“The Elephant Doesn’t Exist”: Guns And The Tyranny Of Extreme Rhetoric
Let’s say you’re making lunch in the kitchen while your kids play in the living room. When you come in with their mid-day meal, the place is a disaster. You look at them. They look at you. And before you know it they’re blurting out something like “the elephant did it!”
Now, I suppose there’s something to be said for that argument. It takes a quick wit. Or at least a keen sense of mammalogy. But it’s got one fundamental flaw: There is no elephant. And you know that’s true no matter how hard they argue otherwise.
These days, some on the right have seized on an invisible elephant all their own. They’ve named him Tyranny, and to hear them tell it, he’s big, he’s scary, and he’s tearing up the place. The problem, of course, is that he doesn’t exist—but that hasn’t stopped them from trying to convince the rest of us that he does.
Their latest effort came in the form of a Scott Rasmussen poll that found “65 percent See Gun Rights As Protection Against Tyranny.” If it’s true, that’s quite a finding. It means most of us believe that our government may descend into tyranny and that guns are the right way to protect ourselves from that eventuality.
Of course, there’s good reason to doubt Rasmussen: His polls reliably lean to the right. But for the sake of argument let’s take his findings on their face. How should we reconcile them with the great many other polls that suggest broadening support for gun control? The 55 percent in a CNN/Time poll who say gun controls should be tightened. The 58 percent in an ABC/Washington Post poll who back an assault weapons ban. The 63 percent in a CBS/New York Times poll who support banning high capacity magazines. The 78 percent in the same poll who favor creating a database to track all gun sales in the United States.
If you take the Rasmussen poll on the one hand and all the other polls on the other, it can only mean that there are many millions of us who somehow believe both that Americans need guns to protect ourselves from a government that may turn tyrannical and that we should make it harder for Americans to get guns. This is a, ahem, nuance that Rasmussen fails to address.
And then of course, there’s this: According to a recent Pew survey, only 33 percent of Americans have a gun in their home at all. If so many of us really think that tyranny looms and that guns are our protection but so few of us actually own them…well, we must be a pretty self-destructive lot.
As it happens, there was another poll in the field at around the same time as Rasmussen’s that was about the same issue, and conducted by a similarly conservative pollster—Wenzel Strategies (the pollster for Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, among others). Wenzel asked respondents whether they believed the Second Amendment “exists to allow Americans to have small arms for hunting and self-protection” or “to give Americans the ability to defend themselves against government if it becomes tyrannical?” The results? Forty-seven percent said it’s just for hunting and self-protection. A whopping 8 percent said it’s just to defend against tyranny. And 40 percent said all of the above.
In other words, two polls that can be relied on to skew right, but on the question of tyranny and guns, Rasmussen’s big majority turns into Wenzel’s minority. And a less partisan researcher would presumably find that support is actually significantly lower than is suggested in both.
None of this, however, put the brakes on the Rasmussen poll among the conservative press and punditry. Breitbart, NewsMax, FreedomWorks, etc. all quickly linked to or posted stories like the one Katie Pavlich authored at TownHall.com reporting that “an overwhelming majority of Americans believe the Second Amendment and gun rights are necessary to protect against tyranny.”
Look, I don’t put any more stock in Wenzel than I do Rasmussen. In my view, they both poll in the service of ideology rather than in an effort to uncover actual attitudes and beliefs. (Wenzel used his findings, for example, to suggest that we are more at risk of tyrannical takeover precisely because we don’t think it’s going to happen. Sigh.) And I have no doubt that there are those who actually believe that tyranny is in the offing. But the fact is, most of us, regardless of our political or ideological stripe, don’t believe that. We know the difference between our government and that of other countries in world, between Saddam Hussein and John Boehner. The former subjected Iraqis to years of death squads and oppression. That’s a tyrant. The latter’s subjected Americans to years of weepy incompetence. That’s irritating.
