The Obama Administration, I think, is raising the Big Shiny Object of Iraqi failure just as Egypt is about to fall into the abyss:

Judging from the articles at the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, the pretext creation of “Iraq as Failure” has been ramped up to an extremely high volume. And guess who is the villain? All this is happening as Egypt is on the verge of a military coup d’etat. So much for the “Arab Spring.” But preemptive *blame deflection* is just incredible to watch.

Here are a few articles, all of which have appeared in the past 24 hours:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1805afe2-869a-11e2-b907-00144feabdc0.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ten-years-after-the-invasion-did-we-win-the-iraq-war/2013/03/08/9c18c10e-80f3-11e2-8074-b26a871b165a_story.html?hpid=z3

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/douthat-what-hath-rand-paul-wrought.html?hp&gwh=95EFA7C531A6B3AB4641E72FF7E89A27

All of these opinion pieces have been launched in the past 24 hours, as Egypt itself – the centerpiece of Obama’s “splendid” Arab Spring agenda and the recent recipient of $250 million courtesy of John Kerry – is collapsing on itself.

We’re getting close to the point that the New York Times jumps the shark on the gun control issue, and here’s the op-ed to prove it, from Wendy Button. If it’s the same Wendy Button I think it is – this Wendy Button – her very abbreviated bio at the Huffington Post is:

“Wendy Button has written for Democratic Senators John
Edwards, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and John Kerry, and for Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. She received her MFA in writing from Bennington College.”

She’s got an op-ed in the New York Times today asking legislators to strip her of her right to own a gun because, essentially, she’s a threat to herself – to the point that she just doesn’t know what she might do in the future, and she thinks there will be less risk of her blowing her brains out if someone just takes her rights away. She’s asking the authorities to take away her 2nd Amendment rights because she’s suffered from depression, and is evidently worried that she might kill herself one of these days:

“Please Take Away My Right To A Gun”

I guess she thinks she’s too sick to trust herself with even the *right* to own a gun despite writing for all the people listed above! She’s terrified she might be irrepressibly suicidal! Did Tom Menino know this when he hired her? One wonders whether she should be allowed to drive – because after all, she might just decide to crash her car into a bridge abutment at 80 miles an hour, or just park it and try to jump off the George Washington Bridge. She had better shut the electricity and the gas service off at her home, too. And get rid of all the knives in the house. Clear out the medicine cabinet. I’d recommend the police get over there – right now! – before she does something to herself.

Listen to this stuff:

Please take away my Second Amendment right. Do more to help us protect ourselves because what’s most likely to wake me in the early hours isn’t a man’s body slamming at my door but depression, that raven, tapping, rapping, banging for relief.

I have a better chance of surviving if I never have the option of being able to pull the trigger.

Wendy, all you have to do to stop yourself from buying a gun is not buy one, and then voluntarily commit yourself. Commit yourself. To an asylum. Really! Just do it. If you’re that afraid you’re going to kill yourself, by all means, right now – get to the hospital and have yourself admitted as an inpatient. Dial 911 and shout at the top of your lungs: “I’ve just written an article for the New York Times and I’m afraid I am going to kill myself!”

If you walk into Bellevue Hospital with this article and tell them: “I’m afraid I might eventually kill myself because I have the right to own a gun. I can’t stop my depression, I don’t know what to do besides this…” believe me, they’ll help you put yourself away. Moreover, if your depression is that uncontrollable and you’re still having these thoughts, you should have committed yourself a long time ago. What does your family think? Do they help you? Do they know how sick you are?

If you’re so terrified that you’re not reporting your own longstanding mental health problems even as you confess them in the pages of the New York Times, and you have such poor impulse control that you don’t know whether you’ll be able to stop youself from buying a gun and killing yourself at some point in the future, you shouldn’t be at home alone right now. Because it might be tonight! So go! Get in a cab. You shouldn’t even be driving a car. Please, get yourself some help and do it fast!

It should be a straight-up right-wing opinion journal with no apologies. No more BS, very much like the Weekly Standard.

All the current format serves to do is provide an advance notice of what people on “our side” of the fence are thinking, but what’s even worse is that it’s a troll generator of enormous proportions. The content here has gone from being Republican/Conservative eclectic to Conservative Intelligent to Desparate Conservative Half Donk Op Research + Half Stupid Most of the Time.

It’s not really a conversation anymore: it’s the trolls and the democrat op-researchers posting as regular users versus the front page writers, while the rest of us play clean-up duty and basically rebut them here on our own blog. It’s stupid, folks. It’s too big to be managed in the way you’re trying to do it, and I think actually it is doing more harm than good. I’ve thought this for a long time. Now is the time to do it.

I really want to ask Redstate and Human Events to stop what they’re doing and change the way they’re doing it. Either come in with the Spiked Pipe and make it a serious place for people to comment and cut the crap, or get out of the game. If you want the blog to be read, make it exclusive, start charging money, and make it a community of people who aren’t just here to waste the rest of everyone’s time.

I’ll send $50 tomorrow to Erick Erickson to make sure I have a subscription and the ability to comment. I’ll sell my pet cat to do it. I’m not interested in Redstate being an open forum any longer. You want to contribute? Pay up – right now.

Enough. The new users popping out of the infinte elsewhere and posting as diarists wasting all our time have to stop.

The moron quotient has to be reduced and I think it’s going to require Redstate to have some courage and do what they’ve known they would have to do for all this time. Better to start now than continue along with the morons and the malefactors.

I don’t know what else to tell you. This place is a shell of its former self and it’s not getting better or more intelligent, it’s getting stupider and more troll-infested. Raise the bar or quit. If you won’t do that, at least bring Thomas Crown and Bob Hahn back on a regular basis and have them clean the place up.

We’re not a Republic of Needs and thank God we’re not. The technocracy is doing its best at every turn to decide what people need and how much they’re going to be allowed, which is why they want to throw the Constitution away or rewrite it whenever they can.

But let’s imagine we were a society of needs. What we really need are fewer profoundly mentally ill people who are undiagnosed schizophrenics copying each other’s horribly violent crimes. Valerie Solanas was a profoundly ill person when she shot Andy Warhol – but despite the fact that many could have stopped her, nobody did. And for several decades now we’ve seen these kinds of problems, well, metastasize.

If we want to talk about what society needs, it would do us well to recognize that we need to get a handle on that, and the sooner the better. We could see we needed it as soon as it became clear to anyone with any kind of training and background who Adam Lanza really was: he was a profoundly sick but highly intelligent kid, living alone with his mother in a broken household, in a bucolic, well-educated upper middle class town, who was being sheltered to the best of his family’s ability, with very large checks being written, and he wasn’t getting any better. They didn’t want the diagnosis. They wanted to handle it on their own. That’s my conjecture – it’s not meant as a statement of irrefutable fact – but given what I have to work with, it’s the best conjecture I can make.

I can further conjecture with some knowledge that having a son diagnosed as a schizophrenic is a really profound thing to happen to anyone, much less someone who is a millionaire (every year) and a finance Executive with General Electric. Adam had longstanding troubles and he wasn’t improving; in fact he was being kept away from treatment that might have helped him improve. For a variety of reasons, we’re not being allowed access to the full set of facts regarding the Lanza family – and those are the most salient facts. But we don’t have those.

