“The Wrong Hands”: If We Knew Whose Hands Were Right And Whose Were Wrong, Stopping Gun Violence Would Be Easy
The other day, former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly (or as he is for some reason always referred to as, “Astronaut Mark Kelly”; I guess if you’re an astronaut you get that) announced that they have started a new initiative, Americans for Responsible Solutions, to push for new laws to limit gun violence. I have great admiration for both of them and I hope they succeed, but there was something I heard Kelly say in an interview that was worthy of note, and a bit unfortunate. He noted that they’re not trying to take away anyone’s guns, and they’re gun owners themselves. They just want to make sure guns stay out of “the wrong hands.” The problem with this—and I think it’s something well-meaning people probably say a lot without giving it too much thought—is that it assumes that the lines are clear between the right hands and the wrong hands, and if we could just make sure no wrong hands got guns, we’d all be safe.
There are some people who should definitely not have access to guns, like convicted felons, or people with severe mental illness, or teenagers, whose ability to make clear, reasoned judgments is extraordinarily poor. But once you get beyond that, the idea that we can make an a priori distinction between people who should have guns and who shouldn’t is a fantasy. There are around 30,000 gun deaths in America every year, and only a tiny percentage of those are from mass shootings committed by people who have gone completely over the edge. Many gun crimes are committed by people who got their guns illegally, and if you did that your hands are wrong by definition. But that inevitably leaves thousands of gun deaths (including suicides; because of the proliferation of guns in America, we have far higher success rates for suicides here than in other similar countries) attributable to people who would have seemed like “the right hands” until they shot somebody.
The fantasy that society is made up of clearly distinguishable “good guys” and “bad guys” is something the NRA and the gun manufacturers fervently want us all to believe. As Rick Perlstein writes, Ronald Reagan was more responsible than anyone for weaving this idea into the fabric of conservatism:
For them, it’s almost as if “evildoers” glow red, like ET: everyone just knows who they are. My favorite example from studying Reagan was the time news came out that Vice President Spiro Agnew was being investigated for bribery. The Governor of California told David Broder, “I have known Ted Agnew to be an honest and and honorable man. He, like any other citizen of high character, should be considered innocent until proven otherwise.” Citizen of high character: I don’t remember that line in my Constitution. That same week, he said of an alleged cop killer, not yet tried, that he deserved the electric chair.
As long as we continue to believe that we can easily tell who the bad guys are and that every gun death isn’t an argument spun out of control or an abusive husband who killed his wife or an impulsive suicide attempt that might not have ended that way, but instead they were all scenes out of a Schwarzenegger movie, we’ll delude ourselves into thinking that some meaningful proportion of those 30,000 deaths can be prevented if we just take their guns—or, as the NRA would have it, make sure there’s somebody around to return fire when they come for our children. And then we’ll have squandered this opportunity.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 10, 2013
“Most Antagonistic Toward Israel?”:That Would Be Ronald Reagan’s Defense Secretary, Something Lindsey Graham Should Know
When Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warned on national television over the weekend that Chuck Hagel “would be the most antagonistic secretary of defense toward the state of Israel in our nation’s history,” either his memory served him very poorly — or he was simply lying to smear his former Senate colleague. For whatever Hagel’s perspective on Mideast policy may be, it would be absurd to compare him with the Secretary of Defense whose hardline hostility toward Israel became notorious during the Reagan administration.
That would be the late Caspar W. Weinberger, of course.
Weinberger, a longtime Reagan confidant, ran the Pentagon from 1981 until 1987, when he was forced to resign over his involvement in the cover-up of the Iran-Contra affair (a ruinous scandal that involved the secret sale of missiles to the Iranian mullahs and the illegal transfer of profits from those sales to the Nicaraguan contra rebels – and that almost sent Weinberger to prison along with more than a dozen administration officials).
