Cut it out already!

I’m tired.

Last Wednesday was a tipping point for me: the shootings in Alexandria, the Left’s vile reactions, the tragedy of Grenfell Tower.

Not that I have anything useful to say about Grenfell Tower. But the rest of it?

Nobody who’s been paying attention to the escalating violence on the Left was surprised by the Alexandria shootings. Shocked, yes. But surprised? In the last year we’ve seen riots and attempts to shut down Trump campaign events, individual Trump supporters being beaten and harassed, a speech at Berkeley canceled after protestors broke windows and started fires, a professor at Middlebury College assaulted for the crime of standing next to Charles Murray, a parade in Portland canceled due to threats of violence toward Republicans who dared march in the parade, a college in Washington terrorized by bullies who march around the campus swinging baseball bats, repeated death threats towards Republicans in Congress and their families.

All this backed by a steady drumbeat of vile invective. Trump is not a legitimate president. Trump should be assassinated. Rublicans should be lined up and shot. Trump should be impeached and then executed. (Huffington Post). Hey, look at my neat model of Trump’s decapitated head! (Kathi Griffin.) I want a rhino to fuck Paul Ryan to death. (Joss Whedon.)

I’m tired of this prolonged temper tantrum.

The very people who screamed that Trump was a direct threat to democracy because he said he might not recognize the results of an election… have been, ever since November 8, refusing to recognize the results of this election. “Not my President!” they cried. And they have had ever so many great ideas. Who can forget, “Let’s dress up like giant vaginas and march on Washington to protest Trump’s vulgarity?”

Did I mention that I’m tired of this?

And I’m just as tired of the limp-wristed Republican response. We deplore the mobs and the violence. We write articles about Democrats saying outrageous things and point out that if a Republican had said the same things, the media would crucify him.

This has absolutely no effect on the ranting, raving, insanely screeching mob.

I am beginning to wonder if anything less than reciprocal violence will make a dent in their righteous anger.

I'm not rooting for reciprocal violence. I want to see this country return to a place where we judge ideas by debating them, not by trying to kill our opponents. But you know what? The people on the Left who are raising this ruckus should hope even more that this country goes no farther down the path of political violence. While screaming about fascism and accusing everybody and his brother of being a Nazi, they are themselves creating the conditions that lead to a totalitarian state.

And that will be much, much worse than the imaginary fascism they’re yelling about now.

Isis Condemns Kathy Griffin for Cultural Appropriation

Via Duffelblog:

RAQQA, Syria — The self-proclaimed Islamic State has issued a statement condemning self-proclaimed comedian Kathy Griffin, accusing her of “cultural appropriation” after she posed for a photograph with a mock severed head of President Donald Trump. The group, which has been protective of its brand ever since taking over vast swaths of Iraq and Syria and establishing itself as the premier beheading agency in the Middle East, said it was deeply disturbed by Griffin’s “ignorant and offensive” use of a “sacred Islamic State tradition.”

There's more. Read it all. It's the only remotely appropriate response to That Picture that I've seen. And no, I'm not going to post a copy of That Picture. You've seen it. We don't need to keep gawping at it. (Unless we are the Secret Service, which is supposed to take such things seriously, God help them.)

Mass-produced protests

The morning after Trump's missile strike on Syria, there were already anti-war protestors in the streets. I'm not necessarily in disagreement with their point - I certainly don't believe any good can come out of our entanglement with that particular mess - but I do think they're rushing to conclusions. (The First Reader and I disagree here. He thinks 59 Tomahawks amount to a declaration of war; I think the message is more, "If you use chemical weapons, we will make you sorry." We'll all have to wait and see, I guess.)

But I am impressed by the speed and professionalism of these protests. Look at the picture. How did they get professionally printed signs less than twenty-four hours after the event they're protesting? That requires some serious organization to get the posters printed and distributed. (It's not just this one picture; there are plenty more, revealing a wide variety and distribution of posters.)

The fact of protests doesn't trouble me. The evidence of an unidentified organization behind the protests, just waiting for an event that can be protested, with the money and power to create very professional signs on a moment's notice and then distribute them across the country? That does trouble me. I'd really, really like to know where those signs came from.

"Terrorist" is everybody's Word of the Day

Apparently the hateful terrorist analogies weren't just something that was dreamed up by a local contributor. They seem to have become a constant refrain in the media:

Steve Rattner on MSNBC: “It’s a form of economic terrorism…These Tea Party guys are like strapped with dynamite standing in the middle of Times Square at rush hour saying either you do it my way or we’re going to blow you up, ourselves up, and the whole country with us.”
William Yeomans at Politico: "It has become commonplace to call the tea party faction in the House “hostage takers.” But they have now become full-blown terrorists."
Maureen Dowd in The New York Times: "[M]any Democrats...yearned to see the president beat the political suicide bombers over the head with the Constitution."
Thomas Friedman in The New York Times: "If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission."
Martin Frost at Politico: "We now have a group of U.S. politicians seeking political purity, who seem to have much in common with the Taliban. They are tea party members..."
Margaret Carlson on PBS' "Inside Washington": "[T]hey’ve strapped explosives to the Capitol and they think they are immune from it. The Tea Party caucus wants this crisis..."

