Skeptical Poe

Guns Kill People

Saying otherwise is just dishonest - or straight up deliberately ignorant.



Two things really got to me:  First was Gus's mom being totally unable to reconcile her thoughts to the title of my post.  She insists on carrying the guilt with her forever because (imo) she can't help but blame herself for "improper handling of a firearm".  If only she had pointed the muzzle to the ground; if only she'd made sure Gus had stayed on the horse; if only etc etc etc

Second is Gus's dad saying he's fearful of government involvement in product liability issues because (paraphrasing) "they'll make the gun so safe it won't work".

A string of cynical calculations plus the fear and the careerism on the parts of company employees made it inevitable for these "accidents" to happen, and certainly Mrs Barber shoulda been more careful, but it was a gun that killed Gus.

Un-Togetherness

Yanking the enforcement teeth out of Dodd-Frank: "...Prohibition Against Federal Government Bailouts of Swap Entities..."  That's part of what the Crime-nibus bill is about.

Senator Warren:



Another part?  It allows rich people (and don't forget corporations are people, my friend) to buy even bigger pieces of Coin-Operated Politicians. 

And all of that shit happening in the Wall-Street-n-Washington-Circle-Jerk is very much part and parcel with this:

...That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government ... Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Riots, uprisings, revolts and full-blown revolutions happen when it becomes clear that in spite of hearing the voice of the populace, a government chooses to ignore it.

It seems just too weird (even for me) to think about it, but we may actually be a lot closer than we think we are to the point where The Dirty Fucking Hippies and the Knuckle-Dragging TeaBaggers have to stop just flapping their gums about bi-partisanship and start figuring out how to make common cause.

I wonder what happens next, cuz I get one of my truly lousy feelings that there are some very powerful forces working very hard to keep us separated from one another, and I'm not convinced that a Gandhi or a Mandela is even possible now.

Today's Winner

This one (Democratic Underground) wins the intertoobz for today:

Bitch In Charge

Pardons

I spent a lot of time in the 70s feeling more than a little worried and frustrated because  Ford issued a blanket pardon for Tricky Dick Nixon.

And now that Obama might be doing the same for The Shrubster and his VP (Snidely Whips-n-Chainsey) et al, it struck me as an ah-fuck-not-this-shit-again kinda moment.

But Ol' Doc Maddow has some purty decent 'splainin' goin' on.  This is the only good clip I can find that's also easy to embed here in my little blog:



Find more at Rachel's show archives at MSNBC.com.

Charlie Gets It

It starts with what seems like an unrelated event in Georgia, but Charlie knows there's no such thing as unrelated event.

Mr Charles Pierce at Esquire:

Somewhere in itself, and not very far from the surface, either, this country has gone mad with fear and rage. As a result, it is finding sustenance in the acts of official violence, and doing so in more different ways than the republic has seen since we had lynching, union busting, and Red Scares at the same time, back when the 19th century was turning into the 20th. Anyone who can't see the political and sociological tissue connecting the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the revelations of a decade's worth of CIA brutality, and the execution of Robert Holsey isn't looking hard enough. In the country's untrammelled fear and rage, it is exercising the only function of self-government it can recall as its mad brain turns to red fire -- to encourage the exercise of the state's power to wound and kill all the right people. In this madness, race and class are mere diagnostic categories. In this madness, the politics of right and left, of Republicans and Democrats, of conservatives and liberals, of red and blue, are pathetically inadequate to assess the situation. In this madness, the choices are not made within the easy and obvious contexts . This is a choice between barbarism and not, between savagery and not. This is a choice between the national soul and the national Id. This is a choice of whether to take inchoate and weaponized vengeance against the living representations of the monsters in our paranoid dreams. That's the last vestige of self-government that we have allowed ourselves. The right to demand that the institutions of government kill what we fear. By any means necessary, as someone once said. 

Today's Pix

About That Torture Thing

Our politicians and Press Poodles and everybody else showing off a talent for farting thru their mouths have all been telling us for quite a while that they don't want those rotten terrorists at Gitmo to be brought into this country because they'll stink up the joint - or some such nonsense.

Here's the thing.  I think we know now why we can't just close Gitmo and bring 'em here - it's because we tortured them.  If we put these guys into the regular channels of either our civilian justice system or the military justice system, we lose 'em.

Nothing we have against them can be used in court now because we fucking tortured them.

We completely lost our shit after 9/11. We went more than a little looney, and we did all these really lousy things to people.  

BTW - not to put us on the couch too much here, but we made the transition from Andy Hardy to Vlad The Impaler in one big fuckin' hurry; fast enough to make me think maybe we weren't really making this huge change so much as we were just kinda coming out of the closet(?).

So anyway, when we began to understand just how fucked up it was that we were doing all this really bad shit, we went into the standard CYA mode that happens every god dammed time we allow too few people to hold too much power, and let 'em do their thing without any way to keep an eye on 'em.

And the kicker - we knew it was wrong.  All of us.  We knew it.  It's wrong to torture people. And it was wrong to change the law in order to help us pretend we were still the good guys just trying to protect our sweet innocent little ol' American selves.  We knew it was wrong and we did it anyway.

Can we stop pretending now?

Leave It To Charlie

Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

Today, with the release of the executive summary of the congressional investigation into the American torture program, we have lost forever the right to moral leadership that we claimed at Nuremberg, and at the tribunals that investigated the actions of the Japanese in the Pacific. Those proceedings were based in two fundamental beliefs: a) that there are some activities that are beyond the law, even in wartime, and b) that the people responsible for those activities, even the worst of them, deserve a fair trial, and a trial that is open to the world, not only because the world needed to see the savagery of which humans are capable, but also because the trial would demonstrate to the world that there is a better way to resolve the issues raised by the native savagery of which people and nations are capable than the masturbatory exercise of blind vengeance. Justice Robert Jackson, in his eloquent summation for the prosecution in the trial of the Nazi warlords, saw all of this with coruscating clarity.

Dunno about losing it "forever".  I guess we can only hope the republic lasts long enough to get some of it back.