In contrast to other members of the Reagan cabinet known for their sympathy toward the Jewish state, including Secretary of State George Shultz and the president himself, Weinberger developed a reputation not only for opposing Israel’s interests directly but for seeking to prevent any action, including counter-terrorist operations, that might upset Arab allies of the United States. Until the Iran-Contra scandal broke in 1986, Weinberger was perhaps best known for orchestrating the sale of AWACS jets – the highly advanced airborne surveillance, command, and control system built by Boeing – to Saudi Arabia. Opposed by Israel and much of the American Jewish community, the Saudi AWACS deal generated enormous controversy.
Weinberger’s views on the Mideast were often said to derive from his career at Bechtel Corporation, the mammoth international construction firm where, as general counsel, he had approved compliance with the Arab boycott of Israel. Construction in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states was a major source of profits for Bechtel, and the firm’s support of the boycott was so blatant that Edward Levi, a Republican attorney general, filed a civil lawsuit against the California-based company, which led to a consent decree and prolonged litigation.
Among the most outspoken sources on Weinberger’s record was retired Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, the former Reagan White House aide and intelligence operative who oversaw the Iran-Contra fiasco In his 1992 memoir Under Fire, North explained what everyone in Washington had long known about the former Defense Secretary:
[Weinberger] seemed to go out of his way to oppose Israel on any issue and to blame the Israelis for every problem in the Middle East. In our planning for counterterrorist operations, he apparently feared that if we went after Palestinian terrorists, we would offend and alienate Arab governments – particularly if we acted in cooperation with the Israelis.
Weinberger’s anti-Israel tilt was an underlying current in almost every Mideast issue. Some people explained it by pointing to his years with the Bechtel Corporation…Others believed it was more complicated, and had to do with his sensitivity about his own Jewish ancestry.
As an Episcopalian whose paternal grandparents converted to Christianity — and who later worked at Bechtel, a company with a terrible reputation for anti-Semitism — Weinberger’s personal feelings about Jews and Judaism may well have been “complicated.” But his record as defense secretary was straightforward enough – and considering that Graham is a self-styled expert on Reagan administration foreign policy, the South Carolina senator certainly ought to know it.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, January 7, 2013
“Forgotten History”: No, Conservatives, Benghazi Is Not Worse Than Watergate
On Friday, I got into a little Twitter tete-a-tete with Jim Treacher of the Daily Caller over this post I wrote last week, which argued that the reason conservatives are acting as though the aftermath of the events in Benghazi is the scandal of the century is that they’re frustrated that Barack Obama hasn’t had a major scandal, so they’re making as big a deal as possible out of whatever’s handy. What ensued opened my eyes to something I found surprising, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been so naïve. It turns out that many conservatives not only believe Benghazi is far, far more serious than Watergate was, they seem to have no idea what Watergate was actually about or how far-reaching it was. After the number of Treacher’s followers tweeting me with “How many people died in Watergate? Huh? Huh?” reached triple digits (each tweet no doubt considered by its author to be a snowflake of insight), I decided that since the story broke 40 years ago, we all might need a reminder of why Watergate was, in fact, a really big deal.
The first and most important thing to remember is that when we say “Watergate,” we aren’t referring only to the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate hotel. The break-in was merely the event that triggered the investigations that would eventually reveal the full magnitude of Richard Nixon’s crimes and the crimes committed by many of the people who worked for him. As Jonathan Bernstein has written, for starters, imagine if Barack Obama were suspicious of some former Bush administration officials now working at the American Enterprise Institute and repeatedly ordered Rahm Emanuel to get people to break in to AEI in order to steal files that could be used to embarrass or blackmail those officials. Nixon did that (the Brookings Institution was the think tank in question). Bernstein goes on:
The president’s men, sometimes at Nixon’s instructions, sometimes with his knowledge, and sometimes perhaps without his direct instructions or knowledge but always in keeping with his general orders to his top staff, also planted spies in the camp of Democratic campaigns; broke into Democratic headquarters, photographed documents, and planted bugs; broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to learn things that could be used to destroy his image in the press; attempted to plant left-wing materials in the home of the guy who shot George Wallace; planned to (and perhaps did) selectively leak classified materials about foreign policy in order to hurt the Democrats; forged materials about foreign policy (the death of South Vietnam’s President Diem) in order to plant false stories in the press that would hurt the Democrats; wiretapped government officials; paid a private investigator to tail Ted Kennedy; performed other dirty tricks such as forged letters intended to manipulate the Democratic presidential nomination process (efforts that may indeed have been successful); and other illegal, abuse and unethical actions — this is not a comprehensive list.
