The Commentariat -- July 9, 2016
Afternoon Update:
Maureen Dowd, who certainly reinforced my sense of Billary Clinton back in the day, nails them again: "... the Clintons, who are staying true to their reputation as the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of American politics. Their vast carelessness drags down everyone around them, but they persevere, and even thrive. In a mere 11 days, arrogant, selfish actions by the Clintons contaminated three of the purest brands in Washington -- Barack Obama, James Comey and Loretta Lynch -- and jeopardized the futures of Hillary's most loyal aides.... The Clintons work hard but don't play by the rules. Imagine them in the White House with the benefit of low expectations." ...
... CW: Why would they change? Back in the White House, they will again be the most powerful couple in the world. Their methods of shady dealings, parsing the truth down to the meaning of the word "is," & naked arrogance have got them where they are. And where we're not.
*****
Fred Barbash, et al., of the Washington Post: "Vigils and protests, small and large, restrained in some places, rowdy in others, swept across the nation overnight as one of the worst weeks of racially-charged violence in recent memory ticked down to a merciful end." -- CW ...
... Manny Fernandez, et al., of the New York Times: "The heavily armed sniper who gunned down police officers in downtown Dallas, leaving five of them dead, specifically set out to kill as many white officers as he could, officials said Friday. He was a military veteran who had served in Afghanistan, and he kept an arsenal in his home that included bomb-making materials.... Jeh Johnson, the Homeland Security secretary, said in New York that there was apparently just one sniper, though there were so many gunshots and so many victims that officials at first speculated about multiple shooters." -- CW ...
... Joel Achenbach, et al., of the Washington Post: "... President Obama plans to cut his trip to Europe short by one day, returning from Spain on Sunday night so he can travel to Dallas early next week.... Police said Friday that Micah Xavier Johnson, a black 25-year-old believed to be from the Dallas area, was the attacker. Dallas Mayor S. Mike Rawlings told the Associated Press Johnson used an AR-15 assault weapon in the ambush.... 'At this time, there appears to have been one gunman with no known links to or inspiration from any international terrorist organization,' Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Friday afternoon." -- CW ...
... The New York Times is liveblogging developments. ...
... Ben Collins, et al., of the Daily Beast: "Micah Johnson, 25, of Mesquite, Texas was identified by police as the sniper who shot 12 people during a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Dallas on Thursday night. According to his Facebook profile, Johnson identified as a black nationalist. Activists at Thursday’s night Black Lives Matter march, however, said that the shooter behind the deadliest day for American law enforcement since 9/11 was not part of their protest." -- CW (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...
... Sam Thielman of the Guardian: "For what experts are calling the first time in history, US police have used a robot in a show of lethal force. Early Friday morning, Dallas police used a bomb-disposal robot with an explosive device on its manipulator arm to kill a suspect after five police officers were murdered and seven others wounded." -- CW (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...
... CW: Some while back, in the midst of some other true American horror story, I hypothesized that pretty soon other nations would be issuing travel warnings to their citizens planning to travel in the U.S. Now, it's happened, and it isn't some stupid political trick. Aaron Davis of the Washington Post: "... following deadly police shootings this week of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota -- and an ambush of white officers in Texas -- [the government of the Bahamas, where 90 percent of the residents are black,] on Friday advised its residents to be extra careful if they choose to ... travel here. The reason: 'recent tensions in some American cities over shootings of young black males by police officers.'" -- CW ...
... David Herszenhorn of the New York Times: "... members of the Congressional Black Caucus ... demanded that Republicans allow votes to tighten the nation's gun laws." ...
... Duh. German Lewis of Vox: "In the aftermath of the mass shooting in Dallas that killed multiple police officers, there is one thing policymakers could do to prevent the number of deaths of officers on the line of duty: limit access to guns.... A study from 2015..., published in the American Journal of Public Health..., found that states with more gun ownership had more cops killed in homicides: Every 10 percent increase in firearm ownership correlated with 10 additional officers killed in homicides over the 15-year study period." -- CW ...