That doesn’t make the tyrannists’ rhetoric any less insidious, however. In asking us to conceive of an America that is profoundly different from the one in which we actually live they seek to conform our public policy to threats that exist only in some kind of make-believe place. When they are successful, the mainstreaming of lunatic ideas (like: We live under the threat of tyranny) makes possible ever more extreme policies (like: We all must have the right to semi-automatic weapons). And when we let that happen, nightmares of a very different kind than those conjured up by the ideologues really do come true.
When you take the invisible elephant out of your living room, you can clearly see what caused the mess (your kids.) And when you take the false threat of tyranny out of the equation, the case against assault weapons is pretty clear too (we don’t need them).
The elephant doesn’t exist. And it’s time for us to say so.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, January 24, 2013
“Violent And Filled With Rage”: American Gun Violence Is An Epidemic
Just another day in gunner’s paradise…
Another day, another shooting. I would imagine if this continues, and I fear it might, that Americans will become desensitized—if they haven’t already. Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, Oregon, Newtown, Albuquerque, and now Houston. Of course there will be those that say, well, at least it wasn’t a massacre. Hmm…
The problem is, they’re all linked by three things: guns, violence, and rage.
We as a society have to ask ourselves, why is it that our neighbors to the north, Canada, have guns, hunt, watch the same TV shows and movies as we do—why do we have a level of violence that is simply not on par with the rest of the Western world? And if we look to the Eastern world, like Japan; they not only watch our movies, but many Japanese films and certainly video games that are much more violent. But, they don’t have the guns.
So those of us on the left propose to reduce the type of guns our society, which is obviously very violent and filled with rage—has access to. Those on the right say that won’t stop gun violence. And they’re right. It’s a piece of a much needed, comprehensive, multifacted approach to save our kids, our future, and dare I say our country, from…ourselves.
Now some on both the left and right will blame mental illness. Sorry folks, not everyone who’s violent, enraged, owns a gun, and uses it suffers from mental illness. And with the National Rifle Association and others on the right pushing back on ideas such as tougher background checks, like at gun shows. Well, I guess we’ll keep those mentally ill types pretty well armed.
And of course there are the movies, television, and video games. As someone who lives in Los Angeles and lives about 20 minutes from La La Land (a.k.a. Hollywood), let me explain something to you: Hollywood’s a business. And businesses care about one thing: money. Their bottom line. Here’s a simple, little economic principle: supply and demand. You think the movies and TV shows our kids are watching are too violent? Then stop buying tickets. If you line up en masse for those cute romantic comedies and ignore the more violent Terminator-type films, Hollywood will supply you with what you demand.
So since some say we can’t blame the guns, some say we can’t blame the people owning the guns, some say it’s the mentally ill but don’t want further controls and certainly don’t want to pay for any type of mental illness programs or hospitals or medications—since we’re the ones buying those violent video games, TV shows, and movies, what’s left?
Look in the mirror.
As the parent or a 4 and 5 year old, I notice that the way I handle my stress is the way they handle theirs. They’re imitators. So for every parent out there that’s watching Die Hard or The Godfather in front of your toddler and you think they’re too busy playing with their Elmo, think again. Their brain is absorbing that flick, frame by frame. And for those of you who knock out a wall, or perhaps your wife or girlfriend every time you get ticked off, our kids are watching.
America, we are responsible for those that died. For ignoring our culture of rage and violence far too long…and for not correcting those behaviors within ourselves. This isn’t just systemic, it’s epidemic. So what are we as a nation going to do about it?
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, January 23, 2013
“Crisis To Crisis Management”: Congress’s Continual Game of Political Chicken
The proposal from the House of Representatives to push off the debt ceiling crisis for three months came with an ironic rhetorical frame: If the Senate will, in that time frame, pass a budget, we can start facing our long-term fiscal challenges instead of managing crisis to crisis. Oh, and if they don’t pass a budget all lawmakers will stop drawing salaries.