That’s where all the effort should be going: helping society prevent “random” mass shootings by really understanding and stopping the people who commit them, the ones who are driving the curve – the ones for whom they are not “random” at all. Adam Lanza’s acts weren’t “random” to Adam Lanza. They were deliberate. They were very carefully, meticulously, exactly planned. There was nothing “random” about it to him. And we all have a responsibility as gun owners to better secure and protect our weapons to prevent them from being misused. That isn’t too hard, but it does require some planning and thoughtfulness.

And most of all we should be talking the truth about this incident and the previous ones.

This is not a theoretical problem in our democracy, it’s not even a crisis: we can call for some heightened awareness and understanding if we know what the real problem is, and we can bring that curve of these types of crimes down very significantly if people work together without, to put it bluntly, freaking out. Frankly it’s a minor adjustment. There is no “assault weapons ban” needed. We need to understand the problem.

If we had a responsible government in power, instead of a government that does whatever it can just because a handful of its members wants to, we would be doing that.

Adam Lanza committed his crime because literally nobody stopped him: his mother didn’t stop him (he made sure of that), his father didn’t stop him, his school system didn’t stop him, and the family – despite being millionaires many times over – didn’t stop him. Why is that? It’s because they were protecting him, and then – possibly, even probably – his mother decided she just couldn’t do it any more. Yes, she was being well compensated through the terms of the divorce. She would never have to work again. But in exchange, it appears that she was saddled for the rest of her life having to try to keep the “family secret” and try to find a way to care for this overgrown kid, who is now a man, increasingly reclusive and dangerous, and insusceptible to pain. And keep him out of trouble. My educated conjecture is that once she decided to stop protecting him, he learned of it, he didn’t want to be put away (he was quite happy with the arrangement) and he decided to kill her, 20 children and six others, and then kill himself while leaving all the open ended questions to the rest of America.

My guess is that it’s a very sick thing we had happen there in Newtown, something nobody really wants to talk about. It’s also a very sick thing we had at Virginia Tech., and in Colorado (twice) and at NIU, and in Columbine. But if you look at the people committing those crimes, and you really try to understand what is happening, it’s something that can be understood and it can be prevented, without trampling on the rights of 100 million Americans or more. They have done nothing wrong.

And that is what our government *should* do, but it’s not doing it. It’s racing to get this one in the bag for the ideologues and the gun grabbers. It doesn’t want a full explanation of the events that took place – if anything, our government wants as little more to come out about this event as possible, and that’s been the pattern since about 2 days after the shooting. If we listen to the ideologues, the only answer is to go after the gnat problem with the howitzers. It’s a Joe Biden “This is a big ****ing deal” kind of answer, and he loves that stuff.

There’s a lot going on that people are very reluctant to face. Our society’s answer needs to address the real problem, not the imaginary problem.

Davo said in a different thread: “It’s impossible to win an argument you’re not having.” That’s quite correct. We’re not having the real argument, because it’s been impossible to talk about what the real facts are. The most important facts are, and were, in the Lanza Family Household, and there is a wall of silence that has been constructed around those facts now. It’s a really vile thing that is happening, and the only way to prevent it from happening is for all of us to be responsibly engaged.

[As a preface, I would also like to say to Charles Schumer: yes it is true that I criticize the National Rifle Association and its leaders, particularly when I think they've made statements or comported themselves in a way that I found embarrassing. That doesn't mean I don't support them otherwise, though. We're often toughest on the people we care about the most, as they say in France. Also, I decided to reverse the order of the title of this post, but that's just because I see it both ways.]

Gun control imposed by legislators is a horrible thing and we already know that. It’s like anything else imposed on us by committee and by the government: it’s painful, it’s usually ineffective in terms of its stated motives, it has a large number of unintended consequences, and it tends not just to reduce our freedom but to create a sense of greater dependency on the government as the only people who can “take charge” of a situation and set things right.

We have a lot of things to talk about in the aftermath of Newtown, but one of the most important things we can do, and should do, is to redouble our efforts to make sure our own people are “doing it right.”

Make *sure* your guns are secured and accessible by only the people who need access to them. We need to enforce among ourselves a higher level of attention when it comes to keeping those weapons stored in a safe condition. We need to shift what really amounts to a bit more attention to the security side of keeping and owning the weapons, and only we can do it: at gun shows, at dealerships, at every place someone buys a gun – including in private sales. And in the home.

In the home is important, because we’re not just talking about putting armed police officers in schools, we’re talking about also allowing people to continue to have the guns they already do – in their homes. And that’s where the guns used in the Newtown shooting were stolen from – by a member of the household. We need to think very carefully about it.

This has to become a topic of conversation and self-enforced etiquette among gun owners. It has to become as much a part of the culture as admiring the latest firearm that is beautifully made, or talking about collectors’ pieces, or taking your gun out to the field. We have to reinforce that message. Safety is a tip-to-tail phenomenon. Eddie Eagle is great, and he works with children. What we need also is a redoubling of the effort to help guarantee that the parents are as committed to gun safety as their children, and that all of us really understand that message.

We’ll sell more gun safes, and that’s a positive thing. We’ll be training more people about how to keep guns where they need them but also with less risk they can be purloined and misused and abused. Nobody who owns a gun ever wants to confront the horror of having their weapons used in the way they were in Newtown, CT, and that’s a thing we all need to make imperative. I’m *positive* Nancy Lanza would have done everything she could to stop her son, had she been able to. She didn’t want to die. She certainly didn’t want the children at Sandy Hook Elementary School to die. Adam Lanza’s father didn’t want them to die. I’m sure none of them wanted anything associated with what has occurred. However, she might have not done enough prevention and preparation given the realitites of who she was living with. It seems pretty evident that she didn’t.

If we don’t take those steps ourselves, they are going to be forced upon us – in much more draconian form – and it will be a great deal more painful and distasteful and insulting and destructive.

Anyone who goes to a shooting range knows the rules – or you don’t stay long. Most people who shoot in their own back yards know the rules. They’re enforced while you’re on the firing line, in your booth, in competition. And among friends and fellow gun owners and among instructors, people need to make safety a more important part of the conversation. People do the same when they take their rifles out to shoot for sport or in competition. There is more to be done and we can take positive steps to make it a part of the culture – to keep the weapons secured more carefully and more thoughtfully.

The range culture **is** a safety culture. I know, because I spent three years in high school shooting rifles in competition – doing my homework between relays, talking with my friends, having fun, watching TV, and at the same time doing everything we needed to do to make sure we were safe in what we were doing. We shot at ranges throughout the Garden State including ranges at colleges, and places just a few blocks from school buildings, in bucolic towns not very different than Newtown, and in towns that were a little rougher, too. Literally two dozen kids with competition rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition per week. And not a single serious injury among our young men and women – or anyone else. In fact we helped the local economy by buying late lunches and dinners.

Why? It wasn’t an accident.

We were a group of high school kids, yeah. But we had also created and maintained a culture among ourselves – one that valued an acute sense of responsibility for each other’s – and everyone else’s – safety. Well, in a nation that has more gun owners than ever, we need to make sure that culture of safety is instilled everywhere someone owns a gun. I know that it can be done, because the enjoyment of what you’re doing all begins and ends with the desire to keep yourself and your loved ones safe, to keep your friends safe, and to wake up tomorrow and go back to school, to work, to your leisure pursuits, to your hobbies, and to anything else you want to do. You have to be safe in order to get there from here. To see your children again, to live your life in freedom, and to know that you’re respecting the machines you have the right to own and enjoy owning.

All of that depends on how seriously and with how much respect we treat safety.

If you’re going to have the weapons, and you want to have the weapons relatively unimpeded, and it is your right to have the weapons, it is UP TO YOU to do a bit more to make sure you secure them. That means YOU to people who are not just selling guns but also to those who own them.