... Evan Osnos of the New Yorker: "It is a vision at the heart of the modern gun movement: the more that society makes the threat of violence available to us, the safer we will be. In forty-eight hours this week, the poisonous flaw in that fantasy has been exposed from multiple angles.... [The NRA's] Its official Twitter feed, which often draws attention to cases of police questioning gun owners for exercising the right to carry, said nothing, even as the silence became conspicuous.... It was an awkward exposure of what is usually left unsaid: the organization is far less active in asserting the Second Amendment rights of black Americans than of white ones.... The Dallas ambush has also exposed an uncomfortable fact for the gun-rights movement: for decades, even as it maintains its abstract tributes to law enforcement, it has embraced a strain of insurrectionist rhetoric, overtly anti-government activism that endorses the notion that civilians should have guns for use against American police and military." -- CW ...
... Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker: "By having a widely armed citizenry, we create a situation in which gun violence becomes a common occurrence, not the rarity it ought to be and is everywhere else in the civilized world.... Guns allow the fringe to occupy the center.... [Thursday] night's tragedy was also the grotesque reductio ad absurdum of the claim that it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun." -- CW ...
... Patrick, in today's Comments, identifies yet another way in which "good guys with guns" hinder actual law enforcement: after an incident, numbskulls parading around strapped with weaponry immediately become "persons of interest" whom police have to nab & detain even as the "bad guys with guns" remain at large. -- CW
... Brandi Grissom of the Dallas Morning News: "Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called protesters who ran away from the hail of bullets that rained down on Downtown Dallas on Thursday night 'hypocrites' during an interview Friday on Fox News. 'All those protesters last night, they turned around and ran the other way expecting the men and women in blue to protect them. What hypocrites!' an audibly emotional Patrick said." (Also linked yesterday.) ...
... Confederate columnist Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller looks into the camera: "In the era of Facebook Live and smart phones, it's hard to come to any conclusion other than the fact that police brutality toward African-Americans is a pervasive problem that has been going on for generations.... It would be hard to overestimate the impact that smart phone cameras have had on forcing us to grapple with the fact that this is, in fact, a very real (and all-too-common) problem." CW: A late bloomer, to be sure, but good for Lewis. Via Paul Waldman.
Endless Witch Hunt. Brian Beutler: "If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, then Republicans lost their minds chasing the Clintons down rabbit holes years ago.... What we witnessed Thursday was part of a pattern that goes back more than 20 years. A Clinton does something -- in some cases innocuous, in this case worthy of criticism -- and her political nemeses respond completely out of proportion." -- CW
Moriah Balingit of the Washington Post: "Ten additional states are suing the Obama administration to stop a directive that requires schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms aligned with their gender identity under the threat of losing federal funding, bringing the total number of states challenging the guidance to 21." -- CW
Annals of "Jurnalism," Ctd. MAG thought it was pretty funny yesterday when some piss-ant right-wing outfit couldn't spell Cincinnati in a chyron. But what if some news behemoth like New York Times couldn't spell the subject of its front-page story, even when the subject is a common word in news stories? (BTW, as of 6:30 am ET, that headline was up for at least six hours .) ...
... John Koblin of the New York Times: "Lawyers for the Fox News chairman Roger Ailes filed a motion on Friday arguing that the sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him by a former anchor, Gretchen Carlson, should be moved from a New Jersey Superior Court into federal court and submitted for arbitration. Mr. Ailes's lawyers said Ms. Carlson's suit, which they called a 'tar-and-feather campaign,' was a breach of her contract. The contract, they said, included a confidentiality agreement stipulating that any disputes should first go into arbitration." CW: So, let's see, the boss allegedly commits a series of unlawful acts against an employee, then allegedly retaliates against the employee when she complains to him about it (and other unlawful acts), then claims she breached her contract by suing him for committing the unlawful act & retaliation. Sounds reasonable.