The basic idea that crisis to crisis management is the worst form of governance for our country is right on the money: Short-term continuing resolutions and other stop-gap measures ensure inefficiency because government agencies are hamstrung by their inability to plan beyond a few months. And absolutely the Senate should present a budget that lays out a vision for how to put our country on a path towards a healthy fiscal future. But, the politics over the debt ceiling in the last three years have been a leading contributor to the culture of avoiding hard decisions in favor of incendiary rhetoric we see in Congress today.
The debt ceiling debate in the summer of 2011 spawned the so-called “super committee” and so-called “fiscal cliff.” So, in the past two years we’ve seen the creation and failure of the super committee, an underwhelming fiscal cliff deal that paired special interest tax breaks with an increase to the rates for higher income individuals, and a short delay of the looming threat of sequestration, the across the board spending cuts that were supposed to motivate the super committee—and Congress—to come together to act. In the next two months we have another opportunity to avoid the sequester and the expiration of the current continuing resolution, the bill that funded government for six months at fiscal year 2012 levels in lieu of passing actual appropriations bills. And of course a debt ceiling vote is on the horizon.
All of these crises are manufactured. Those willing to put off raising the debt ceiling to make a political point are willing to hurt our economy and our standing in the world to make that same point.
At the root of these manufactured crises are a winner-take-all approach to the disagreements between and even within the political parties. At each crisis, Democrats and Republicans demand a total victory and a grand bargain only to end up placating one another with crumbs of a bad deal and promise to revisit the issues at the next manufactured crisis. Our nation cannot afford this continual game of political chicken. We cannot afford the impact of defaulting on our debts. Policymakers need to work together and come up with reforms to spending, taxes, and entitlements. No more political theater, no more back room discussions on grand bargains. It’s time for the hard work of legislating solutions to the nation’s fiscal challenges.
“An Electoral Facsimile Of Jim Crow”: Virginia Republicans Move Forward With Mass Voter Disenfranchisement
This morning, I wrote on an emerging Republican plan—in swing states won by President Obama—to rig presidential elections by awarding electoral votes to the winner of the most congressional districts. Because Democratic voters tend to cluster in highly-populated urban areas, and Republican voters tend to reside in more sparsely populated regions, this makes land the key variable in elections—to win the majority of a state’s electoral votes, your voters will have to occupy the most geographic space.
In addition to disenfranchising voters in dense areas, this would end the principle of “one person, one vote.” If Ohio operated under this scheme, for example, Obama would have received just 22 percent of the electoral votes, despite winning 52 percent of the popular vote in the state.
For this reason, I didn’t expect Republicans to go forward with the plan—the risk of blowback is just too high. My skepticism, however, was misplaced. In Virginia, a local news station reports that just this afternoon, a state Senate subcommittee recommended a bill end Virginia’s winner-take-all system and apportion its 13 electoral votes by congressional district.
Unlike similar proposals in Pennsylvania and Michigan, this one wouldn’t award the remaining electoral votes to the winner (Virginia has 11 districts). Rather, the winner of the most congressional districts would get the final two votes. If this were in effect last year, Obama would have gotten just 4 of the state’s votes, despite winning 51 percent of its voters.
The bill’s sponsor, Republican Senator Charles W. “Bill” Carrico, says the change is necessary because Virginia’s urbanized areas can outvote rural regions, weakening their political strength. In other words, Carrico thinks winning land is more important than winning people when it comes to presidential elections.
It should be said that this scheme, if carried out on a large scale, will guarantee an explosion of recounts. In any district where there is a narrow margin between the two candidates, there will be every incentive to challenge the results. Republicans present this as a way to streamline elections, but in reality, it would complicate them, and drag out the process for weeks—if not months. It would be Florida in the 2000 election, multiplied by 435.
It should also be said, again, that this constitutes a massive disenfranchisement of African American and other nonwhite voters, who tend to cluster near urban areas. When you couple this with the move on Monday to redraw the state’s electoral maps—eliminating one state senate district and packing black voters into another, diluting their strength—it’s as if Virginia Republicans are responding to Obama’s repeat victory in the state by building an electoral facsimile of Jim Crow.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, January 23, 2013
“The Big Freaking Deal”: Progressives Might Want To Take A Brief Break From Anxiety And Savor Their Real Victories
On the day President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, an exuberant Vice President Biden famously pronounced the reform a “big something deal” — except that he didn’t use the word “something.” And he was right.