Strange how the same metaphor is suddenly popping up all over the place. You'd almost think they had gotten together and agreed on the line to take....naah, that could never happen.

H/T: Verum Serum for most of these links

Stay classy, Austin American-Statesman

Today's local paper had two opinion columns that make for interesting reading when juxtaposed. The first, by Thomas Palaima, was written as a plea for more civility in political discourse:

Leach pinpoints "the increasingly hostile and ad hominem tone of national politics" characterized by "anger and name calling" that "damage our social cohesion."...Recognizing you in me and me in you would be a first step toward making mutual plans for a better future, toward moving forward in mutual respect. A first step toward bringing decency and humanity back into our public actions, before it is too late.

This is followed by John Young's column, which I suppose the editors felt epitomized the mutually respectful tone Palaima was calling for, with comments like these (bolding mine):

By air, the missiles of a warring party — the tea party — are observed registering red on the map, anti-tax drones beep-beep-beeping their way toward the mainland.....

The president seeks to rally the nation with a prime-time address. A menacing House Speaker John Boehner follows, pulling out a golf shoe, hammering it on the lectern, and implies that unless the White House and Senate capitulate to Republican demands, in so many words: "We will bury you."

(Funny, I watched all two minutes of Mr. Boehner's address yet somehow managed to miss the Khruschev imitation. If we weren't being so mutually respectful and all, I might call John Young a liar at this point. But that wouldn't be nice. I'll settle for respectfully wondering what medications he's on.)

As President Barack Obama said Monday night, the voters asked for a divided government, not paralyzed government. Fiscal jihadists in the House are dedicated to the latter, with belts of explosives hugging their hips.

Way to go, Austin American-Statesman. I'm so proud that my local paper doesn't promote any name-calling or hostility.

Just Beachy

And very pleasant it was, too. Warm enough to slosh up and down in the water, cool enough to sit on the balcony and watch the waves rolling in. Despite the warning signs, I encountered no rattlesnakes and only one moribund jellyfish. And I now have a world-class collection of images of water foaming over sand.

When not in the water I was reading, among other things, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, for no particular reason than that I'd never read it before and occasionally I get this incomprehensible desire to become better educated. And no, that wasn't all I took down to read on the beach, but you really don't want to hear about the old John Grisham thriller or the new sex-and-shopping trashy novel. Huh? You do? Well, too damn bad. Go buy your own soft porn. I want to talk about Edmund Burke. Who was not only an extremely good writer, but almost prescient.

A lot of Reflections can be summarized and translated into modern English as follows: "You idiots, you had a system that was (sort of) working, and instead of trying to improve it, you broke it. Oh, my God, did you ever break it. This is not going to turn out well. There is no way this can possibly turn out well."

Bear in mind that he's writing in 1790, before the execution of Louis XVI, before the Reign of Terror.

He also had things to say that are eerily applicable to the present day: "Nations are wading deeper and deeper into an ocean of boundless debt." Needless to say, he didn't think that was going to work out so well either.

But what really impressed me was this:

"In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who...possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account....But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master - the master of your king, the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole republic."

He wrote that in 1790 - and in 1799, two years after Burke's death, what did the French get? Napoleon Bonaparte.

I expect his spirit was looking down from Heaven and saying sadly, "I tried to tell you."

Are you serious?

I was going to post some pictures of an interesting leaf after various Photoshop manipulations... Maybe tomorrow. The tragedy in Arizona has soaked up all my energy for today.

I just read a report that the shooter was trying to reload when a woman grabbed his arm. Which makes me think...I'm glad he didn't get to load a second magazine and continue the carnage...and wouldn't it have been a good thing if he'd been unable to buy 33-round magazines in the first place? Those used to be illegal.

George Packer has a post in the New Yorker in which he seems to be arguing that "it doesn't matter why he did it" but it's still the fault of "right-wing hostile rhetoric."

Hmm. I don't recall the left as coming up short on hostile rhetoric while Bush was president; I even engaged in some myself.

But where Packer really strains the bounds of reason is in this assertion:

Even the reading of the Constitution on the first day of the 112th Congress was conceived as an assault on the legitimacy of the Democratic Administration and Congress.

The Constitution is right-wing hostile rhetoric?

As was famously said in another context:

"Are you serious? Are you serious?