Tea Party In Congress: Profiles from the Fringe

Mad Dog is trying to understand where the 50 members of the House of Representatives who will caucus with the Tea Party come from.  Who are these people? What are they like?

Picking from Roll Call's list of newly elected Republican likely Tea Party members, I landed on Kerry Bentivolio, first by alphabetical order.

Scanning through his official biography and what has been written about him on line, I think I got a sense of the man. 

This will be the first in a series of  "Get To Know Your Tea Party" presented by Mad Dog.

Mr. Bentivolio was elected from Michigan's 11th district. Like so many Tea Party acolytes, Mr. Bentivolio decries taxes, emphasizes the importance of cutting government spending and government programs.  He is staunch in his support for the idea the 2nd amendment guarantees any American citizen complete freedom to own and use guns. He is against abortion.

Born in 1951, he went to Vietnam rather than college, although he did later get an associate's degree from a community college, and eventually a BA in social studies and a M.A.  

According to remarks on line from a brother, Mr. Bentivolio's early life was marked by some dysfunction, including a proclivity for glue sniffing and he wound up in and out of many jobs, back and forth in and out of the military.
He remained in the National Guard and was served in the first Gulf War, rising to the rank of a Master Sergeant, in the military police.

Like so many of our elected leaders who extol the Ayn Randian notion of the independent man,  who creates his own business and asks nothing from government, Mr. Bentivolio's work history is one of being an employee, first in the military, then as a teacher and he worked as a "design engineer" in the "automotive industry," although exactly what that means, and for whom he worked is not clear. His education mentions nothing which suggests any engineering training. At any rate, he has been supported by large organizations and he has drawn a pay check for most of his life.

He did take a run at a construction business, but apparently did not pay his bills, and when he was scheduled to appear as Santa Claus at a White House function in the George H.W. Bush days, disgruntled creditors got wind of this from local newspaper reports and apparently they raised a howl, called the White House and he was disinvited. A newspaper reporter for a local Michigan paper writes that Mr. Bentivolio sued him and his paper for publishing a story Mr. Bentivolio considered slanderous. A settlement was reached, the reporter says, for nuisance money.

There are several references to Mr. Bentivolio's speckled career as a teacher: Apparently, there were some explosions of temper in the classroom, during which he slammed his fist  on his desk and after newspaper reports of his outbursts and his upsetting students, resulting in several kerfuffles he ultimately resigned his teaching positions.

During his service in the Gulf, Mr. Bentivolio injured his neck and was sent to recover at a facility in Kentucky, where, driving around in a rented car, he happened on a Tea Party rally, where Rand Paul was speaking and he was much impressed.

I'm not sure if a pattern will emerge here, but I do see some similarities in Mr. Bentivolio's profile and that of, say, Rush Limbaugh, in a desultory and sputtering  academic history, a failure at private enterprise, while extolling the superiority of the capitalist system. There is also the evidence of pugnacity and the story of being captivated by a political sales pitch rather than by rigorous debate and thoughtful analysis. 

One also gets the strong intimation being a Congressman is the best job this man could ever hope to land, the steady pay, the check, the level of pay.  


We'll see, as we look at other Tea Party types, what sort of patterns may emerge.

Hunters' Rights

When I was a student, I was lucky enough to be invited, along with a few other students, for a weekend in the Adirondacks. One of the deans was married to a Vanderbilt, and when we arrived, they showed us around the main lodge, which had soaring wood paneled walls lined with the heads of big game shot by one Vanderbilt or another. The Vanderbilts were, apparently, enthusiastic hunters.  The estate bordered the Rockefeller estate, had its own private railroad line, its own gasoline station and a map on one wall made it look about the size of the county I came from in Maryland.

One thing I distinctly remember was the perimeter around the lodge and the smaller cabins surrounding it, which was marked clearly with blazes on trees. That's where you left your guns, and the help would come by and pick them up. No loaded gun was allowed closer than a mile and a half from the lodge. You left the guns, unloaded, and the help came and got them and brought them to a cabin. The guns were left unloaded, I presumed, for the safety of the gun bearers and, I thought darkly, to be sure the gun bearers could not use the guns on the Vanderbilts or their guests.

