand -- unlike using a line item veto to cut one of a couple of sources of funding for the office of a county lawyer who pleaded guilty to drunk driving..

Now the indictment of Texas Governor Rick Perry allows Republicans to change the narrative, from "Who knew that Chris Christie was such a bully!" to "Look how liberal prosecutors are trying to bring down every Republican governor who is a potential president!"

[The] indictment of Perry, then, will probably help the more electable Christie or [Scott] Walker, whom Democrats should fear, while hurting, to some degree, the unelectable Perry, whom Democrats should prefer as the Republican presidential nominee.

Wait -- Chris Christie's image used to be "as a nonpartisan nice guy"? No, that's just plain wrong. Nobody looked at Bridgegate and said, "Who knew that Chris Christie was such a bully!" People already knew he was a bully. Being a bully wasn't a bug for him -- it was a feature. That's what people liked about him -- including, alas, many Democratic voters. Unfortunately, they like a bit of rough, too -- just as liberal New York City elected Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s to crack down on squeegee men, blue New Jersey voted for Christie twice in part to crack down on History's Greatest Monsters, teachers with union benefits.

It's true that a lot of voters thought Christie was a nice guy otherwise -- a big, emotional lug who tears up at the site of Sandy storm damage, then brings the hammer down on government employees who want pension benefits to which they're contractually entitled, all because he loves the people of New Jersey. Bridgegate didn't persuade people that Christie is a bully so much as change the notion of precisely which New Jersey residents he might go medieval on. That's not helpful to him.

But I don't see how Christie is helped by Perry's indictment. General-election voters aren't suddenly dismissing the allegations against Christie (or Walker) because they're thinking, "Look how liberal prosecutors are trying to bring down every Republican governor who is a potential president!" Ordinary Americans simply don't pay that much attention to politics this many years before a presidential election. The only people who are thinking that way are permanently enraged Fox viewers and talk radio listeners. They all vote Republican.

Within that voting bloc, who comes out the best? Perry, because he's denounced the charges against him the most strenuously. He keeps telling us that the indictment is outrageous and has no validity whatsoever. That's got to get wingnut blood pumping! Christie, by contrast, foolishly argued that Bridgegate was a bad thing, just not a bad thing that was his fault personally. He said it went on under his own nose and he was shocked, shocked, to discover it had happened. This was Christie forgetting to do any of the things his fans like about him. He should have lashed out at his accusers. He should have pounded lecterns and damned the whole thing as a Democrat/liberal witch hunt. He should, in short, have done exactly what Perry's doing now.

Jonathan Bernstein makes a better point: that the indictment hurts Perry with "Republican party actors." I'd say the legal woes of all three of these guys help Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and so on. But Perry's indictment doesn't help Christie or Walker.

Bernstein adds:

It's certainly true that resentment sells better than anything else in Republican contests....

Basically, if Perry can get this thing behind him quickly, it becomes a somewhat useful talking point for him on the campaign trail. If not, it really could be a severe problem.

I'd say that if Perry "can get this thing behind him quickly" it becomes a hugely useful talking point for him on the primary campaign trail -- a bloody shirt he can continually wave. Walker and Christie don't seem nearly as inclined to defy the investigators. That may hurt them in early 2016.

IS MONEY THE REASON WE CAN'T TRANSCEND RACE?

Charlie Pierce believes America can never fully overcome its racial animosities:

The honest conclusion to be drawn from what is going on in Missouri now is that we may have reached the limits of the American idea, of the American dream, of the American experiment. This country, it is fair to conclude, cannot exist without some manifestation of its fundamental racial divide. Slavery, followed by Reconstruction, followed by American apartheid, followed by the Civil Rights movement, followed by Wallace and white backlash, followed by the election of Barack Obama followed by the shooting of Trayvon Martin, followed by the acquittal of George Zimmerman, followed by the strangulation of Eric Garner -- where'd he go, by the way? -- and the shooting of Michael Brown. Maybe we should admit it to ourselves, we of the dwindling white majority, that the racial divide is something essential to holding our idea of the country together. It may be that we cannot unify ourselves without fashioning every 50 years or so, a new suit of clothes for old Jim Crow. White people will be a minority in this country, and very soon. Maybe the racial divide is all we have left.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar thinks the real problem is class:

This fist-shaking of everyone's racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue that the targets of police overreaction are based less on skin color and more on an even worse Ebola-level affliction: being poor. Of course, to many in America, being a person of color is synonymous with being poor, and being poor is synonymous with being a criminal. Ironically, this misperception is true even among the poor.