Presidential Race
Alan Rappeport of the New York Times: "Hillary Clinton on Friday rejected the F.B.I.'s assertion that she had been 'extremely careless' with classified material as secretary of state, offering her first public comments on the matter since the Justice Department closed its inquiry without bringing charges against her this week. In interviews on CNN and MSNBC..., Mrs. Clinton insisted Friday that she did not intentionally send or receive any classified information through her private account. She also appeared to be spreading the responsibility to her State Department staff." -- CW ...
... M.J. Lee of CNN: "Hillary Clinton on Friday called for the nation to come together in the aftermath of an ambush that killed five police officers in Dallas, Texas, warning that this 'absolutely horrific event' -- coupled with a series of recent shootings involving police officers -- 'should worry every single American.... We must do more to have national guidelines about the use of force by police, especially deadly force.' Clinton also called on communities across the country to show more 'respect' to the police, as she paid tribute to the officers who risked and lost their lives in Dallas.... But Clinton also warned that there was a 'terrible disconnect' between police officers and the people they are meant to protect. She explicitly stated that some African-Americans are dying as a result of 'systemic' and 'implicit bias.'" -- CW
Amy Chozick of the New York Times: "'I personally know I have work to do...; a lot of people tell pollsters they don't trust me,' [Hillary] Clinton said in a speech to the Rainbow/Push Coalition on June 27. 'It is certainly true I have made mistakes,' she said a moment later, adding, 'So I understand people having questions.'... The snippet of introspection last week from Mrs. Clinton, a candidate not known for public soul-searching, may have signaled an important shift in how she and her campaign hope to ... get skeptical voters to trust her...." -- CW
Thomas Tracy & Graham Rayman of the New York Daily News: "On Friday morning a rep from Donald Trump's Manhattan organization asked ... [NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton] to let the candidate speak to a 3 p.m. roll call at the NYPD Midtown North Precinct. The request came in the wake of the murders of five Dallas police officers Thursday during a protest over police shooting. But ... Bratton strongly rejected the idea. 'Our interest is staying out of the politics of the moment, and not to provide photo ops," he told reporters." -- CW (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Traveling in Style -- on Other People's Money. Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed: "At a glittering 2008 gala hosted by Gucci to benefit Madonna's charity, Donald Trump bid more than $100,000 for a trip to Paris, earning him press from New York to London. But most of the money he used wasn't his. It came from his foundation, to which he had donated just $30,000 that year. The bid fits a pattern: Trump takes credit for splashy charitable acts to which he in fact gives relatively small sums." The IRS would have required the Trump Foundation to report the trip -- whether Trump took it himself or gave it to a friend or family member -- because it was "self-dealing." But it didn't. -- CW
Way Beyond the Beltway
House of Cards. Griff Witte of the Washington Post: "It has only been two weeks since the world awoke to the news that Britain had done the unthinkable, voting to exit the European Union.... With chilling efficiency, the main players in the drive for an exit have now themselves been forced to take their leave. If you haven't been following closely, here's a quick summary of what's befallen the actors in this very British drama." -- CW
News Ledes
New York Times: "Sydney H. Schanberg, a correspondent for The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for covering Cambodia's fall to the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and inspired the film 'The Killing Fields' with the story of his Cambodian colleague's survival during the genocide of millions, died on Saturday in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 82." -- CW
New York Times: With a win at Wimbledon today, Serena "Williams tied Steffi Graf's Open-era record for Grand Slam singles titles, gaining her 22nd with a 7-5, 6-3 victory. The win left her two short of Margaret Court's overall record of 24 Grand Slam titles from 1960 to 1973. The Open era began in 1968." -- CW
USA Today: "Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the late famed 'American Sniper,' overstated the number of medals he was awarded for heroism, according to a Navy investigation released Friday.... Kyle had made other, unverifiable claims, including his account of shooting dozens of rioters in New Orleans in the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina.... He was killed in 2013 by a veteran he had mentored."
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Reader Comments (10)
Inside that WaPo (Achenbach et al) story linked above is this para:
"About 20 civilians with ammo gear and rifles over their shoulders began to run away when the shooting began, Rawlings said. Once authorities began to catch and interview them, he said they realized one shooter had fired from multiple angles. Texas law allows people to openly carry long firearms."