That is the overarching principle, and we need to redouble our efforts. We have to do it in complement with our other efforts, and we have to come through on it. If we can’t get the random mass shooting trendline moving in the other direction, everyone who believes in the 2nd Amendment in this country as the individual right to own firearms of all different types and capacities is looking at a losing proposition.

We have to take the steps to help create the conditions where fewer of these kinds of crimes can be committed, in addition to the steps we already have. Responsible gun owners need to step up, here, and make it into a priority. This is a cultural moment for the “gun culture.” We have to stand and deliver.

Think about it carefully and make it your primary thought for the next month: what do I have to do to make sure I can use my guns if I need them, but they’re also better secured than they are now? From theft, from “mentally unstable” people, and from people who shouldn’t have access to them. Beacuse they are MY responsibility.

If we cannot do that, the Government is going to increase the level of ITS responsibility and everyone’s individual freedom is going to decline in lockstep.

If you want to bring the rate of “Adam Lanza” type crimes down, you can’t just try to stop people like Adam Lanza – once they have the guns. You also have to do everything you can to prevent them from having easy access to the weapons, and we can all do that in a way that doesn’t detract from our ability to use them when we need to, or just want to.

We have to be smarter about it. It is OUR responsibility. The answer to irresponsibility and chaos is more responsibility. But WE have to take that responsibility and lead, and show the way.

We have an epiphenomenon going on right now between gun ownership, the ability of people to defend themselves, freedom in general, and random mass shootings, which are in an inverse relationship to overall gun crime. It’s a problem that is mixed up with our culture and many other factors. Desensitization to violence might contribute; more mentally ill people on the street and not in care probably does contribute; video games and ultraviolent graphic movies sure don’t help much, but it’s hard to say if they contribute, and who they contribute to. Not having fathers around is probably not a good idea. But that’s the culture we’re living in.

Despite that, we have to be sure that we’re taking responsibility for our factors – the things we can control – in the nonlinear differential equation nauseous rollercoaster ride here, by demonstrating our commitment to safety – not just in words but in action.

As I’ve said, I don’t know whether Nancy Lanza had a gun safe in her house. Does anyone know?

I know where I’m buying my next one, and I know that I am going to take more careful stewardship of the guns I have than I already do. Each of us who owns guns can probably think of several things they can do right now.

Complacency is not going to suffice. Betting on political winds blowing one way or the other is not a strategy. All of us need to have an idea of what we will each do better.

We don’t have a Bill of Needs and thank God we don’t. However, there are occasionally some times when we need to take some steps to help sustain and strengthen the Rights we have. Right now is one of those times.

No affiliation – they just make good gun safes.

The room looked like a funeral home. They were 15 minutes late. They couldn’t get their words together. The timing combined with how they orchestrated it made it seem like they had to push each other into the room and then slink out of the room. Wayne LaPierre looked like he’d been up for four or five days. He was pallid and when he first started speaking he didn’t sound empathetic, he sounded ghastly, like he was announcing the end of the world. He looked like he was in a cold sweat with all the blood drained from his body. David Keene couldn’t even put his words together from behind the rims of his glasses. His introduction was merciful only because it was short. He looked like he’d been up for six days. Longer than LaPierre.

How did Medea Benjamin get a seat in the room? Does anyone at the NRA watch the news and know what Medea Benjamin looks like? What was she doing at this event?

I think somehow they also thought they were going to get applause when they walked in and left the room. The applause in a setting like this always serves to set the tone, and they should have known they weren’t going to get any, but they did the speaker roll-out and exit like they thought LaPierre was going to stroll up there with an enthusiastic audience and leave to at least polite applause. David Keene looked like he really believed he was going to get applause when he introduced LaPierre. These guys are used to preaching to the choir and it was painfully evident. Dead silence.

Then they slunk away into the shadows. NO questions taken or answered? Nobody willing to even speak, ready to face reporters with questions? It looked male-menopausal from one end to the other. There were a few moments at the beginning that I thought LaPierre was just going to have a heart attack and collapse right there at the podium. I really thought he was going to keel over. They had a week to prepare for this and the only thing missing was the background death dirge music.

Worst press conference I’ve ever seen, and not just because they let the protestors sit in the front row.

These people don’t have the slightest idea of how to make their case before a skeptical and increasingly liberal public. They’re washed up and they’re hurting themselves. It’s not their ideas – it’s the presentation of those ideas by these toupeed old white males who are positively hated in this culture right now but they still cannot face the music. Yeah it’s unfair. Yeah, it’s prejudice. But your face and your message and how you present it matters as much as the message itself. It’s ironic that the Washington Post didn’t cover it live on their website because it would have helped the WaPo to stream every minute of it – that’s how bad it was. I had to turn it off several times.

They blew it in just about every way imaginable, and they have more than one foot in the grave. It was a very disappointing thing to watch: the cultural shift has taken place, the apocalypse has come, and these guys just don’t get it. They need some serious media consultancy. They need new thinking, new faces, and a lot better media strategy – with much more articulate spokespeople who are a lot younger. The Old Grave White Men aren’t going to win this time: the culture has changed. And everyone is going to suffer.

Someone needs to come in and do a Harley Davidson on the NRA.

I was very disappointed watching that news conference – which it wasn’t – it was just a painful slog from one end to the other. What LaPierre said in the abstract was helpful, but he really did look and sound like he was delivering the message from a funeral home, as the undertaker of something already dead. The world has changed guys, culturally you are just not the people who are going to make the effective messages any more. At least, not if you keep doing things this way.

Very sad. They’d better straighten themselves out fast.

I don’t think they have anyone in their organization who knows how to present themselves to the media. They shouldn’t just have answered questions – they should have let the Q&A go on for an hour, at least. By slinking away into the back room of their facility they looked like they were retreating into their sarcophagus. I think they did. Wayne LaPierre talked about some substantive things, but this railing on and on about “monsters” and “demons” was just pathetic.

They don’t know how to communicate with the public except for their own captive audiences. When they’re forced to make a statement – which is what this looked like – they do it looking like they have a gun to their heads.

LaPierre seemed to find his footing a couple of times and then it just kept dwindling away. And in the end, watching them leave the podium and slink away into the back room was the dumbest thing they could have done. Really an F minus overall.

Does this sound harsh? It’s nothing like what the NRA is getting from the Left. I expected them to at least have their stuff together today, not to make a “fun and happy” presser by any stretch of the imagination but at least look and sound like they had their act together and they understood they have a constituency out here who needed to see some competency and evidence of aplomb. Instead they let their long-awaited press conference be hijacked by Code Pink and looked like a bad remake of No Country for Old Men.

[Update: OK I'll try to be charitable. A lot of the ideas were good, but setting themselves up against the video game industry was a ding-dong idea. You let OTHER people handle the video game industry, guys. You've got your own problems. I think they were going for sombre and respectful (not respective!!) but what they created instead was a lot different, most importantly because they couldn't even control their own press event. And not being prepared to at least answer a few questions was boneheaded. What you needed was three or four people who seemed to be *eager* and *ready* to answer questions, almost like they were hoping for the chance to answer them. What we got was some guys slinking off stage after their presser was hijacked by Code Pink. We're in big trouble.]

Here’s the article.

“In the initial hours after the killing spree one week ago, investigators said they had uncovered “good evidence” that would provide clues into what prompted Lanza’s rampage.