And that's how the status quo wants it.

The U.S. Census Report finds that 50 million Americans are poor. Fifty million voters is a powerful block if they ever organized in an effort to pursue their common economic goals. So, it's crucial that those in the wealthiest One Percent keep the poor fractured by distracting them with emotional issues like immigration, abortion and gun control so they never stop to wonder how they got so screwed over for so long.

I see an interaction between race and class. My Italian ancestors, and Charlie Pierce's Irish ancestors, were despised in this country, too, but the majority culture eventually embraced us. I think in large part it's because white ethnics reached for a piece of the pie at a time when America was making more pies, and sharing them broadly. White skin helped, too, obviously -- but we benefited from some decades of economic expansion before the Depression hit.

By contrast, blacks were excluded from full participation in the larger economy for a century after the Civil War. When did the door opened a crack? Just before the economic turmoil of the 1970s -- which was the beginning of a period when overall inequality began to increase. The wealth of the middle class hasn't expanded much since the Nixon years, so white America feels it has no extra pie to go around. The rich, as Abdul-Jabbar says, just keep baking more and more pie. But they're not sharing -- and they're taking more and more pie from middle-class whites. Therefore, middle-class whites resent demands for pie from anyone else.

It's probably more than that. We may never be capable of color-blindness, as Pierce says. But it would be nice to have an economy that's expanding for everyone, in order to know for sure. Or just for its own sake.

NO, IT'S NOT INEPTITUDE IN FERGUSON

Jelani Cobb at The New Yorker:

From the outset, the overlapping bureaucracies in Ferguson handled the case in ways that suggested ineptitude. Yet subsequent developments -- the stonewalling followed by contradictory statements, the detention of reporters, the clumsy deployment of sophisticated military equipment -- all point not to a department too inept to handle this investigation objectively but one too inept to cloak the fact that they never intended to do so. One protestor held a sign that said, "Ferguson Police Need Better Scriptwriters."

I don't think the local authorities really care whether they conduct a responsible investigation, or whether they help Ferguson to heal and come to terms with what happened. It's not just that they're closing ranks around one of their own. It's not merely that they obviously believe Mike Brown was a worthless thug whose death should go unmourned. It's not only that they don't regard the people of Ferguson as fully human. It's that they don't care if you know all that about them. They're not trying to conceal it. They're not "too inept to cloak the fact" that they don't care. They don't give a damn what you think if you're the kind of person they don't like.

From the beginning, they've known instinctively what polls are now showing us: that white people don't understand the racial pain behind the protests, or don't care, that whites always give cops the benefit of the doubt in matters like this, and that this is especially true of the Republicans who dominate America's heartland. They understood this, I assume, because they're the sort of whites who would feel his way even if law enforcement weren't their business. They have, as the kids say, no fucks to give about people who aren't like them, and they know the majority of Americans feel the same way. So they don't care if Ferguson burns. They're going to keep doing what they're doing. They don't care if it's appropriate. It's what they want to do. They don't care what you and I think, and they don't need to.

DON'T ASSUME THE GUN LOBBY WILL LIFT A FINGER TO HELP DEMILITARIZE COPS

Salon's Jim Newell, citing a report from The Hill, is breathlessly reporting that a bill to curb a program funneling Pentagon weapons to police forces is being backed by a gun rights group:

Rep. Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat, has been working on a bill to demilitarize the police for sometime, his office said....

What's most interesting about Johnson's proposal, at the moment, is the odd left-right political coalition of outside groups that's organizing around it. The ACLU supports it, as does Gun Owners of America. Wait a second? Did we just say "Gun Owners of America," a crazy group to the right of the NRA, supports it? Apparently so:

According to the Defense Logistics Agency, more than $4 billion in discounted military equipment has been sold to local police departments since the 1990s.

"Why are those guns available to the police?" asked Erich Pratt, spokesman for the conservative Gun Owners of America. "We don't technically have the military operating within our borders, but they're being given the gear to basically operate in that capacity."

Gun Owners of America and the ACLU are both backing a forthcoming bill from Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) that would curtail the sale of DOD weapons to local police departments.

The support of a group like GOA could provide cover to Republicans and conservative Democrats looking to support a police demilitarization bill.

But how much of a priority is this bill for Gun Owners of America? I'm looking at GOA's website: there's nothing about this bill whatsoever. GOA's Twitter feed? Nothing. Facebook? Nothing. What are GOA's priorities? Defending the legality of AR-15s. Telling President Obama that the Second Amendment doesn't give citizens the right to bear arms. (Silly liberal -- the right to bear arms was personally bestowed by God.) Reminding members that Colorado's new gun laws are still being challenged in court. Oh, and approvingly citing a story about the current spike in gun sales in the St. Louis area.

