Carnival of the Fire-Breathers

By Kathleen Parker
Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Before recent events, I intended to write about the GOP’s message problem with the headline: “Shoot the Messenger.”

Sunday’s fatal shooting of abortion doctor George Tiller makes my title inappropriate, but the idea remains relevant.

The adage, of course, is “Don’t shoot the messenger,” meaning we shouldn’t necessarily blame the person who delivers bad news. For the Republican Party these days, however, the problem isn’t so much the message. It’s the messenger.

By grotesque coincidence, Tiller’s murderer furthers the point.

It has long been a problem for the GOP that some of the party’s cherished positions are embraced most enthusiastically by people whose grip on reality is sometimes . . . tenuous. This is especially true with regard to abortion.

There are certainly compelling secular arguments against abortion that one might be perfectly willing to hear. Then Randall Terry shows up.

Terry, the colorful founder of Operation Rescue, doesn’t represent the Republican Party, but he is nevertheless the most familiar face of the antiabortion movement. When President Obama recently gave the commencement address at Notre Dame, who showed up to lead the protest but Terry and the equally odd carnival performer Alan Keyes?

Rather than persuading people to think differently about abortion, the Terry-Keyes act makes one want to write checks to Planned Parenthood. And smart Catholics, who were perfectly capable of articulating their objections to the president’s invitation to America’s premier Catholic university, were suddenly stuck in the frame with rabble-rousers who demean the message.

Such is the continuing dilemma of the GOP: How do you get out the message when the messengers keep getting in the way?

Now comes a fanatic with a gun. Let me be clear: I don’t mean to compare Terry or Keyes to the shooter. The former are passionate protesters; the latter is a murderer.

Nor do I join those who accuse talk show host Bill O’Reilly and others who have spoken out against Tiller as somehow being responsible for his murder. The man who pulled the trigger is responsible for Tiller’s death. Period.

That said, fire-breathers on the right don’t help, whatever the cause. They may warm the base, but the Republican base is becoming a remote island in mainstream America. Everyone else is paddling away.

Accurately or not, the right-wing wacko contingent increasingly dominates the public perception of the GOP. And, fairly or not, that perception makes it easier for characters such as Scott Roeder, the suspected shooter, to become associated with the party.

Roeder is already emerging in stories as a right-wing character from central casting. Previously arrested on explosives charges, Roeder was once attracted to the Montana Freemen, best known for engaging FBI agents in an armed standoff in 1996. Roeder’s ex-wife told the Associated Press that he had become “very religious, in an Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye way. . . . That’s all he cared about is anti-abortion. ‘The church is this. God is this.’ Yadda yadda.”

Indeed.

Some Internet commentary even refers to Roeder as a “Christian terrorist.” Let’s see: Christian, pro-gun, anti-government, pro-life. Sounds like a Republican, right? Oh, and he’s suspected of being an assassin. Connect them dots.

No, it isn’t fair. The GOP can’t control who joins the party, and Republicans don’t have a corner on random crazies. But what the Democrats have that the Republicans lack is a moderating voice to neutralize the party’s more strident characters. While Democrats have Obama, Republicans are stuck with the squeakiest wheel du jour.

One can convincingly argue that the media have a hand in perpetuating the conservative caricature, but the Republican Party has contributed to the distortion by pandering to its less rational elements. Still fresh in our minds is the last presidential election — a strange season that might be attributed to GOP desperation if not for a prior history in times of political prosperity.

Two words: Terri Schiavo. During that 2005 Operation Rescue debacle — complete with death vigils and lamentations — Bill Frist, then the Senate majority leader and a practicing physician, lent credibility to the circus performers by diagnosing Schiavo’s condition via video and challenging other medical opinion that she was in a persistent vegetative state.

And let’s not forget how the GOP handled the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Illinois against one Barack Obama. They inserted their own African American, none other than Alan Keyes. That worked out well.

We should never shoot the messenger, it should go without saying. But until the Republicans marginalize those who belong in the margins, they won’t be attracting many new recruits. And the messengers will continue to obscure the message.

kparker@kparker.com

Kris Allen definitely has a nice touch, and is capable of fine interpretation. But in spite of Simon’s reminders, AI is not a singing competition. It is a popularity contest.