But since then, police officials have become more guarded, bracing the public for a lengthy investigation that will stretch well into the new year. The extended investigation means Lanza’s motive may not be known before President Obama’s push for new gun control regulations.”

Actually, the words they were quoted as using were “very good evidence” that would hopefully “paint a complete picture” – as you can read from the sources I link to in my earlier post.
That was the same representative Vance who is now being quoted – almost a full week later – as saying:

“We don’t have any smoking gun to say this is why it occurred, at least not yet,” said J. Paul Vance, a Connecticut State Police spokesman. “We are moving forward and working with our partners, and as you can assume with multiple deaths, we are looking at several months before we really have our arms wrapped around this.” [Emphasis mine]

It’s the same police spokesman, 6 days later. All of the people whose “hunger for information” is “…overwhelming” throughout the State of Connecticut and elsewhere are going to have to continue to go hungry.  And they shouldn’t bother asking! The article quotes state representatives telling the media to leave Newtown because “the story is over.”  At least for “several months” before everyone’s “arms are wrapped around this.”

The NRA’s press conference is scheduled for 45 minutes from now:  10:45 a.m. ET.  The Washington Post has said this morning that any discussion of a motive is officially premature, so let’s see what happens.

It’s a good idea, and it’s an idea we should have advanced a long time ago.  In addition to other ideas we’re all considering, having a few teachers at each school who volunteer and are willing to be armed is not something we should reject out of hand – in fact we should be supporting them.

It’s a good idea not because anyone wants to think of a school as a “less-safe” place to be.  It’s a good idea because the reality is that a lot of schools really **are** a “less-safe” place to be.  Moreover the idea that at least someone shouldn’t be armed at a school just because…”it’s a school!” is not a defensible reason.  It’s just dogma.  Having some people who are competent at handling firearms won’t make schools “less safe” – it will make them more safe.

The people who are elementary school teachers and administrators are not incompetents and I know they care deeply about the children whose care they are responsible for every day.  They’re also adults who are capable of defending themselves and – if the need arises – to defend those children and themselves.

This isn’t about turning schools into armed camps.  It’s actually something that could be done discreetly and with a lot of careful thought.  I think it would do a lot of good to have a few faculty members at a school who took the time to train, who had the interest, and who undertook the responsibility to be armed.  It’s a big responsibility but it’s not an objectionable responsibility – it would be a very positive thing.  I’d much rather send my children to a school where I know that at least some of the teachers and/or administrators had access to a firearm than not.  I’m sure there are a lot of people who are Principals and administrators who could satisfy the requirements and would be interested and extremely capable if they undertook that role and were allowed to do it.

I support that initiative.  It makes a great deal of sense.

America has the best gun training available in the world for people who are willing to seriously undertake the responsibility and take the courses.  That isn’t a boast – it’s a fact.  It doesn’t turn people into “Commandos.”  It trains people to be really capable of using their weapons responsibly, and anyone of average intelligence and commitment can do it.  So what if we decided to fund a few thousand teachers going to concealed carry and weapon courses.  Would that be horrible?  Would it change our view of ourselves, or them?  I think it would actually help things a lot.

It’s not going to solve all the problems, any more than any other single answer does, but the reflexive idea coming from people like Mike Bloomberg that “it’s crazy” is just not helpful.  I’m sure everyone in every town in America can think of at least one person in their school district who would be capable of stepping up and performing that extra duty, without much trouble or controversy.

People react against this idea largely because of their preconceived notions and prejudices.  There’s some kind of barrier that prevents them from realizing:  “We’re creating soft targets here, and nobody can defend themselves, but because they’re supposed to be sacrosanct, we can’t think about this.”

Well, we should think about it, and we should do more than that.  Every school – elementary, middle, high school and others in America – should have a couple of people on the faculty who know how to use a firearm and have access to one.  I personally don’t think public school teachers are categorically less competent or capable of handling their weapons than anyone else.  Quite apart from the idea that they have to become “commandos” or “police officers” – which is utterly, absolutely false – many of them already own guns in their private lives.  They probably don’t talk much about it, but they do.

We should be facilitating their efforts to make schools not precisely “gun free” but “random mass shooting free” – and arming a teacher or two – and training them, and compensating them for it – is a worthwhile thing to do.

It’s not an extreme proposal, although I know all “modest proposals” run into objections from people who want to call them extreme.  Mostly for cultural reasons, not factual reasons.  We all have our shibboleths.  I know that there are people who teach at almost every school in America who would and could  handle the responsibility with competence, and just by doing so they would reduce the attractiveness of their schools and the children under their care as targets of opporunity.

If people recall, in the first 24-48 hours after the massacre, the State Police in Connecticut were quoted by the media as saying that they had recovered “very good evidence” that would paint a “complete picture” about the motive for the shootings.

In recent days, that motive and that evidence – whatever it was or whether or not it ever existed – has apparently vanished:

The Washington Post is now saying:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/for-lanza-family-son-adams-difficulties-dominated/2012/12/17/3c0e8eb0-4890-11e2-ad54-580638ede391_story.html

“While investigators don’t know or haven’t said why Adam Lanza went on a horrific killing spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., a clearer portrait of the family that raised him is emerging through interviews around the country with friends and family and in divorce documents sealing the end of the Lanza’s marriage three years ago.”

Well, which is it?  Is it that they don’t know?  Or is it that they haven’t said?  Or is it that they never had?

Or is it that they have a lot of information they’ve decided is too sensitive and important to share?

It’s an important question in the debate that’s going on right now, and it doesn’t square with the earlier statements attributed to authorities that they had evidence that shed light on the motive:

Here’s the Yahoo news article from Saturday:

http://wap.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/news/blogs/lookout/evidence-found-shooter-home-may-point-motive-police-155657663.html?.b=index%2F&.ts=1355628640&.ysid=dZKeMxoAsJWjxqErOe40AWrC&.intl=US&.lang=en

“Police on Saturday said evidence recovered at gunman Lanza’s home may provide a motive for the massacre.

State police spokesman Lt. Paul Vance declined to provide specifics about the evidence but said, “we’re hopeful it will paint a complete picture.”

Here’s CBS New York:

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/12/15/investigators-work-around-the-clock-to-learn-more-about-newtown-school-shooter-adam-lanza/

“Asked at a news conference whether Lanza had left any emails or other writings that might explain the rampage, state police Lt. Paul Vance said investigators had found “very good evidence” and hoped it would answer questions about the gunman’s motives. Vance would not elaborate.”

So we went from people “working around the clock” and having “very good evidence” that would hopefully paint “a complete picture” to basically nobody knowing anything – or not saying anything – about what all of that was about.

All of us are about to embark on a long and grueling process to discern what might be done to prevent shootings of this type in the future, and mysteriously one of the most important pieces of information that might help us – the evidence that was supposedly discovered shedding light on the motive of the gunman – has gone from being “very good evidence” to absolutely unavailable.

Why?

I support Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform, and you should too.

Don’t let the WaPo’s “chip chip” become the “drip drip” in this post-election season. You KNEW it was coming from Pete King because he shot his mouth off all the time during Sandy, now he wants to go wobbly.

Anyway, here are the four “moderates”:

Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) – Oh my GOD I am so TOTALLY surprised….by him and…Bob Corker (Tenn.) and Saxby Chambliss (Ga.) and Rep. Peter King (N.Y.)

Uh, No. Those guys don’t make a break.

Read my lips:  Stay strong, get on the phones, and support Norquist.

NO NEW TAXES.  People who think they’re Republicans won’t pay for it because they’ll become Democrats.  Everyone else will pay for them.  Enough.