In fact, I’d suggest using this phrase to describe the Obama administration as a whole. F.D.R. had his New Deal; well, Mr. Obama has his Big Deal. He hasn’t delivered everything his supporters wanted, and at times the survival of his achievements seemed very much in doubt. But if progressives look at where we are as the second term begins, they’ll find grounds for a lot of (qualified) satisfaction.
Consider, in particular, three areas: health care, inequality and financial reform.
Health reform is, as Mr. Biden suggested, the centerpiece of the Big Deal. Progressives have been trying to get some form of universal health insurance since the days of Harry Truman; they’ve finally succeeded.
True, this wasn’t the health reform many were looking for. Rather than simply providing health insurance to everyone by extending Medicare to cover the whole population, we’ve constructed a Rube Goldberg device of regulations and subsidies that will cost more than single-payer and have many more cracks for people to fall through.
But this was what was possible given the political reality — the power of the insurance industry, the general reluctance of voters with good insurance to accept change. And experience with Romneycare in Massachusetts — hey, this is a great age for irony — shows that such a system is indeed workable, and it can provide Americans with a huge improvement in medical and financial security.
What about inequality? On that front, sad to say, the Big Deal falls very far short of the New Deal. Like F.D.R., Mr. Obama took office in a nation marked by huge disparities in income and wealth. But where the New Deal had a revolutionary impact, empowering workers and creating a middle-class society that lasted for 40 years, the Big Deal has been limited to equalizing policies at the margin.
That said, health reform will provide substantial aid to the bottom half of the income distribution, paid for largely through new taxes targeted on the top 1 percent, and the “fiscal cliff” deal further raises taxes on the affluent. Over all, 1-percenters will see their after-tax income fall around 6 percent; for the top tenth of a percent, the hit rises to around 9 percent. This will reverse only a fraction of the huge upward redistribution that has taken place since 1980, but it’s not trivial.
Finally, there’s financial reform. The Dodd-Frank reform bill is often disparaged as toothless, and it’s certainly not the kind of dramatic regime change one might have hoped for after runaway bankers brought the world economy to its knees.
Still, if plutocratic rage is any indication, the reform isn’t as toothless as all that. And Wall Street put its money where its mouth is. For example, hedge funds strongly favored Mr. Obama in 2008 — but in 2012 they gave three-quarters of their money to Republicans (and lost).
All in all, then, the Big Deal has been, well, a pretty big deal. But will its achievements last?
Mr. Obama overcame the biggest threat to his legacy simply by winning re-election. But George W. Bush also won re-election, a victory widely heralded as signaling the coming of a permanent conservative majority. So will Mr. Obama’s moment of glory prove equally fleeting? I don’t think so.
For one thing, the Big Deal’s main policy initiatives are already law. This is a contrast with Mr. Bush, who didn’t try to privatize Social Security until his second term — and it turned out that a “khaki” election won by posing as the nation’s defender against terrorists didn’t give him a mandate to dismantle a highly popular program.
And there’s another contrast: the Big Deal agenda is, in fact, fairly popular — and will become more popular once Obamacare goes into effect and people see both its real benefits and the fact that it won’t send Grandma to the death panels.
Finally, progressives have the demographic and cultural wind at their backs. Right-wingers flourished for decades by exploiting racial and social divisions — but that strategy has now turned against them as we become an increasingly diverse, socially liberal nation.
Now, none of what I’ve just said should be taken as grounds for progressive complacency. The plutocrats may have lost a round, but their wealth and the influence it gives them in a money-driven political system remain. Meanwhile, the deficit scolds (largely financed by those same plutocrats) are still trying to bully Mr. Obama into slashing social programs.
So the story is far from over. Still, maybe progressives — an ever-worried group — might want to take a brief break from anxiety and savor their real, if limited, victories.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columist, The New York Times, January 20, 2013
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