Those 20 "good guys with guns" were extremely fortunate that the Dallas Police are pros, and did not automatically consider them to be accomplices. During the period when police "caught and interviewed" them, police assumed there were multiple shooters. It speaks to the officers' professionalism that they asked questions first, and didn't just shoot some of them down.
And ... while they were dealing with those 20 potential threats, those police were not isolating the actual shooter.
It will be interesting to see how this sub-scenario gets treated in gun-world. Armed citizens helping the police? Not much.
It is time for black Americans and reasonable Americans to get together and raise money for a new legal foundation to protect black Americans from police brutality
A BCLU, black civil liberties union designed to bring civil damage claims against police officers, police unions and city, county, and states over every blatant injustice.
Make injustice expensive. Law suits are better than burning black neighborhoods. Law suits are better than demonstrations that can get out of hand and get people hurt, gassed or jailed.
Cops know the cops that like to club people.
The cop's union knows which cops like to club people.
The chief of police knows which cops like to club people.
The Mayor can find out which cops like to club people.
When it becomes really expensive to defend the psychos, they will be weeded out.
Obviously a white man with a gun.
Don't know if RC readers saw Egan's recent column on political orphans in which he highlights the growth of so-called independents that parallels the increasing disaffection with both the D's and the R's.
Not recommending it. Kinda limp, really, but since its posting on this morning's on-line NYTimes edition didn't invite the comment I would have made, I'll burden you.
The piece was particularly blah because it did little to plumb the reasons for the disaffection or suggest what it means.
I see four reasons. First, the still-heightening economic inequality, which Republicans are largely responsible for but Democrats have certainly contributed to. Second, the increasingly public and disproportionate manner in which people of different social classes and races are treated by our purported justice system. Third, the feeling that white folks of all social classes have that they are besieged by the growing number of those who walk around in skins of another color, who they can no longer easily avoid. Fourth, the breakdown of social institutions, family, fraternal orders, churches and the like, active worker unions, anything that makes us feel a part of something beyond ourselves and whose absence isolates us in ways for which Facebook and Twitter are no adequate substitute.
So I see the declaration of political independence today as more another expression of powerlessness and loneliness than it is anything else.
And since in a polity of 320 million an independent voice is no voice at all, the paradox in all this is that the more such independence we declare, even with all our guns, the less free we will be.
Ken—
The breakdown of social institution of which you speak is largely (perhaps only) a phenomenon of white social institutions.
James,
Good point. And I'm guessing that whites, yearning to be "free," constitute the majority of the "independents."
Dowd and CW: Keep up the Clinton bashing and you may get the president you deserve. The Republicans do not need your help as Clinton bashing keeps the public attention away from anything that may solve any problem. Keep it going, crooked Hillary, lying Hillary. Add your voice to the Donald's and elect him.
@carlyle: Yeah, keep your head buried in the sand &/or your mouth shut about the Clintons' behavior. It is the height of stupidity to give the powerful a free ride because they're better than other alternatives.
I'm a big fan of the Obamas, but when the President was bending over for Boehner, et al., I let him have it, too.
The difference is that Obama's mistakes -- if they are mistakes -- are made in service of what he believes is the greater good. The Clintons' mistakes are in service of the Clintons. There's a stark moral difference there.
I'm fairly sure Hillary will be president, & when she is, she's going to need watchdogs of the real kind, not the right-wing, conspiracy-theorist kind. Part of my job then will be, as it is now, to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Marie
Marie: You may remember that Maureen and Frank Rich spent two months defaming Hillary in '08 and she wasn't even Secretary of State then. If Dowd is your champion, you will be following a lot of her bile.
I would hope Justice Ginsberg's warning would end all argument: there will be Several openings on the court come the next administration. I say let's pull together. Lord knows there will be plenty of attacks from the Republicans.
Horrible fact of the day...Public schools in Kansas are now called 'Government' schools.
We're losing,folks. Time to pull together.