I liked the Black Eyed Peas, and loved seeing Carlos Santana (one of my all time favorites). I think Rod may have been a little incapacitated, but he hit his stride eventually. Brian May and Queen were inevitable, and I would love to see Adam fronting them for a tour. As far as Kiss goes, I never cared for them or their music. The Archie’s in makeup. Now, Adam and Ziggy Stardust or Mott the Hoople- that would have been cool!

Randy and I spend a lot of time discussing the metaphysical and existential implications of Bill Griffith’s work in his daily comic strip Zippy.

No one jams more thought provoking pop-culture sociopolitical commentary into their work than this artist.

The passage above is familiar to most Americans with a cursory familiarity with our United States Constitution. Said passage is the Second Amendment to the Constitution, accepted by the House of Representatives in 1789. Two hundred and nineteen years later, Americans were faced with debates regarding the applicability of this amendment to everyday life, after the Supreme Court ruled that a Washington D.C. statute banning ownership of handguns was un-Constitutional. Time does not permit a review of the merits or shortcomings of this issue here, but a new debate is gaining a lot of attention in the state of Texas, and that involves the open bearing of handguns in public. What is the stated purpose for this “refinement” of the existing law? What might be other reasons for an “open carry” law? And does it make any sense?

According to Jacquielynn Floyd writing in the Dallas Morning News, Mr. Ian McCarthy started a petition drive in the state of Texas last year advocating an open-carry law. According to the website OpenCarry.org, more than 40,000 Texans have signed so far. McCarthy lists a number of reasons justifying the need for this new law, the first two of which are citations to the Second Amendment. His third point says “Criminals are not deterred by rules, regulations, and laws forbidding the possession of weapons. A man bent on mass murder will not be stopped by a rule forbidding him to have a gun.” This of course is a restatement of the familiar axiom that “if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” But what is the empirical data behind this? According to Wikipedia’s article on gun related homicides per capita on countries with a gross national income of $15,000 or more, the United States leads the pack. And based on the statistical database found in Statemaster.com, the District of Columbia leads the rest of the nation in firearm deaths by a comfortable margin. So at best, the evidence is unpersuasive that handguns, and especially open display of handguns, result in a reduction in deaths by such weapons.

So why the emphasis on this notion of “open-carry”? Returning again to the group leading this battle, we see an attractive “soccer mom” with her cell phone holstered on her left hip, and her handgun on the right. The only thing missing is an apple pie. Again referring to OpenCarry.Org, here are some of the justifications for the ability to display your sidearm like Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke:

4. It is well known that the requirement to conceal a handgun for the purpose of protecting self, friends, and family can be difficult especially in Texas with our extreme heat since a person will usually have to wear a jacket to properly conceal a handgun and to avoid “printing.”
5. The requirement to conceal a handgun can make it difficult to draw the weapon should the life of the carrier or the life of someone else be in danger.
6. A criminal will not open carry a weapon because he does not want to draw attention to himself. We believe that a citizen openly carrying a handgun lawfully will be a deterrent for crime.

There seems to be an emphasis on the importance of visually displaying guns for all (especially criminals) to see. Is it simply the intimidation factor that the proponents of this law view as significant? Our local and state police wear their weaponry openly (at least those with the specific role of civil peacekeeper), but that is in addition to badges and uniforms which mark them as assigned with this responsibility. And of course we know that the English police also wear uniforms and badges without the necessity of carrying a sidearm. Do the “open carry” constituents consider our designated police officers ineffectual or incompetent, or do they rather want to elevate themselves to the level of “keepers of the law” for reasons more subtle than that? There are academies for the training of police officers, funded by tax payer dollars. The purpose of these is to prepare those desirous of this life of service to be skilled and discerning in the use of tools to keep the civil peace. The emphasis is the use of all strategies first before utilizing “deadly force”, which is the way we as a people seem to prefer, and certainly our courts have expressed that preference. Will the soccer mom or construction worker, when faced with a perceived threat, exercise the caution and discernment that is legally required of a trained police officer before taking the law into their own hands? We have seen in tragic cases how the judicious use of force is a great challenge even for the trained officer, so are we as a society really interested in extending that challenge to the general populace?