Grover, if you’re listening:  I really mean this post.  And you should start talking a lot more here on Redstate, maybe 500 words a week or something so we can all get ahold of you without having to listen to you through the Washington Post’s transducers.  We’d appreciate it, and we’re on your side.  Even us “moderates” from Massachusetts, where we should know what we’re talking about by now.

Around 4:30 in the afternoon yesterday, just as Sandy was unleashing  its final beachfront assault against New Jersey,  I was eating a nice corned beef sandwich and a perfect dill pickle, watching the NOAA Water Vapor loop from Drudge over the Internet.  Then about 10 seconds later we lost power.

Bzzzzt.  Blink.  Bzzzzzzzzzzt….blin….blink……BRIGHT….bzzt.  DARK.   FLASHLIGHT BEAM!  Where’s the Flashlight?  Ok you know you put it right over there…

It’s strange that when the power actually goes out, no matter how well you’ve planned for it, there’s always a moment of primordial shock.  It’s like making a transition to the preindustrial age in a matter of a few seconds, surrounded by all the modern gadgetry that has just been thrown into contrast all around you, suddenly useless as tombstones.  It’s such a strange feeling.  No matter how many times it’s happened to you, the next few minutes are primordial.  I sat there for a few minutes taking it in.

Then you get up and think about what the heck you’re going to do now that the pump that moves the water around isn’t working.

We lost power for approximately 5.5 hours, right at the MA/CT border.  That was a pleasant surprise but also a bummer, because despite my hopes of going all the way without feeling a blip in the juice, there were too many other lines around us that got rearranged by the storm and the winds and the trees dancing all over the place to allow it.  We were ready with gasoline and generator and propane but never wound up using them.  Temperatures indoors never got below 50 degrees.  We’re inland and a little high-elevation and there was near-zero worry of storm surge or flooding.

Apparently the root cause of our hours of darkness wasn’t very serious and power was restored by 10:30 p.m. last night.  We had been hoping for the best, but we were prepared to run the place with long extension cords and gasoline – luckily it never came to that.  We were never really afraid of the wind velocities although they occasionally hit (by my own wind speed meter) as high as 56 MPH.  Most of the weak trees are already down (see below).

It was fascinating and eerie and scintillating to hear it move in, though.  It started off  slowly, it built slowly – some distant hissing and rumbling.  Then it became urgent and resonant and insistent, howling and hissing as Sandy came ashore in NJ.  It rose in a crescendo for about 3 hours and then WHOOOOOOOOOSHHHhhhhhgasp it was over and there was almost complete cathedral silence.  Dead.  Silence.

Prior to that, as the wind intensity grew you could hear it blowing over the small hillocks we call “mountains” in this area, spreading a huge and fine foggy mist of rain everywhere.  Most of the leaves that hadn’t already blown off the trees were comprehensively made to amscre by the wind gusts.  In terms of leaves on the trees here, autumn is now *OVER*.  They were actually blown down onto the road and it became a kind of shifting autumnal mosaic for a while there.  It was still daylight, and the clouds passing over were flashing by so quickly that any small aircraft caught in them would have needed prayer on both wings.  This storm was *moving* once it started moving.   I don’t recall seeing clouds move so quickly.  You’d get sustained howlings and then BLAM big gusts of wind and you couldn’t hold on to the door.

It was funny, though, and almost poignant:  as all of that was going on, the air was warm and sweet, and it almost invited you to step outside into the mist.  The outdoor temperature just as it was passing over was around 62 degrees.  The misty rain falling felt almost like a shower at the beach as the water dribbled down your face and shirt – I almost wanted to stay outside during the “worst” of it, just to watch and listen to it, which tells you how little impact we really received because I’m sure in New Jersey very few people felt that way.

That was about the best we could have hoped for.  There are about 100,000 in MA still without power.  Where I was, the sun was shining this morning.

Most of MA (proportionally speaking) is restored at this point in terms of power but there are still people suffering.  From my perspective National Grid earned their keep this time, for perhaps the first time I’ve lived here.  I have the feeling one of the reasons we’re faring better than a lot of towns is that after the tornado that passed near here, then the huge freezeout freak Halloween storm last year, National Grid was compelled to do the kind of power line and roadside maintenance on the trees and lines that basically brought them into the 21st Century.  Last year right at this time we were among the last people in the Commonwealth to have power restored and frankly, a lot of people here got sick and tired of defecating into plastic bags and showering with handi-wipes, and they complained mightily.  You really didn’t want to “meet and greet” your neighbors around Day 6-7 during that event, and we made our displeasure known.

I don’t see or expect any voting impacts, early or otherwise, maybe very small ones but nothing requiring Federal Action.  Post offices were open today, town halls were staffed for the most part, and people where I live were pretty much back to (ab)normal by the end of today.

Almost everyone here was very well prepared and most were also well armed.  I’ll have to check the Police Blotter later this week but I cannot conceive of any looting or theft attributable to anyone during the storm:  most anyone trying it wouldn’t have outrun the bullets and/or the buckshot.  I think everyone in our local government did a great job.

Many people I know in New Jersey are still suffering and I’m doing what I can to help them.  You should, too.  At least ask if they need it – they’ll appreciate your effort.

The songs themselves are more than compelling enough to make up for any lack of verbosity on my part.  My reasons for choosing them are mine and mine alone, and rather than go into a dissertation about why I chose them, I just want to let them speak for themselves.

For your listening pleasure as the sun sets and the knives come out:

The Incumbent – Vice President Joseph Biden of Delaware is represented by George Thorogood and Foghat:

One Bourbon, One Scotch and One Beer     |     Slow Ride

The Challenger and Our Champion – Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is represented by Weezer and Elvis Presley:

Buddy Holly     |     Hound Dog

Now there are people in the universe who might object to my choices on the basis of their deeper knowledge of music history, they might object to them on the grounds of taste, and there are all kinds of other reasons.  So I invite people to use this thread as their own.  Follow up and place your own Songs of the Evening.  Good ones only, and keep it PG-13.

I thought of including Judas Priest’s Turbo Lover for Biden, but I’m not that big a fan of Rob Halford even though I’m sure … actually I KNOW — that song sounds **GREAT** in a ’78 Trans Am Special Edition at around 130mph on the Garden State Parkway … Don’t ask me how I know.

A bit of a paradox – my third choice for Ryan was a really beautiful song by John Denver.  Again, my reasons and mine alone…but it’s such a gorgeous song.

Regardless of who wins, regardless of who you like more, please listen to good music on your Human Speakers and while you are listening to the debate tonight, turn down the music and remember why you love America so much.

When I think of my advice to him going into tomorrow night’s debate, I only have a few things to say.  He’s probably heard a lot more from a lot of other people, so I’ll keep it simple:

1) You’re debating an old pro -  but he’s also an old pro who has spent his life as a professional Plastic Man, a professional politician whose gigantic gleaming teeth and strange-sounding lapses into the vernacular have gotten him in lots of trouble on more than one occasion.  Biden has a few brain cells left, but many of them are going to be of the treacherous variety that managed to survive.  Watch out for the treacherous ones and be ready for them.

2) You, on the other hand, are a young man with a very long career ahead of you.  This means that on the one hand you can feel comfortable in your skin but you need to take advantage of all the things that your youth bestows upon you.  You need to stay sharp without looking or sounding *slick*.