My wife's father was a life time member of the NRA.  His father gave him his first rifle at age 12, and he hunted in the fields and woodlands of Utah. When, years later as an Army colonel  he was appointed assistant commander of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., he arrived at the house assigned him, in a wooded area of the campus and spotted squirrels scampering around the grounds. He quickly retrieved, not a gun, but his bow and arrow and promptly nailed a squirrel for lunch.  Within minutes, his house was surrounded by M.P.'s, one of whom ran up to his door and the colonel stepped out on to the porch, smiling, curiously.

"Colonel, stay inside until we give you the all clear."

"Problem?" 

"We had reports of an man with a bow shooting arrows."

"Oh, certainly. Carry on," my father in law said, and he went back in to the kitchen to prepare his squirrel lunch.

Walter Reed, in those days, was just off 16th Street in Northwest Washington, D.C. It was one of those enclaves within a city which had deer, squirrels, even the occasional fox. But the military was very vigilant about weapons. 

My father in law mentioned that soldiers returning from firing ranges on base had to present the empty shell casings, which were then counted. If you had taken 24 rounds, you had better come back with 24 shell casings. The Army did not want you using a live round on a drill instructor, officer or fellow soldier. That's how careful the Army was about ammunition, guns and the potential for mischief by the mixture of the two.

All this is by way of introduction to events of January 1.  Walking along the Urban Forest in Portsmouth, which is bounded by Elwyn Road, Route One and the salt bog, I heard gunfire. Long volleys, then silence, then more shots. The Urban Forest was teeming with walkers and dogs that day, and many of them came streaming out along the trails near the water, through the woods, trying to get away from the firing. Somebody said she had seen a man with a rifle firing in the direction of the high school, across the bog.  An off duty policeman, walking his dog, called the station house in Portsmouth to send out a squad car, but as he looked out across the bog, fifty yards from the entrance to the park, he saw two men on an island just offshore, a boat, and they had rifles.

"They might be hunters," he said. "They might be within their rights. It is the Live Free or Die State."

Sure enough, the Police Log in the Portsmouth Herald the next day said these were legal hunters in duck season.

Legal, but why is this legal?

From where those hunters stood, Route One was about 0.3 mile across open bog; the high school is screened by scrub trees and brush, but less than a mile, and the walking trails of the urban forest within twenty yards, and Elwyn Road less than 0.2 mile. 

Stray shots could have hit motorists along either road, walkers, dogs and there were precious few ducks to be seen that cold New Year's day.

The question is: What is so sacred, important or necessary about hunting that hunters should be allowed to hunt so close to their fellow citizens, to unsuspecting motorists or people just out for a walk with their dogs?

In Hampton, one of my neighbors grabs a gun and goes shooting in the salt marshes off Route One, in sight of the Seabrook/Hampton Falls Nuclear power plant and within yards of occupied homes, and within easy rifle shot of cars along Route 1.

"It's perfectly legal," he says.

Well, if we are a democracy, if we elect local government, why should this be legal?

Why can we not do what the Vanderbilts did, what the Army does, with respect to limiting and controlling lethal weapons when it comes to protecting the places we actually live?
We ought not conflate the control of hunters in populated areas with the events at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I have no doubt, seeing those hunters on the bog, all decked out in their hunting gear, they had no blood lust for human beings. They were enjoying the great outdoors, hunting ducks. 
But I do argue their enjoyment does not trump the enjoyment of all the walkers, motorists and joggers who were out that day.
In some ways, it reminds me of the debate over loud motorcycles: The man on his Harley likes the roar of his bike, but those around him are offended. 
The hunters enjoyed shooting off their rifles, but I can say with considerable certainty, they offended dozens of citizens that day.
Isn't democracy about the rights of the majority? We need to balance the rights of the minority, but isn't the greatest good for the greatest number still a reasonable principle of governance?
I might like the idea of a windmill in my backyard, but the noise and the sight of a sixty foot windmill might understandably upset my neighbors. Do they have no rights to low noise levels and a decent view?
Somehow, I do think, all of this may be of a piece:  the NRA has zero tolerance for any sort of limitation on the reasonable use, possession and display of guns. The NRA has lots of money and they use that to terrorize elected officials. That is perfectly legal, and that is the way the Supreme Court says we must play the game: Money is speech and Organizations enjoy the right of free speech as surely as individuals. 
But where, in all of this, is reason?

