CSotD: Hearing what we want to hear
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Let's lead off with some non-political short takes. Monty is particularly well-timed for me, because I was streaming the Sopranos yesterday while I did dishes, and I have to say, people in that show sure got a lot of phone calls.
About the fourth time I wiped my hands and reached for my pocket, it occurred to me that if these guys had custom ringtones instead of a plain-vanilla ring like everyone else, it wouldn't be a problem. And, if the Sopranos had been filmed a few years earlier, they probably would have, because that used to be a thing.
Which made me wonder how many people still have custom ringtones? Not "variations on a ring to let you know who's calling" but "The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You" sorts of ringtones.
And here's the answer: Two.
And, coincidentally, it's the same one.
It's costing me money to work here
Susan is the Beleagured One in Between Friends, and thus the least likely to be able to say "no" in the current arc about people who bring their kids' fundraisers to the office.
At one paper where I worked, the new publisher put out a ban on these pests, and bless her heart for that.
Though I had a simple sentence that would back them right off:
"My son plays hockey."
Depraved Indifference to Common Sense
Matt Wuerker sums up the response to the President's speech.
He laid out some strong principles, including a couple that the rightwingers have been howling for, like the idea that Middle Eastern nations need to get some of their own boots on the ground, and that we need to tighten oversight of our visa programs and immigration screening in general.
He also called the San Bernardino shooters "terrorists" and acknowledged that they were extremist Muslims. Check those off on the list of demands.
And, as a bonus to Patriot Act and Big Stick hawks, he even said "our military will continue to hunt down terrorist plotters in any country where it is necessary."
You'd think someone on the right would give him a few props.
However, he also had the nerve to suggest that not all of the world's billion or so Muslims are extremists and that we shouldn't allow people on the terrorist list to buy guns, and went even further:
We also need to make it harder for people to buy powerful assault weapons like the ones that were used in San Bernardino. I know there are some who reject any gun safety measures. But the fact is that our intelligence and law enforcement agencies — no matter how effective they are — cannot identify every would-be mass shooter, whether that individual is motivated by ISIL or some other hateful ideology. What we can do — and must do — is make it harder for them to kill.
I single that out because the chickenhawks are demanding that we shut down the entire immigrations and refugee system until it is perfect.
All the time arguing against background checks and restrictive gun laws, because people find ways around them.
By their own logic, shouldn't we shut down all gun sales until we've fixed the flaws in that system?
It's a ridiculous, illogical position that Rob Tornoe neatly skewers, but, when you're throwing raw meat to the lions, you don't need perfect form, just reasonably good aim.
Obama said something else chickenhawks don't want to hear: "So far, we have no evidence that the killers were directed by a terrorist organization overseas, or that they were part of a broader conspiracy here at home."
The need to trace everything to a centralized terrorist conspiracy brings to mind the Bircher loons who were convinced in the Sixties that the SDS and Panthers were getting marching orders directly from Moscow.
This isn't just "in error." This is "clinically insane."
Once more, the question is how much of these toxic, paranoid ravings from Fox News and the GOP are their own delusions, and how much is them cynically playing to the boobs at home?
Or, to repeat an earlier link to Jeet Heer's brilliant takedown, deliberate lies versus depraved indifference?
We had all kinds of "radicalized" screwballs running around in the Sixties, long before you could download fringe lunacy from the Internet.
I've noted before that I dated a woman who later joined the Weathermen. I don't know how deep in she got with them, but we had stopped dating because of her obsessive political views and my refusal to mirror them.
There was a guy next door, a heroin dealer who called himself "Shabazz" and stockpiled weapons. He wasn't political, just crazy. He tried to board a plane with a gym bag full of guns but, even in those pre-metal-detector days, the stewardesses spotted something amiss.
And I knew people who traveled to Cuba to harvest sugar cane and ingest propaganda, and came back not simply supporting North Vietnam, but babbling about "our brothers in Cuba and our brothers in North Korea."
Their biggest harm was that they drove moderate supporters away with their looney-toons rhetoric.
But none of them were taking orders from anybody. They were autonomous screwballs.
They certainly weren't all harmless. It would have been good if someone had stopped the idiots who blew up a building at Madison, killing a graduate student, but, as I've said before, spying on everybody is the same as spying on nobody.
And that's part of the difference between vigilance and panic.
Fortunately, the vast majority of self-styled revolutionaries are absurdly incompetent.
Like the fellow I knew in college who transferred to another school but returned for a visit a year later, crowing about how he had burned down the ROTC building there.
He was kind of a doofus (not the only one I knew back then), but how smart do you have to be to set a fire?
Well, I recently did some Internet sleuthing to find out how the press covered his rebellious act of domestic terrorism 46 years ago, and here's what I found about his Towering Inferno:
So, excuse my refusal to panic, but I'm going with Obama's "Keep Calm and Carry On" policy.
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