3) Take your time but at the same time always seize the initiative.   America loves youth and exuberance, but it particularly respects competent, think-on-its-feet youth and exuberance.  Biden will do his best to make you sound inexperienced, glib and callow.  You can expect that right now, because it’s a big part of his personality – but more importantly he desparately needs right now to portray himself as a Wise Elder.  As a result he will do his best – whenever the opportunity presents itself – to portray you as a wet-behind-the-ears ingenue.  Be prepared for it, but do not take the bait and don’t let yourself get thrown off track by his attempts.

4) Biden is notoriously, almost preternaturally heavy handed, but he falls apart under scrutiny.  I don’t think he can match you in terms of “drill down” concentration.  He probably has a few good old chestnuts, though.  His predominant method of convincing people of something is grandiosity combined with backhanded compliments, corny wisecracks, and then some condescention and old chestnuts that he digs up and shows around.  He likes to handle things with crushing logic statements and sweeping generalizations.  I suspect that tomorrow night he’ll try to be a little lighter, a little more airbrushed and sharper, to try and look like he isn’t as old as he is.  So *your* counterresponse is actually to be the better statesman than him.  Even tempered and capable of moments of brilliance:  that is what you need to deliver.  He’s just not that hard to figure out, but I’m sure he’ll have a couple of curve balls down there in the ol’ Biden underpants.

5) We have confidence in you.  We’ve watched you speak, we’ve watched you debate and we know that you have a command of the facts.  But do you have a *sparkling* command of the facts?  Those are the moments people remember in a debate: the quickness of mind and the aptness of a phrase.  The things you say that you let emerge from the spark of insight and creativity are going to be the things that win the moment.  Let yourself create those moments.  In other words, give yourself the mental flexibility to be spontaneously intelligent.  You’ll make Biden look like he needs to go home and take his teeth out.

6) Addendum.  If Biden can’t succeed any other way, he’ll cheat.  He’ll try to portray you as evil.  When he thinks he’s losing a point, particularly if it’s an important point, he’s going to try to make you look like the Devil’s Tenderoni.  You need to have one of those backpacks that has a hidden glove inside it that pops up and catches Biden’s Evil Imprecations.  Because you’re going to get a couple of them tomorrow night if you’re at all successful.  He’ll try to make you look sick, he’ll definitely try to make the policies you’ve talked about sound evil, because he’s a little bit of a bully and also he knows it makes his base get a tingle up their legs.  It’s just like high school all over again.

7) Addendum II:  There is a chance that Biden will try occasionally tomorrow night to do his best impression of Henry Kissinger and come across as serious, reserved, and circumspect.  It’s a stretch for him, but don’t underestimate the possibility that he has a few sentences that Woodward threw him to make him sound like he’s a Master of the Universe.

You’re the young man but on the other hand you’re not extremely young.  What you need to do tomorrow night is basically to be yourself, comfortable in your skin, ready to win the game.  Don’t let Biden intimidate you.  He likes to try and do that.  His gestures with people on the campaign trail are always almost universally possessive.  He tries to GRAB people and take command of them.   We’ve all seen the pictures, we’ve all watched the theatrics.  He’s a little too Burt Reynolds for his own good, if you know what I mean.  He will try to do that with the audience, he tries to do it with acolytes, and then he might even try to do it with you.

I don’t need to go into policy specifics here:  you’ve been poring over them for days now.  You’ve got them at your command and the key to winning tomorrow night’s debate is to keep them all at your fingertips, to be deployed at the time of *your* choosing.  Under stress, the most important thing is not to sound disrespectful but rather more agile-minded and authoritative.

Joe Biden is almost as much a manufactured entity as his boss is.  You’re the real deal, a real person – an exceptional person.  Don’t let it go to your head, but don’t let it escape you, either.

Good luck.  We’re counting on you, Congressman Ryan.

No pressure. 

When the weight of the world seems to be on your shoulders, remember that you have the spine to carry it.  I know you won’t shrug.   Fight!

The first one comes from the New York Times:

Senator, Senator Make Me A Match:  For Staff, Schumer is Cupid

“Have kids; have a lot of kids,” Mr. Schumer, who has two daughters, is known to intone. “Start early and keep having them.”

It gets better!  Schumer pestering people to get married!

“What’s the holdup?” the senator asks couples who are dillydallying on an engagement. “Did you get a ring yet?” Other could-be-marrieds receive a simple instruction: “Get moving!”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/18/nyregion/senator-senator-make-me-a-match-for-staff-schumer-is-cupid.html?hpw

Schumer comes across (by his own admission!) as a Paternalistic grandfatherly figure gently nudging and observantly urging his staff to get matched up, get married and have lots of babies.  He sounds like Timothy Cardinal Dolan!  What has brought him to this epiphany?

Then there’s Joe Biden recently:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/13/bidens-dating-advice/

“No dates until you’re 30,” Biden told a young girl as he greeted firefighters and their families in a small crowd at Hillsborough Fire Department.

“Know what my dad… used to say? You have one job: Keep boys away from your sister,” Biden said to the brother.

Whew, the slicing and dicing for Traditional Values voters is getting heavy.  At this phase of the campaign season we can see that they’re worried about it a lot.  It looks like there’s a lot of concern among the Democrats about making sure they’re not seen as being transgressive, but I have to wonder:  what do they say to their other constitutents?  So far there hasn’t been much of an outcry from the single moms, the homosexual interests, or the other groups in this country who are decidedly more liberal than this.  Where do the LGBT organizations in the country stand on Biden’s and Schumer’s recent comments?

All of a sudden, both of those guys seem to be trying to tell the story of how SQUARE they are.  How does this stuff go over with the Hollywood crowd?  I thought Paternalistic marriage and sexuality advice was supposed to be anathema.

So my best guess is that they know they’re in big trouble and it has been identified pretty clearly through their polling, and so the message has now changed radically in favor of Traditional Values and Traditional Marriage.  Are either of them going to start asking that schools not distribute contraceptives without parental consent, or that parental notification laws for abortion become the law of the land?  Are they going to start standing up for traditional marriage and parenting?

These guys sound a lot more like the Family Research Council these days than either have have in the recent past.

What’s happening?  Are they abandoning their base?  It looks a lot to me like they’re giving a “wink wink” to the base and trying to fool as many people as they can in the process.

Just in case you haven’t heard about the comments, I can point you to all the other places you also haven’t acknowledged reading recently, but why bother?  His statement was disgusting enough, and apparently he said it without any remorse, but apparently with some advanced planning considering his audience:

'THEY GONNA PUT Y'ALL BACK IN CHAINS'

I’m not even going to address whether Biden was “on to something” with his comments because in my opinion he was clearly at least “on something” when he said what he said, and the rest of it is just pure Joe Biden and shouldn’t be repeated.  I’m just surprised that he’s trying to keep up the schtick of imitating other people’s speaking mannerisms so openly, using his accent to appropriate the voice of (I guess) who he thinks should be supporting his message:  Some Black person who isn’t Joe Biden.

Biden has progressed, though – by his own yardsticks.  In the past, he used to just *talk* about other people’s accents in a political forum.  Indian accents, who knows what other accents.  Maybe he can do a good Jewish accent, or a Hispanic?  Maybe some guy from Japan?  We can see that with his time in the Obama Administration, he now sees fit to *use* them in official campaign events.  Pretty soon I expect him to start talking like Bobby Jindal when he travels to Louisiana.  Evidently he considers himself to be both an actor AND a Vice President.

Here are a couple of Joe Biden’s previous Greatest Hits:

“You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian Accent.”