Peter King, Krauthammer and Republican Bile

Peter King, R-NY

Dr. Krauthammer

McConnell, R-Ky

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle

Representative Peter King, of New York was livid. The House of Representatives is where the money bills have to come from, and his state was promised money to help rebuild from the devastation of hurricane Sandy. But the House of Representatives, still captive to the Republican Tea Party has refused to provide promised relief. Congressman King sputtered: "They can find New York when they need campaign contributions, but when New York needs them:  Drop dead. I would not contribute another cent to Republican candidates."  
That got the attention of the Republicans. They did not vote through the bill, but they called in Mr. King and promised to vote this week and send New York its money. 

Thus is it ever so, the Republicans are against government, which is to say, they are against taxing and spending, until they need government: Then they are self righteous.

Another face of the 21st century Republican party: Charles Krauthammer, expostulated that Hiliary Clinton's failure to appear before a congressional investigating committee was malingering, was "Benghazi allergy" had Rush Limbaugh and all his dittoheads smirking and cat calling. They loved it in Limbaughland. Hiliary is a' fraidy cat. Won't come out and testify.  Hiding behind a phony injury.

Ms. Clinton, meanwhile,  has an MRI which shows a clot in the transverse sinus, an injury which can be lethal, and requires anticoagulation in hospital.

Does Dr. Krauthammer (MD, Harvard Medical School) or Mr. Limbaugh, (no academic degree of any sort) have decency to say, "Oh, well, sorry about that?"

This is the nature of the men on the other side of the aisle. From Eric Cantor, to John Boehner, to Mitch McConnell, to John Kyle down to the last drawling good ol' boys from Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina to Texas to Arizona, these are the vile boys. These are the Sheriff Arpaio crowd, for whom Kelly Ayotte has expressed her affection, with whom she votes in lock step, whose backing she covets for her national ambitions.

We have seen this sort of nastiness over the course of this nation's history. Certainly, the men who snarled across the aisle from Thaddeus Stevens were no different. These embittered men, hate dripping from their lips, were outraged at the idea of black men voting, women voting, a multiracial society in which white men would have to compete with women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians. 

It frightened them to think what might happen, if their white sons had to compete with other people.

So how do we deal with people like this? We are not going to change them. 
We can only expose them. 
Sunlight, a powerful disinfectant. 

When Martin Luther King described George Wallace, standing on the school steps, "Hate dripping from his lips," it was a powerful image, an image we had seen on TV and the power began to drain away from Wallace and his racist throng. When TV cameras caught images of fat, white policemen, with dogs, beating black men and women and dragging them down the streets of Selma, revulsion set in, not in Selma, but everywhere from the hamlets of New Hampshire, to the beach towns of California, and things began to change. 

The best we can do is to show these Republicans for what they are. Jon Stewart does some of this, every night. Steven Colbert lampoons them. But we need to do more.  We need to show Republicans, Fox News Republicans, Congressional Republicans, Tea Party Republicans, and yes, even Blue Dog Democrats, to the nation.

We need to quote them, show them, put their images before the nation.

Then, and only then, will the tide turn.

Dysfunctional Democracy: Can It Long Endure?

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure... that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The Agents of Hope and Change: Of different minds and sometimes a single purpose

Obama

Chris van Hollen D-Md

Dick Durbin D-Illinois

Tom Harkin D-Iowa

Steny Hoyer  D-Md

The Opposition: Striving Every Day to Keep the Rich Rich And The Poor in Their Place

Eric Cantor R-Va

Grover Norquist Unelected 

Mitch McConnell R-Ky

John Roberts R-Bush

Antonin Scalia R-Spanish Inquistion

 When fascism comes to the United States, it will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. 
--Sinclair Lewis

This morning, the New York Times published the first paper of 2013. On the same page, a summary of the "Tentative Accord" ran over an article about a message from Chief Justice John Roberts to the Executive and Legislative branch.