Those were the original crimes. What followed was obstruction of justice as the White House, with the active leadership of the president, lied to FBI investigators and grand juries, destroyed evidence, suborned perjury by prearranging false testimony; suborned perjury by paying off witnesses and either promising or at least hinting at the promise of presidential pardons in exchange for false testimony, and using the authority of the presidency to derail and undermine FBI investigators and prosecutors. Again, the president was personally actively involved in all of those things.
The scandal also revealed so many repugnant statements and acts, some of them illegal and some of them not, that I suppose it’s hard to keep them all in your head. For instance, Judeophiles that conservatives have become, they may like to forget that the White House tapes showed Nixon to be a vicious anti-Semite (“The government is full of Jews. Second, most Jews are disloyal”) who ordered his staff to assemble lists of Jews working within the executive branch so he could identify his enemies (the aide who carried out a Jew-counting operation in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fred Malek, is to this day a major Republican fundraiser). Of course, there was also the “enemies list” of Nixon opponents targeted for harassment; one memo detailed “how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” Among the crimes planned but never executed, the most colorful has to be G. Gordon Liddy’s plan to murder columnist Jack Anderson. Liddy was convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping; today he is a popular conservative radio host. Among those who ended up going to prison for their crimes in the Watergate scandal were the attorney general, the White House chief of staff, and the president’s chief domestic policy adviser. The scandal was so damning that facing impeachment and almost certain conviction, the president of the United States resigned.
The point is “Watergate” was not just a break-in. It was a panoply of government malfeasance and outright criminality the likes of which the country had never seen before and will probably never see again.
It is true, as my conservative friends point out, that no one actually died in Watergate, while there were four deaths in Benghazi. Those deaths were a terrible tragedy. But unless some evidence emerges that President Obama or somebody else in his administration, through some act of corruption or misconduct, actually caused those deaths, the deaths don’t raise the magnitude of the “scandal” past that of other scandals that weren’t related to any deaths. For instance, 241 service members Ronald Reagan sent to Beirut were killed in the bombing of Marine barracks in October 1983, but I’ll bet that not one of my angry Twitter correspondents considers that a “Reagan administration scandal” (nor, by the way, did almost any Democrats at the time, rightly or wrongly).
For the record, I agree with Kevin Drum on this point: Let’s go ahead and investigate what happened in Benghazi. If that investigation helps us improve security for our personnel operating in dangerous places, that would be a positive outcome. But let’s be honest: Republicans aren’t worked into a lather about this because of their long-standing passionate commitment to security at our embassies and consulates. They’re hoping that if we keep digging, some kind of nefarious behavior will be discovered, and they’ll be able to use it to embarrass the administration. That’s politics, of course, so it isn’t all that surprising. But that’s all it is. And the idea that Susan Rice going on television and delivering some slightly inaccurate talking points constitutes a “cover-up” on par with the Nixon administration suborning perjury, paying hush money, and obstructing justice in a whole variety of other ways? That’s just insane.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 19, 2012
“Magic Moment Instinct”: Mitt Romney’s Secret Debate Weapon
With the first presidential debate coming on Wednesday, further details are emerging about how the two candidates have been preparing for the face-offs. The debates have a special importance for Mitt Romney, who trails President Obama by 4.3 points in both Real Clear Politics’s composite of national polls and their aggregation of polls in most swing states. Many politicos believe that the debates are Romney’s last chance to turn the race around. So what’s his secret weapon? Zingers.
This from Peter Baker and Ashley Parker in today’s New York Times:
Mr. Romney’s team has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August. His strategy includes luring the president into appearing smug or evasive about his responsibility for the economy.