Man, that guy is just a perceptual genius, isn’t he?  And he’s so suave.  He’s someone who really needs to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

What Biden did today should really tell anyone that not only isn’t he *ready* to be Vice President again, he shouldn’t have been in the first place.  I guess he’s still stuck in the Sophomore year of College somewhere in Delaware.  His party hasn’t passed a budget of any kind.  His chains are the debt he’s leaving – on Black people, on White people, on Hispanic people, on Indian people, on Asian people, on Gay people, on Green People, and on just plain People, people: on everyone in this country who will have to pay for the things he hasn’t even been able to pass a budget to quantify.

That’s how much Joe Biden’s party really respects us all.  Appropriation and use is fine.  Being honest?   Not so much.

He can’t talk about what budget they would have passed, because they didn’t, and haven’t.  Instead, he goes for the Sharpton angle, appropriating all the race-baiting and trying to evoke fear among people who – judging by the reaction, thankfully – weren’t having much of what he said.  There were no cheers and there shouldn’t have been.  It went down like a lead balloon and Thank God.  I say to everyone there:  “Now you know why you should leave the Democrats in this election cycle.”

The Vice President of the United States has just successfully demonstrated why he should never have been the Vice President in the first place.  We’ve known that for a long time, now.  I want to thank Joe Biden for demonstrating it so clearly again today, himself – without any provocation except his own.

“Scalia Warns: Guns May Be Regulated.”

No ***t.  Wow, ain’t that a corker.

Well, duh, Matt.  Tell us something we don’t already know.

Guns already *are* regulated at the Federal and State and Local level, and that practice has been going on for a long time now. There is no surprise in the ongoing process of judicial review.   There are hundreds of cases across the country that are ongoing.

Everything can be regulated in our country, including regulation itself.   This is not a shocking concept.

I don’t understand why Drudge has been running the headline all day today because it’s a no-news headline, and what Scalia said is about as uncontroversial as it could be.

“We’ll see,” he said. ‘”It will have to be decided.”  And similar statements saying that new developments might require adjudication.  I mean, what’s really the story there?  If he had said:  “Guns cannot be regulated” then the next question would have been:  “Why are they?”

So I’m wondering what Drudge is trying to achieve here.

If he’s trying to tell people who already own firearms that they can be regulated, they already know that.
If he’s trying to tell people who oppose people owning firearms they can be regulated, they already know that, too.
If he’s trying to tell people who study the issue from a legislative point of view they can be regulated, those people most assuredly understand that in a very deep and intrusive way, believe me bucko.  You can bet that Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer know *that*.
If he’s trying to tell people that Scalia said something on television, he could have just made the headline:  “Scalia Says Something on Television.”  But everyone pretty much knew that.

I’m not sure what Drudge is trying to demonstrate with the headline except that he is a master of the obvious.  If he wanted to talk more constructively about what the reality is, Scalia’s statements are very bland.  He should have linked directly to the article at National Journal talking about what Obama might actually DO as the President.

Here is that article, by Major Garrett of National Journal:

http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/three-simple-steps-obama-can-take-on-gun-control-20120726

Scalia’s statements are about as PH neutral as you can imagine in comparison to the steps Obama is considering.

Don’t believe the hype.  Romney was a pro-2nd Amendment governor during his tenure here in MA.  I have every reason to believe he will continue to be a pro-2nd Amendment President. 

http://www.goal.org/newspages/romney.html

Romney’s 2nd Amendment and pro-sportsman record while he was *actually* the Governor in Massachusetts was very positive. 

Legislation: During the Romney Administration, no anti-Second Amendment or anti-sportsmen legislation made its way to the Governor’s desk.

Governor Romney did sign five pro-Second Amendment/pro-sportsmen bills into law. His administration also worked with Gun Owners’ Action League and the Democratic leadership of the Massachusetts House and Senate to remove any anti-Second Amendment language from the Gang Violence bill passed in 2006.

Please read the rest before you shoot your, um, mouth off.  Romney’s record with 2nd Amendment supporters and sportsmen here in Massachusetts was in excellent shape when he left office. 

This is from the *premier* 2nd Amendment and pro-sportsman group in the Commonwealth. 

There have been a lot of attempted distortions of Romney’s record – factual, rhetorical and simply incorrect distortions.  Outright lies in a lot of cases.  Before people believe the lies they should contact G.O.A.L. and ask what the real story was.

It gets complicated for people to understand because Massachusetts is such a universally Liberal state with supermajority liberal votes in both chambers of the legislature.  But  don’t be fooled.  Romney was one of the strongest 2nd Amendment governors MA has had and he’s *leagues* better than his successor. 

It’s relatively easy to be a pro-2nd Amendment Governor when you’re elected Governor of Montana, or Utah, or Texas or Kentucky, and even Georgia or Florida.  In fact it might be easier to be a pro-2nd Amendment Governor if you were elected in Maryland or New Jersey.  We all know there will never be a pro-2nd Amendment Governor elected in New York until the world ends, or well after the world ends, actually.  Barring that, Massachusetts in my view is – and has been for more than a decade now – the toughest place on Earth for a pro-2AM Governor to function successfully, and Mitt Romney did so.  If people are looking to find a “core” in his 2nd Amendment principles, you just have to look at his record here, and it speaks for itself very clearly.

It will *never* be good enough to satisfy the people who don’t live here and don’t understand this Commonwealth’s politics, I know.  In a sense you DO have to live here to understand what he was swimming against, but he swam very well and very skillfully, and left a strong legacy here.   On his 2nd Amendment record in the Commonwealth I’d take him back as governor *any day* and I’ve said that a few times now.

Let the twisted Op-Eds begin!

Matt Groening finally reveals where “Springfield” from the Simpsons was really (theoretically at least) located. 
 
It’s Springfield, Oregon – chosen after the name of the town where the original “Father Knows Best” show was portrayed (not in Oregon). 
 
Of course, the Simpsons more than anything else as a cultural phenomenon were all about how “Father Knows Less Than Nothing, And He’s An Idiot.”  Homer Simpson was 23 years of the incompetent, bumbling, hapless and utterly clueless father figure.  No matter how stupid he seemed, there was always something more stupid waiting around the corner.  No matter how incompetent he was and what a terrible father figure he was, he was basically propped up by the rest of his family – but he was never the support, except for comedy.  Homer Simpson is the Schmuck whose family loves him despite that, and as the Schmuck he was the model for the Simpsons’ father figure.
 
http://seattle.cbslocal.com/2012/04/11/mystery-solved-simpsons-creator-reveals-where-springfield-is-located/
 
Matt Groening, by the way, was a five-year student at one of the most leftist colleges on the Left coast:
 
Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington.  Courtney Love (from “Hole”, last heard from as the wife of Kurt Cobain) went to school there also.
 
http://www.evergreen.edu/
 
The big feature of their campus is “Red Square”
 
Revolution! 

Anyone who ever watched the Simpsons with their father sitting in his chair knows how uncomfortable Homer really made American men, American Dads, and fathers.  My Dad HATES Homer Simpson.  It was a full-court press against their authority – and even more than that – their basic competence as human beings – for more than 2 decades.  Homer Simpson was a relentless portrayal of American fathers as clueless, helpless, irresponsible, stupid, sometimes coy, inadvertently funny, hapless, haphazard, mostly dumb, irresponsible, and generally pitiful creatures.   Nobody can deny it:  it’s in every episode!

It was really Matt Groening’s reaction to Father Knows Best.