What confused Mad Dog mightily is the phrase "Tentative Accord." What is this thing? A law?  Apparently, no bill was passed into law. The bullet points were neatly outlined, but they are not law. And is this an agreement between departing lame duck Congress and Mr. Obama or does it automatically get enacted by the new Congress? What is this "accord" exactly? 

Whatever it is, the Democrat Tom Harkin said Mr. Obama had given away the store.
 For Mad Dog, giving away the store would mean two things: 1. Mr. Obama gives in on taxing the rich at higher rates--and by rich 400K strikes Mad Dog as drawing the line in the Republicans' favor, but Mad Dog could life with this, having seen the movie and realizing political deals are always sullied  2. Not reducing or endangering Medicare or Social Security, not in premiums or financing. 

So Mad Dog still does not know what to think has happened, what has been swapped for what, until there is a bill to vote on.

As for the Chief Justice's message: He tells us the Judiciary can be a model of financial virtue, while "No one seriously doubts the country's fiscal ledge has gone awry."  
Actually, Chief Justice, Mad Dog seriously doubts this. Or if there is red ink, it flows from the wounds of two wars we can quickly end, if we chose.

Mr. Roberts  then extols his own thriftiness: "For each citizen's tax dollar only two tenths of one penny goes toward funding the entire third branch of government!"
(Exclamation point!)
Well, that's very impressive (!!! )considering the judiciary does not fund programs which provide for the nation's health care, financial security, defense, Coast Guard, border defense or manufacturing or infrastructure. The only expenses the judiciary incurs have to do with salaries,  building maintenance, and computer expenses. 
The Chief Justice tells us how hard working the judges are, "Hearings in Lower Manhattan the day after the storm hit, working in a building without heat or hot water that was only sparsely lit by gas-fueled emergency generators." And the Supreme Court, we are told heard arguments when the rest of official Washington was closed after Hurricane Sandy.
Oh, three cheers for the intrepid judges!  Perhaps they had to wear sweaters under their robes. 
None of these judges were hanging from helicopters on ropes, reeling in the drowning. Oh, don't get me started. I would love to see Mr. Roberts tell any of my New Hampshire neighbors, electricians who work on generators in the snow, builders who plow their way into construction sites, ship yard workers who get up at 4 AM to make their shift twenty miles from their homes, power line workers, plumbers, pipe fitters, auto mechanics, power plant workers, garbage collectors, men with weather beaten faces, thick shoulders and callused hands, or doctors who operate, frequently, through the night. 
These men, and women, would tell Mr. Roberts he does not know what hard work is.

What Chief Justice does not mention is that "retired" judges can pull their full salaries if they continue to hear one case a year, and if they agree to hear a few more, they can be provided with a secretary and an office, at government expense, while they draw their full salaries.
Oh, this is very thrifty, thank you very much.
This is the essence of the privileged life:  Justice Roberts likely studied very hard, in his warm dorm room and his library heated partially by the public dollar, on his way to becoming a justice. And he thinks he is a paragon of virtue because he goes to work when the lights are dim.
That is how far men like those who sit on the Supreme Court are from the lives of real hard working Americans.

Seidman and Krugman: Voices of Reason

Two stellar pieces appeared on the same page of today's New York Times: Paul Krugman addresses the problem of trying to sound balanced when the situation is unbalanced; Louis Michael Seidman, a professor of constitution law at Georgetown, addresses the issue of being hidebound by the Constitution.

Speaking of the efforts by the CEO of Starbucks to encourage "bipartisanship" by having employees write "Come together" on coffee cups,  Mr. Krugman says, "It's true that elected politicians have been unable to 'come together and compromise.' But saying that in generic form, and implying a symmetry between Republicans and Democrats, isn't just misleading, it's actively harmful."