Meanwhile, no one's reporting that the NRA has said anything about this bill one way or another. There's no mention of it at NRA.org, at the website of the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action, at the Twitter feed of the NRA or NRA News or NRA-ILA, or at the Facebook pages of the NRA or NRA News or NRA-ILA. (There isn't even a word at NRA-ILA Missouri's website or Facebook page.)

The gunners don't really care about this. GOA does seem to be aligning itself with Rand Paul (the group has worked with Paul in the past, and a banner on the group's Twitter page quotes him praising the group), but the issue is not going to be a priority. At the end of the day, this will be liberals and maybe Paul and a handful of libertarians vs. both the military and the law-and-order establishment, including nearly all Republicans.

And if you doubt that Republicans are going to get back in line, see what Fox News has been airing:

An all-white male panel of Fox News experts defended the militarization of police in Ferguson, Missouri and the actions of police officer Darren Wilson, arguing that local police districts need to use tear gas, rubber bullets, and armored vehicles to defend the country from Islamic terrorists....

"The response last night is what needs to happen," retired NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik told Fox News on Monday morning.

Bo Dietl, a Fox News contributor and former NYPD detective, went even further. He argued that authorities in Ferguson must "take charge" and defended arming local precincts with unused military equipment from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars by invoking the threat of global terrorism....

"They're coming back, they're coming back these extremist Muslims are coming back and they're going to do something in the United States and you can't fight them with pea shooters," Dietl said....

That's Fox issuing marching orders. Republicans will march.

HILLARY'S CORONATION IS OVER -- IF YOU WANT IT

The Hill publishes a piece titled "Five Figures on the Left Who Could Challenge Hillary Clinton," and Martin Longman (aka BooMan) is skeptical:

Yes, it would be kind of interesting if Russ Feingold came out of retirement to vie for the nomination, but is there even a hint of evidence that he is contemplating such a move, much less that he might be successful? Bernie Sanders has made rumblings, but just his age alone precludes him from being a strong challenger. Al Gore is the only Democrat with the stature, donor base, and experience to really challenge Hillary Clinton, and that wouldn’t necessarily be a challenge from her left....

But Gore isn't running. Biden doesn't have a chance. Martin O'Malley is running out of time to catch fire with the grassroots base and build an organization. Elizabeth Warren has officially "encouraged" Hillary to run.

Is the left even in the mood to have an ideological battle in 2016? Perhaps there is some appetite for it, but I haven't seen it reflected in our elected leaders....

Personally, I'd be up for an ideological battle, but I am not going to lie to you and say that I see many people by my side.

Me either. Barbara O'Brien writes,

I don't want Hillary Clinton. I rarely hear from anyone who does.Yet I keep hearing she is popular! But with who, I wonder?

Well, she's popular with the Democratic base -- the real Democratic base, which consists not of solidly progressive politics junkies, but of people who are vaguely liberal and tune politics out more than they tune it in. (They tune in primarily in presidential election years.)

The Democratic base doesn't vote in state and local elections and doesn't vote in midterms. These are the people we're supposed to count on to focus on a hero of lefty politics mavens? Yes, a Hillary-toppling insurgency happened in 2008, but elements were in place that aren't in place now: one burning issue (the Iraq War) and a series of secondary issues (Katrina, Social Security privatization, Terri Schiavo) that made a broad range of Democratic voters pay attention to politics between presidential years, plus an unusually charismatic insurgent with a really strong political operation who actually wanted the nomination badly. We don't have any of that right now.

We need a large, angry, informed, mobilized progressive movement -- not just to win elections for progressives, but to fight outside the realm of electoral politics on issues that find both parties to the right of what's in the people's interest. But the fizzling out of the Occupy movement shows that we're still waiting for a movement of that kind.

We don't even have the level of free-floating anger the right has. Of course the right will embrace ideological warriors in the campaign for the 2016 nomination, probably not enough to nominate one, but enough to push whoever is nominated far to the right. That's how conservative voters are -- they'll be ideologically fired up then, because they're ideologically fired up now. They're always ideologically fired up. They're fired up enough to possibly reelect Scott Walker and Rick Scott and Rick Snyder in states Barack Obama handily won twice. They might beat Dannel Malloy in Connecticut and John Hickenlooper in Colorado because they're always extremely fired up on guns.