In Ms. Floyd’s article, she quotes Mr. McCarthy as saying on an Austin radio station “it’s kind of sad that people are so afraid of guns.” She goes on to quip “Why? People ought to have a little healthy fear of guns- they can kill you!”

            In our sentimentalized view of the Old West, citizens on the frontier found themselves surrounded by imminent danger, and insufficient or non-existent governmental protection, creating the necessity for a rifle at every door, and a holstered gun on the hip of every man. Regardless of the historical truth of this “ideal”, the proponents of “Open Carry” legislation maintain a view that questions the ability of our designated police officers to protect life and property. And even more insidious is the opinion of these proponents that perhaps the “established authorities” are really in league with the criminals who want to steal or destroy all that is near and dear to them. Could that possibly be? The sins of racial and class hatred are a part of the human condition, and the fear of the “the other” who have different views, languages, or beliefs, is all too easily viewed, even in our society today. The lines of division that have been so apparent through the last election cycle have emphasized the cultural touchstones that identify the Red versus Blue, liberal versus conservative, Republican versus Democrat. And Second Amendment rights are one of the primary areas of emphasis for the conservative minded or persuaded. Witness the surge in gun purchases before and after the Presidential election by those who have been trained to believe that the forces of the Left are poised to break down the doors of the righteous citizens and haul away all their guns. Once that happens, the forces of crime and Hell will be unleashed upon the masses, and crime and murder will be the norm. We have to hope that cooler heads will prevail, and of course reality and statistics noted earlier indicate that Americans seem to have a gun violence problem on a far greater scale than other countries, even with our more liberal gun rights.

The New York Times editorial dated December 2^nd, 2008 quotes President-elect Obama as stating at the Democratic convention “Don’t tell me we can’t uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47’s out of the hands of criminals.”

As I watched John McCain’s concession speech,  I was moved by his gracious comments, yet deeply worried by those in his audience who reacted with boo’s twice during his speech. And their voices are only echoes of a segment of our culture fed by the voices of hate, ignorance, and division. I was equally struck by the fact that the crowd of 100,000 plus in Chicago assembled to see Obama did not react with boo’s when he spoke of John McCain.

As further evidence of this illness, the following comes from Associated Press, first spotted on www.MySanAntonio.com :

AUSTIN — State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar isn’t backing down from her claim that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is plotting with terrorists to attack the U.S.

The Texas Freedom Network, a watchdog group that monitors the board, released a public statement Monday asking Dunbar to retract the statement.

“I don’t have anything in there that would be retractable,” said Dunbar, R-Richmond. “Those are my personal opinions and I don’t think the language is questionable.”

In a column posted on the Christian Worldview Network Web site, Dunbar wrote that a terrorist attack on America during the first six months of an Obama administration “will be a planned effort by those with whom Obama truly sympathizes to take down the America that is threat to tyranny.”

In a telegram to President Kennedy one month before his (Kennedy’s) murder, Rabbi Heschel wrote “We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate Negroes.  The hour calls for high moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.” 

High moral grandeur and spiritual audacity!! 

You know, I had almost forgotten that words like that could be spoken, written, thought. 

Ranmar

by Christopher Buckley

The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.

I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first.

As to the particulars, assuming anyone gives a fig, here goes:

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last column…”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.

A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.

But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

Krauthammer Almost Throws in the Towel

Krauthammer, who started his journalistic career here at the New Republic (he was a psychiatrist until Mike Kinsley found him in a letter to the Washington Post), has been on the Palin case from the very beginning. His first column on the lady was devastating. And, this morning, even after she somehow demonstrated that she wasn’t a complete boob (as post-Kouric almost everyone thought she was), Charles kept his cool. Palin had not really done anything for the ticket, except reinforce the unpleasant hard-core of populist Republicanism. A Reagan she is not.

All of this notwithstanding, I suppose my old friend and TNR team-mate will vote for McCain, hoping that the just God will keep him strong and well.

But Charles, I think, has thrown in the towel. Now, he does not especially like Barack Obama. On the other hand, Obama had “one goal.” And, unlike Palin, he did “pass the Reagan ’80 threshold. Be acceptable, be cool, be reassuring.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writes Dr. K, famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a “second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.” Charles goes on to question Obama’s experience, convictions, associations and self-definition. This is the usual. And then he writes:

Obama has “got both a first-class intellect and a first class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.