He then details the huge, and likely hurtful concessions made by Mr. Obama, rejected by the Republicans. "In return, the Republicans have offered essentially nothing. Oh, they say they're willing to increase revenue by closing loopholes--but they've refused to specify a single loophole they're willing to close. So if there's a breakdown in negotiations, the blame rests entirely with one side of the political divide..Given that reality, think about the effect when people like Mr. Schultz respond by blaming both sides equally."

This is the point I was trying to make about Mr. Douthat's article, yesterday. He is another one of those kumbya types trying to smooth over the nasty reality of Republican intransigence.

"What they're actually doing is rewarding intransigence and extremism," Krugman observes, because they are refusing to place the blame where it belongs.

Professor Seidman argues in a provocatively titled article, "Let's Give Up on the Constitution," that the words on parchment have outlived their usefulness, and more harm than good now accrues from any belief in this document as a sacred text. 

He outlines a long history of Presidents and government officials on a variety of levels violating the Constitution, from Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase, to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, to decisions like Brown v Board of Education (outlawing segregated schools), to Miranda v Arizona (requiring "Miranda rights" be recited to citizens arrested)  to Roe v Wade (legalizing abortion)  to Bush v Gore (handing the election to Bush before a recount).  For many of these decisions, the immediate need for going beyond what was written in that document or frankly defying it (since slavery was accepted in the Constitution) was thought paramount to the national good. In the last case, it was simply convenient for the "orginalists" to ignore the Constitution when it suited their political convictions.

Today, with Antonin Scalia the real power on the Supreme Court, espousing "originalism" we have a recipe for disaster. 

"Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional politcal system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what  James Madison might have done 225 years ago."

It is the legal equivalent of, "Just ask what Jesus would do."

All thinking ceases, in the face of this level of ethical analysis.

Seidman concedes, "This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands...What would change is not the existence of these institutions, but the basis on which they claim legitimacy. The president would have to justify military action against Iran soley on the merits, without shutting down the debate with a claim of unchallengeable constitutional power as commander in chief."

He goes on to address the fears that many have raised about ensuing chaos if we change our approach to the Supreme Court or the Constitution: "The deep-seated fear that such disobedience would unravel our social fabric is mere superstition...The country has successfully survived numerous examples of constitutional infidelity." 

He points to Britain which has no constitution but holds together by traditions, accepted modes of procedure and engaged citizens. 

It is strange, Mad Dog observes, that Britain, which has a state religion does not try to justify its policy and governmental decision by reference to a "Good Book" or sacred scripture, but the United States has a Supreme Court which makes every decision thumping the good book of the Constitution, insisting "All the answers are in here. Every question is answered in the Good Book."

"What has preserved our political stability is not a poetic piece of parchment, but entrenched institutions and habits of thought and, most important, the sense that we are all one nation and must work out  our differences, " Seidman avers.

That is actually a scary thought, and I hope Professor Seidman is wrong about that, because if he is correct, just look at the Tea Party Republicans who currently hold sway in the House of Representatives. These are the people who believe 47% of our nation is compromised of parasites, freeloaders who want to suck the blood out of the the hard working 53% and most especially the upper 1%. These are not people who think of our nation as a whole people, but who believe the nation is a system of castes, and they believe themselves superior,  in the ruling caste, who live in walled communities, who keep their  children separate and apart,  free of despoliation by the hoi polloi; these are the people  who vacation among people of their own station and who believe other Americans are the enemy. 

I think a less radical approach might work, and I've spelled it out in terms of changing the composition of the Supreme Court with the president appointing a new justice every two years, only the 9 most recent justices voting. At least that way we could assure the Constitution is seen as a living document, not a holy book.

Ross Douthat: Getting the Balance Wrong

Audi Alteram Partem

--Hear the Other Side

Ross Douthat instructs us in today's New York Times, "Shake yourself free of the toils of partisanship, and let your mind rove more widely and freely...And whenever you're tempted to hurl away an article in disgust, that's exactly when you should turn the page or swipe the screen and keep on reading, to see what else the other side might have to say."