This nicely illustrates one of the big problems that the Romney campaign has brought upon itself: They keep trying to find one magic moment on which they can turn around the race. They banked first on the vice presidential roll out and then on the GOP convention as instances where the American people would see and embrace a new Mitt Romney while finally turning on President Obama in the manner Republicans believe he deserves. That magic bullet instinct also explains the campaign’s jumping around from attack message to attack message (see: welfare attacks, “you didn’t build it,” “bumps in the road,” and so forth).
But as I argue in my column in U.S. News Weekly this week (subscription required), while we remember big moments in debates, they rarely if ever actually turn elections. The classic example is Gerald Ford’s declaration that the Soviet Union wasn’t dominating Eastern Europe—it’s remembered as a crippling gaffe, but he closed on Carter during the period of the debates that year. And while conventional wisdom (and, apparently, the Romney campaign) holds that Ronald Reagan only broke through after decisively besting Jimmy Carter with “there you go again” and “are you better off…?” in their late October debate, he was already leading in the polls at that point. It’s true that the polling trend line shows a Reagan surge after the debate, but he had been leading Carter since the late spring and had been creeping upward since late August. The Reagan-Carter debate accelerated an existing trend; it didn’t turn the election or change its dynamics.
And there’s another reason why the Romney campaign shouldn’t bank on zingers to turn around their flailing, failing effort. As The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison observes on Twitter today, “if people don’t like a candidate to start with, they aren’t going to be impressed when he uses one-liners and put-downs.” He goes on to wonder whether Team Romney realizes that candidates with high negatives (and Romney’s are so very high) shouldn’t be relying on zingers. People already find Romney unlikable, in other words; coming across as more of a smarmy smart-ass isn’t going to help him.
On a lighter note, the idea of Mitt Romney’s arsenal of prepared one-liners has given rise to a new Twitter meme: #MittZingers.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, September 29, 2012
“No, We Can’t All Get Along”: As Long As There Are Republicans, It Really Doesn’t Matter If We Do
Mitt Romney seems to have decided to run an entire presidential campaign on quibbling semantic arguments, which is certainly a novel approach, but not one I’d recommend for future candidates. It’s not that every campaign doesn’t spend way too much time complaining about the words their opponent says, but he really has taken it to a totally different level; every day seems to bring a new expression of feigned outrage at something Barack Obama said.
Over at MSNBC’s “Lean Forward” blog, I have a new piece about one of these inane back-and-forths that happened last week, when Obama said he learned you couldn’t change Washington from the inside, and Romney got really peeved and promised he would change it from the inside. My point was essentially that if I hear one more pundit talk about the good old days when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill would argue during the day, then share a beer and bellow some old Irish sea shanties in the evening, I think I’m going to lose it:
Let’s look at the biggest accomplishment of Barack Obama’s first term, the passage of the Affordable Care Act. In that Univision interview, Obama tried to describe this as a triumph of change from the outside, as the American people exerted pressure on their representatives. But that’s not really what happened. There was some outside organizing, but it probably didn’t carry the day. The reform that one president after another failed to accomplish didn’t happen because Barack Obama and his supporters changed Washington. It happened because Obama wrestled with Washington, struggled with it, and finally overcame roadblocks both institutional (the filibuster) and personal (the narcissistic cynicism of characters like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson). And today, almost everything about those processes remains the same. If Obama tries to do something else as ambitious in his second term, it’ll be just as difficult.
What matters isn’t whether Washington was transformed, but that because of Obama’s health care victory, 30 million more Americans will have health insurance, and that starting in 2014 none of us will be denied coverage because of our pre-existing conditions, and all of the other positive results of the ACA. If you’re the parent of a child with leukemia who can now get insurance, that’s change you can believe in.
Guess what: if Barack Obama wins a second term, things are going to be just as unfriendly as they were during the first term. Yes, Barack Obama failed in his promise to bring Republicans and Democrats together, just like George W. Bush failed in his promise to bring Republicans and Democrats together and Bill Clinton failed in his promise to bring Republicans and Democrats together. But while it would certainly be nice if everybody could get along, in the end that’s about one-zillionth as important as what they do or don’t do for the public.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 25, 2012
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