Right-wing voters are crazy, but we should a little crazy. We should at least be in a fever to vote every time there's an election, and we're not. So where's the base for an insurgent Democratic presidential candidate when no candidate seems to have the fever, either?

WHY DO AMERICAN MOVIEGOERS HATE AMERICA?

So I see that The Giver finished fifth at the box office this weekend:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Guardians of the Galaxy held on to the top two spots at the box office this weekend....

In a surprising development, The Expendables 3 wasn't the highest-grossing newcomer of the weekend. That honor went to Let's Be Cops, which took third place....

Playing at 3,003 theaters, The Giver opened in fifth place with an estimated $12.8 million. While it came in on the high end of these comparisons, The Giver still essentially wound up in the same realm as recent young-adult flops The Host, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones and Beautiful Creatures....

If The Giver flopped, you know what that means, don't you? It means that America's moviegoing public hates freedom. Just ask FreedomWorks blogger Logan Albright, who told us a few days ago that The Giver "brings new life to themes of liberty":

The Giver is that rare film that successfully merges conservative and libertarian themes with superior craftsmanship and genuine entertainment. The celebration of individual differences, of emotion, of life, of freedom, and of the general messiness that is the human condition strikes deep, as we instinctively reject the placid, yet soulless, sameness of a society controlled from the top down....

Following in the grand tradition of 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Ayn Rand's Anthem, the Giver reminds us all of the dangers of a too-powerful state. Regardless of how well-meaning such a society's architects may be, the rigid control of every citizen's life in order to preserve "the greater good" is chilling. It also rings increasingly true in today's world of government spying, compulsory health insurance, and a culture of political correctness gone mad.

Naturally, "compulsory health insurance" is totalitarian, and obviously the first step toward a society in which no one ever sees color or feels unbridled joy because an all -powerful central government won't allow it.

It's not just FreedomWorks. Sarah Palin lavished praise on the movie in a review on her new TV channel, frequently invoking Ronald Reagan, and describing the movie's tyrannical government as basically just like ours:

"'The Giver' depicts a society where the government has grown well beyond an anti-state," Palin says. "The government in the movie limits every aspect of life -- where to live, what to wear, what to eat, who to marry -- to make a society that doesn't have pain or risk, supposedly, to create some kind of utopia. Sound familiar?"

If your response to "Sound familiar?" is "No, not really," you must be a dirty, stinking liberal. As Kira Davis at Independent Journal Review tells us,

However futuristic The Giver is meant to be, it is an absolute reflection of what we see happening in modern American society. A few people are deciding for the majority of us what is right and what is wrong when it comes to our own lives. The Community, like too many leaders these days, thinks that freedom means "freedom from" -- freedom from violence, danger, religions -- or inflaming passions such as free speech and even love.

I guess two of FDR's "Four Freedoms" were totalitarian, too, because they're "freedom from" -- freedom from want and freedom from fear. (And you were a fascist, Norman Rockwell, for painting all four of them!)

Ahh, but America rejected "the most pro-American movie of 2014" (Townhall.com). So we're doomed. Enjoy love and color while you can, sheeple.

CONSERVATIVES ARE STARTING TO FRAME THE DEBATE ON POLICING, AND RACISM IS BEING DEEMED IRRELEVANT

Want to know where the discussion set off by the events in Ferguson is going to end up? Look at this Twitter exchange between right-wing radio host Michael Medved and right-wing Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby:

.@MedvedSHOW I'd give the credit to more and longer prison terms for serious crime, not to equipping police w/ RPGs & armored vehicles.

— Jeff Jacoby (@Jeff_Jacoby) August 17, 2014

Also see Ross Douthat's latest column, "Playing Soldier in the Suburbs," which takes exactly the same tack as Jacoby's tweet -- yes, heavy-metal policing is bad...

In an era of riots and hijackings, the SWAT model understandably spread nationwide. But as the riots died away and the threat of domestic terror receded, SWAT tactics -- helicopters, heavy weaponry, the works -- became increasingly integrated into normal crime-fighting, and especially into the war on drugs.

... It's our antiterror policies made manifest, our tax dollars at work.

And it's a path to potential disaster, for cops and citizens alike.... Militarized tactics that are potentially useful in specialized circumstances -- like firefights with suicidal terrorist groups -- can be counterproductive when employed for crowd-control purposes by rank-and-file cops.

... but hey, we don't want to be too hasty in condemning other aspects of criminal-justice heavy-handedness:

To many critics of police militarization, of course, the helmets and heavy weaponry are just symptoms. The disease is the entire range of aggressive police tactics (from no-knock raids to stop-and-frisk), the racial disparities they help perpetuate and our society’s drug laws and extraordinary incarceration rate....