Like David Brooks, Douthat has made a living playing the role of the dispassionate, rational, approachable conservative.  The New York Times publishes these two as if they represented a lively conservative movement, as if they are the William F. Buckley, George Will ilk of amusing, thought provoking, waspish foil to smug liberalism.
The problem is, these are conservatives who do not represent a conservative wing, because they are the only extant surviving members of the species. They are the last two Dodos, and even Dodos were not all that benign.

Their pitch is, come let us reason together. Let us be Civil. 
We saw what that approach got us in the first Presidential debate, where Mitt Romney rolled over Jim Lehrer's civility with a Panzer tank and crushed any hope of a restrained, reasoned discussion in the first three minutes.

As for an interesting conservative backbench:  Charles Krauthammer is so pathological, just watching him on television one thinks of that deranged general in Dr. Strangelove who rides the nuclear bomb to its target like a cowboy on a wild horse.  George Will has the capacity to be amusing, but he is really nothing more than an old lady gossip, incapable of discerning when he has been fed the wrong answers at his Old Ebbet's Grill lunch. For me, the quintessential George Will appeared in 1981, when the AIDS epidemic was fresh,  and he published a story about how AIDS will never infect heterosexuals--it was destined to be a queer disease, promulgated and requiring anal intercourse with disruption of normal rectal tissues.  One can only imagine where he got this line, but the fact is, he did not have the intelligence or training to ask hard questions before publishing this stuff as received truth.  It was, like so much else which conservative belief is based upon, wishful thinking. 

In light of these circumstances, it is difficult to read and engage "other side" because the other side so rarely has anything reasonable to say.  

Consider the "gridlock" in Congress over the Fiscal Cliff. This is not a case of if only the Democrats would give a little and the Republicans would give a little...The Republicans, virtually every last one of them, have become so extreme, there is no room left for governing. They have purged, driven away or exiled any Republican who even verges on moderation.  

The House of Representatives Republicans have en masse, bound themselves to a pledge to never raise taxes, which is to say, to simply not govern. As long as you have a party dedicated to this kind of intransigence, how can you "hear the other side?" The other side is saying, "No government. Kill Medicare by converting it to Coupon Care and call it "saving" Medicare. Kill Social Security and call it fiscal responsibility. Never ask millionaires to pay more taxes. Spend only on defense, let everything else take care of itself.

Imagine if Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens had taken Mr. Douthat's counsel:  Let's just listen to the other side and allow slavery to persist. Economic forces will eventually make it go away. Or maybe we should listen to the plan of phasing out slavery on a timetable which would end slavery by 1900. 

Imagine if Martin Luther King, Jr. and the leaders of the Civil Rights movement had taken the advice that Southern whites were not ready for integrated schools and we risked raising expectations of Blacks which could never be met, expectations for equal opportunity in education, employment and housing and that would cause a violent backlash.

All these reasonable conservative ideas were given a hearing and discarded. 

But at least there was room in some of these discussions for a shift in opinion. One side had not dug in.

When you listened to the debate on the floor of Congress in the movie Lincoln  (which was presumably historically as accurate as Doris Kearns Goodwin could make it) and heard the shock from the Democrats of the 1860's( who were the conservative party then,) when you heard them say there could never be a place for Negroes voting, or for women voting or for interracial marriage or for any sort of multiracial society, you have some idea of the sort of problem we have today, as we look across the aisle and see the face of fanatic opposition. 

The other side wants to drown government in a bathtub.

They are, at best fanatics, at worst anarchists. 

How do you expand your mind to listen to that?

In his masterful Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln wrestled with the existential idea of "why" the Civil War had come about. If it was God's will, why? The best he could come up with was the rather Old Testament notion that a vengeful God required a deep and abiding wrong be paid for with blood. The wrong that was slavery could not simply be phased out and patted on the head told to go away.   No, the murders and enslavement, and wrecking of families and lives ruined had to be atoned for.

 So each drop of blood drawn by the bondman's whip had to be paid for by a drop of blood drawn by the sword, as Lincoln reckoned.

I think we are in the same place now, with respect to the Tea Party Republicans. There is no reasoning, no compromising with those who "think" like these fanatics. You have to simply oppose them with whatever tools you have. 