And one of the original actors from Father Knows Best would have applauded The Simpsons, and it’s important to read that, too, from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Knows_Best

“I wish there was some way I could tell the kids not to believe it. The dialogue, the situations, the characters ­ they were all totally false. The show did everyone a disservice. The girls were always trained to use their feminine wiles, to pretend to be helpless to attract men. The show contributed to a lot of the problems between men and women that we see today. . . . I think we were all well motivated, but what we did was run a hoax. ‘Father Knows Best’ purported to be a reasonable facsimile of life. And the bad thing is, the model is so deceitful. It usually revolved around not wanting to tell the truth, either out of embarrassment, or not wanting to hurt someone. If I could say anything to make up for all the years I lent myself to (that), it would be, ‘You Know Best.’”[3]

Not telling the truth is the big sin that a lot of people continue to commit regardless of what side of the political divide they’re on.  The capacity to try to deceive out of embarrassment or shame is particularly strong.  The 1950s were built around a very strong firewall of embarrassment and shame:  the penalties were so high that everyone lied.  The whole culture lied to itself.  But it was a very sunny lie, and a very optimistic form of deceit, because we had just basically destroyed the worst evil in the world and frankly controlled the Universe as far as anyone knew it. 

Now we’re lying to ourselves in a different direction – which doesn’t make it any better.    Destroying the father figure in American life has had terrible consequences for everyone and the pendulum just keeps swinging, I think with less bearing and more violence than ever.   

We sometimes refer to it as the Nanny State but Chris Christie from Jersey is quite right when he describes it as “paternalistic”.  It’s the new, statist paternalism, where people sit around on a couch and wait for checks from the their father, the Government.  How can it be anything but when it wants to know about everything you do, and force you to do whatever it dictates?

I think if you look back at the Popular Science archives from the 1950′s, on the balance, the world was a better place.  There was certainly a lot more opportunity for people – for everyday people who wanted to make a career in their homes and with their lives without driving themselves into horrific debt.   Go take a look.  You really could make a living in the ’50s doing the kinds of things the advertisers in Popular Science had for you.  And a Law Degree was something you could get from a mail correspondence place in Chicago.  The world has changed completely for people like my father and no wonder he feels like he’s living on another planet.  Nobody can make a living now, unless they’re a lawyer, a banker, a tech guru, a pornographer, a government employee or one of their benefactors. 

http://www.popsci.com/content/wordfrequency

I was ticked, burned, discombobulated, singed, crisped off, hacked off, pi**ed off and generally not in a good mood that he summarily de[published] me.  I took a day off and I forgive him .

Now, we really need to get back to talking about the serious things we’ve got ahead of us in this election cycle.  The facts are that now, both Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan have endorsed Romney and I consider his status as the nominee to be a fait accompli.  I also want to say that I like the way Marco Rubio thinks and when I see him on television, I just really think he’s a terrific person and one of the brighest stars we have.  He is potentially a Great Man and I mean that in the  profound sense of the term.  Redstate was *absolultely correct* to have supported him so strongly.  I can tell by watching him and listening to him that he and I would have great conversations based on the way our minds work.  I think that’s why he endorsed Romney, in the end.   I support him 110%.   He’s a great person. 

I was angry at being summarily de[published].  It wasn’t necessary, but I’m over it.  I won’t make the same mistake again and Neil won’t have to de[publish] me again, even though he really shouldn’t have felt he had to in the first place.  Let’s get one thing straight:  whenever I post a diary entry, I’m online – I’m logged into Redstate and also Gmail.  I don’t post from a Blackberry or a mobile device and even if Neil had just given me a warning in the thread that would have almost instantly sufficed to have me flesh it out a little more.  Instead he just [depublished] my post.  OK.  Maybe he was in a “[depublishing] mood.”  I forgive him.

Moreover anyone who knows me understands that when I write something, I usually go back and add several explanatory and/or exculpatory sentences and paragraphs after the fact.  I am bittersweet about Rubio supporting Romney but bittersweet it is.  The Sweet part is that I had a longstanding belief that Romney was eventually going to move the mountains to get the endorsements and the money, and the Bitter part is that none of our other candidates really rose to the level to challenge him effectively.   But it’s OVER.  In my mind at least.  And thank God, because now I can concentrate on some other things Redstaters might actually *agree* on.  Let’s not let Atavism turn into Onanism and mentally masturbate our way to defeat, here. 

Let’s move forward from here.   We have lots of big fish to fry, even bigger than the big Sturgeon carcass that washed up on the beach in North Carolina, and the last thing we need right now is more rancor and disunity.  As Peggy Noonan said today, it’s ours to lose ”virtual sigh”.  And she was much more charitable about Obama being “creepy” than I would have been, but mine is not to rewrite the columns of WSJ contributors.  I love her even though I disagree with her all the time.   One good thing about that column today is that she’s really got ahold of a strong *feeling* about Obama that I think is starting to take hold even among his former supporters, and with a lot of good reason.  He should have stuck with the Assistant Professorship, frankly.  But all of us know that wasn’t The Plan, Stan.

So let’s not lose, shall we?

We don’t need any more of our own circular firing squads.  Obama’s campaign is the Lonely Sinking Feeling and the most important thing we need to do is not screw up much more.  Let’s have a little solidarity here, people!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-My2AkcZeE4

This is one of the most amazing (and uncreative and hacked-up) examples of intellectual malfeasance I’ve seen yet:

I’m talking about “The Right’s Etch-A-Sketch Imperative” in which he first states the relevant text of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law and then proceeds to tell people what it “really means” while asserting the NRA and gun owners believe or adhere to his twisted-up, lurid interpretation.   

Please read the article in its entirety at the Washington Post’s website, and when you get down to paragraphs 9 and 10 be prepared to witness this astounding feat of projection and transmutation:

…there was a national outcry because under the Florida law, a citizen has a right to use “force, including deadly force, if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

Flash forward (you don’t have to go very far!)  to the next paragraph, where he talks about the NRA’s “utopia” based on “feeling threatened” and “no longer counting on law enforcement to preserve the peace.”  Neither the NRA nor the Florida law talk about “feeling threatened” or “just shooting.”  To my knowledge as a member I’ve never discussed the word “utopia” in connection with concealed carry.  And they certainly don’t talk about “no longer counting on law enforcment” either - they talk about using deadly force if it is necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm “to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”   That’s a universe away from Dionne’s assertion that it means:  “If you feel threatened, just shoot.”  They couldn’t be any farther apart! 

Dionne probably knows that the use of lethal force in this case is being scrutinized according to the way the law is written, not what he is imagining it means so that he can project that on others.  In fact it would be a travesty of the law and nothing I as a gun owner would support if the law said what he claims it does!   Then he has the chutzpah to put one right after the other, without even a few intervening, dissembling paragraphs to play around with the primacy/recency effect.  Amazing.  He just glues them together and expects people not to notice they’re utterly different, and moreover to buy his interpretation.  It isn’t even goodspeak Orwell.

The doublespeak continues, but this is a particularly breathtaking and brazen example.  Dionne knows very well that the shooting is being investigated in the context of what the law says.  It’s amazing to me that the Washington Post can keep running a column – even from this columnist – that contains such an outrageous distortion of both the law and the facts, wrapped up in a slanderous caricature.   [Author's note:  Yes I know that when it's written it's libelous, but "slanderous" sounded better at the end of that sentence.]

It’s hard to believe he understands the words he writes, much less publishes them for other people to read in a major national newspaper.  Even E.J. Dionne has a certain responsibility as an editor for such a large publication not to further distort and propagandize, particularly when – even at this late date – all the facts have not yet come out and everyone’s tensions are high.