The argument for broad reform is appealing; it might also be overly optimistic. To be clear: I cheered [Rand] Paul's comments, I support most of the reforms under consideration, I want lower incarceration rates and fewer people dying when a no-knock raid goes wrong. But there may be trade-offs here: In an era of atomization, distrust and economic stress, our punitive system may be a big part of what's keeping crime rates as low as they are now, making criminal justice reform more complicated than a simple pro-liberty free lunch....

In America, right-wingers always get to position the Overton window, on every subject of debate. Right now, they're positioning it between Douthat/Jacoby and Medved. The "left" and "right" in this debate will be: do we get rid of the MRAPs and BearCats and keep the rest of our usual tactics? Or do we keep it all?

It would be lovely to think that Rand Paul, by joining liberals in condemning the racial inequities of our justice system, has helped move the discussion to the left. But as I told you on Thursday, even Paul stressed the military hardware rather than the racism in his Time op-ed. And now those of his conservative brethren who are willing to acknowledge any problems whatsoever in how we deal out criminal justice are going to limit themselves to talking about tanks. So, outside MSNBC, that's all we're going to talk about.

SO IS RICK PERRY NOW THE 2016 GOP FRONT-RUNNER?

Oddly, just before Rick Perry was indicted, I was mentally sketching out a post arguing that Perry could be the GOP's 2016 presidential front-runner, in theory, if he continued to pursue the nomination the way he's been doing it recently. I didn't imagine that Perry could do this without screwing up -- I wasn't thinking about his legal woes, which weren't on my radar, but rather about his gaffe-filled 2012 campaign -- but I thought that he'd spent this year doing a much better job of running a pre-campaign than a lot of Republican A-listers.

Specifically, Perry's been stroking wingnut pleasure centers at a time when Ryan, Paul, and Rubio have been trying to feign moderation, Christie has been trying to downplay legal troubles and past acts of RINOism, and Jeb Bush has been trying to live down his support for immigration reform and Common Core. Perry hits the pro-capitalist pleasure button every time he trolls a blue state and offers to relieve it of a few big employers. His macho-man appearance on the border with Sean Hannity and the Texas Highway Patrol was top-shelf wingnut gun/xenophobia porn. And on the subject of immigration, there was this just a couple of days ago:



Pure winger pleasure. Ahhh, but that's all moot now, right? Perry's under indictment, so we can stop talking about him for 2016 -- right?

I don't know. All the right people (and I do mean all the right people) are rallying around him:

PERRY FIRES BACK; STANDS BY VETO http://t.co/6AC2Qt01Ic

— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) August 16, 2014

.@GovernorPerry is a friend, he's a man of integrity – I am proud to #StandWithRickPerry: https://t.co/JjCws3jzQ7

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) August 16, 2014

Rick Perry Punches Back Against Indictment http://t.co/S7c0YhmwRS

— Fox Nation (@foxnation) August 16, 2014

Confident Perry: “I intend to fight, & I intend to win”: AUSTIN, Texas — In a brief press conference at the Ca... http://t.co/4LeBQsmhWR

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) August 16, 2014

#chicago hit-job >> “@cnnbrk: Texas Gov. Rick Perry vows to fight charges ... says indictment politically motivated. http://t.co/BpDyRcpDZe”

— Robert Zimmerman JR (@rzimmermanjr) August 16, 2014

(That last one is George Zimmerman's brother.)

At the moment I think, within his party, Perry could become what Bill Clinton was to Democrats in the Gingrich/Ken Starr years, minus the mixed feelings Democrats had (i.e., that adultery, if not impeachable, is still a bad thing) -- Perry was going after Democrats, so I don't think Republicans are going to think he did anything bad.

I once wrote that Chris Christie was going about it all wrong if he wanted to remain a 2016 contender: he should have lashed out and said Bridgegate was nothing but a witch hunt, because that's what GOP primary voters want to hear. Well, that's exactly what Perry is doing now. Yeah, he may go to jail, but if he doesn't, he may emerge a huge crazy-base hero.

Last night, after the indictment came down, someone on Twitter snarkily posted a link to a July post at The Fix titled "Rick Perry. So Hot Right Now." Yes, laugh now, but Perry was getting traction -- see, for instance, these Gallup numbers:



Incessantly trolling liberals was working for him. Tacking hard to the right on immigration was working for him. Being a martyr to evil liberalism might work for him, too.