Our system of government is designed to thwart action, with checks and balances meant to prevent action rather than to expedite it. 

Until 2014, there are no elections to expunge the fanatics. So what do we do until then? The Tea Party has its foot rammed on the brake of government. 

We can only jam our foot on the accelerator and hope the car moves forward. If it remains, wheels spinning in place, we can only point to the root cause of the problem and hope the American people can see the truth, not the half truth of Mr. Douthat, but the full truth, in full light of day. 

We are still stuck with the Tea Party of 2010. The Radical Tea Republican Party has the power to send us back into recession, to reverse the slow progress we have seen emerge.  

The only question is:  Can we find a way to overwhelm the fanatical right?

Currently, I see no path forward, other than attempting to shame the fanatics. 

Not a good bet.

Peyton Place, New Hampshire and Rape

From The Phantom Speaks Blog. Used with Permission


Hard on the heels of the news out of Newtown, Connecticut is today's summary of the week's news in the Sunday New YorkTimes, with an extraordinary story by Jeffrey Gettleman about the ordinary viciousness of life on planet Earth, this one focused not on America, but on the huge central African nation of Congo.  He reports on the rampant raping of women by young men carrying AK-47's in what are called militias. "What's the strategic purpose of putting an AK-47 assault rifle inside a woman and pulling the trigger? Or cutting out a woman's fetus and making her friends eat it?"
As chilling is his simple observation about cruelty not directed at women: "I met a pair of soldiers who had chained a chimpanzee to a corroded railway tie, leaving the animal in a pile of its own feces, staring up at us with rheumy eyes as the soldiers howled with laughter."

Police and pundits alike are quoted, decrying the murder of "innocence" at Newtown. Presumably, they meant, the murder of "innocents," that is, six year old children. But, no, they often extend their remarks to include the adults in this "idyllic" town where adults moved to raise their children in a protected environment, where children could grow up feeling safe from predators.

Of course, there is no such place on earth, not Norway, not small town America.

Wherever there are people, particularly young male human beings, you will find savagery lurking. 

Right next to the story about Africa, where young men stride about villages grinning, with babies squirmy in death throes on their bayonets, is a story about crowds on New York city streets, where people walk among each other, reading cues, and never colliding. There is another about the aging of Japan, where the first grade class in Nanmoku has just a single student this year. No fear of mass murder in that school. In fact, enrollment in the whole school system there is down from 1,250 to 37 over the past 50 years. Japan does not have a problem with young men and guns or bayonets, presumably because it has so few young men. But it did once, and they were as vicious or more vicious than any on the planet--just ask the women of Nanjing. 

The authors of Freakonomics, have suggested the drop in the murder rate, which began in the United States about 20 years after abortion was legalized resulted from the reduction of unwanted children, so fewer young men were around 20 years later to rape and shoot. 

That may apply to the everyday ghetto violence, but what do you think about the mass murderer? As Chris Rock has noted: When you hear about a man who grabs a lady's pocket book, hits her over the head with it, and runs away--Black man. When you hear about a man who walks into a school yard with an AK-47 and mows down six year old children--White guy.

Young, white guy. The people who shoot "randomly" do not typically emerge from the angry underclass, the poor, the spat upon. They seem to come from among the comfortable, from among those to whom much as been given.  And they seem to slaughter after planning, and that planning is designed to protect them from being injured, interfered with. Like the lions and predators on the nature shows, they do not attack other lions--they go after the young and the defenseless, where there is less risk of injury to the predator.

Grace Metalious wrote a brave, infamous, by today's standards quite mild pot boiler about 50 years ago, about a New Hampshire village which appeared, on the surface, to be picturesque, quaint, sexless and all "innocence" but which, below the surface was roiling with lust, greed, avarice and rape. It was called Peyton Place.  It was a decent book, and it made her famous, and she was not saved by that fame. She is buried in a pretty cemetery near the towns she described. But the violent emotions she described were not buried with her. 
There are twenty somethings growing up not five miles from her grave, who put in Congo with an AK-47 in their hands would be just as vicious as any native.