The columnist has thrown in the towel. There’s almost a “should” in his last sentence.

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: September 30, 2008

I was channel surfing on Monday, following the stock market’s nearly 800-point collapse, when a commentator on CNBC caught my attention. He was being asked to give advice to viewers as to what were the best positions to be in to ride out the market storm. Without missing a beat, he answered: “Cash and fetal.”

I’m in both — because I know an unprecedented moment when I see one. I’ve been frightened for my country only a few times in my life: In 1962, when, even as a boy of 9, I followed the tension of the Cuban missile crisis; in 1963, with the assassination of J.F.K.; on Sept. 11, 2001; and on Monday, when the House Republicans brought down the bipartisan rescue package.

But this moment is the scariest of all for me because the previous three were all driven by real or potential attacks on the U.S. system by outsiders. This time, we are doing it to ourselves. This time, it’s our own failure to regulate our own financial system and to legislate the proper remedy that is doing us in.

I’ve always believed that America’s government was a unique political system — one designed by geniuses so that it could be run by idiots. I was wrong. No system can be smart enough to survive this level of incompetence and recklessness by the people charged to run it.

This is dangerous. We have House members, many of whom I suspect can’t balance their own checkbooks, rejecting a complex rescue package because some voters, whom I fear also don’t understand, swamped them with phone calls. I appreciate the popular anger against Wall Street, but you can’t deal with this crisis this way.

This is a credit crisis. It’s all about confidence. What you can’t see is how bank A will no longer lend to good company B or mortgage company C. Because no one is sure the other guy’s assets and collateral are worth anything, which is why the government needs to come in and put a floor under them. Otherwise, the system will be choked of credit, like a body being choked of oxygen and turning blue.

Well, you say, “I don’t own any stocks — let those greedy monsters on Wall Street suffer.” You may not own any stocks, but your pension fund owned some Lehman Brothers commercial paper and your regional bank held subprime mortgage bonds, which is why you were able refinance your house two years ago. And your local airport was insured by A.I.G., and your local municipality sold municipal bonds on Wall Street to finance your street’s new sewer system, and your local car company depended on the credit markets to finance your auto loan — and now that the credit market has dried up, Wachovia bank went bust and your neighbor lost her secretarial job there.

We’re all connected. As others have pointed out, you can’t save Main Street and punish Wall Street anymore than you can be in a rowboat with someone you hate and think that the leak in the bottom of the boat at his end is not going to sink you, too. The world really is flat. We’re all connected. “Decoupling” is pure fantasy.

I totally understand the resentment against Wall Street titans bringing home $60 million bonuses. But when the credit system is imperiled, as it is now, you have to focus on saving the system, even if it means bailing out people who don’t deserve it. Otherwise, you’re saying: I’m going to hold my breath until that Wall Street fat cat turns blue. But he’s not going to turn blue; you are, or we all are. We have to get this right.

My rabbi told this story at Rosh Hashana services on Tuesday: A frail 80-year-old mother is celebrating her birthday and her three sons each give her a present. Harry gives her a new house. Harvey gives her a new car and driver. And Bernie gives her a huge parrot that can recite the entire Torah. A week later, she calls her three sons together and says: “Harry, thanks for the nice house, but I only live in one room. Harvey, thanks for the nice car, but I can’t stand the driver. Bernie, thanks for giving your mother something she could really enjoy. That chicken was delicious.”

Message to Congress: Don’t get cute. Don’t give us something we don’t need. Don’t give us something designed to solve your political problems. Yes, Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke need to accept strict oversights and the taxpayer must be guaranteed a share in the upside profits from all rescued banks. But other than that, give them the capital and the flexibility to put out this fire.

I always said to myself: Our government is so broken that it can only work in response to a huge crisis. But now we’ve had a huge crisis, and the system still doesn’t seem to work. Our leaders, Republicans and Democrats, have gotten so out of practice of working together that even in the face of this system-threatening meltdown they could not agree on a rescue package, as if they lived on Mars and were just visiting us for the week, with no stake in the outcome.

The story cannot end here. If it does, assume the fetal position.