Gun Smoke

This is just asinine.

If you strip away the reactionary politics and overheated paranoid rhetoric for a moment, the basics alone are unbelievably appalling, callous and narcissistic, by any standards in a civilized society.

The Second Amendment crowd has chosen to assert itself by deliberately using the violent, barbaric massacre of 168 innocent people -- most of them civilians, many of them children -- to argue against something for which there is no evidence.

They have chosen to honor the actions of a mentally unbalanced, highly disturbed sociopath whose actions were so reprehensible that his final years were spent in 23-hour lockdown in the nation's toughest   prison before he forfeited his life -- alone, on a sterile white execution table -- for his crimes.

They have chosen the date of the nation's worst act of domestic, home-grown terrorism by strapping on weapons and taking a confrontational, provocative stance against the federal government and the nation's first black president.  They declare they are willing to take arms against a government that likely educated them, protects them from crime, and collects their garbage -- at least the kind you can put in a can.  They want to fight a government that has no interest in fighting them.

They have decided, in short, that we are idiots.

Must be decaf

The Tea Party may be small, old and white, but there's no question: it's definitely hot.

By contrast, the Coffee Party -- a legitimate grass-roots answer, a bi-partisan organization dedicated to more civil political discourse -- is not.  At least as far as I can tell.

In fact, the nascent, common-sense outfit which sprouted up in the wake of last summer's over-the-top town-hall meetings and TP rallies, seems to be going over less like a percolating, pick-me-up brew and more like the lukewarm, slightly bitter pot that sits around the office kitchenette after the morning rush.  That's if a handful of news reports about the outfit are to be judged.

It's hard to tell what's on their agenda.  Their web site doesn't do much better, its mission statement built on feel-good platitudes like, "government is the expression of our collective will," and, "we will support leaders who work towards common-sense solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them."

Wowee.

Nice, but it doesn't have quite the same pop as "Don't Tread on Me," or "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

While the TP'ers were getting their anger on in Washington, the Coffee Partiers were, ... well, not doing much of anything from what I can tell.   Perhaps civility is part of their problem.  Speaking as a former newsman, I can say definitively: that calm, rational, give-and-take discussion stuff doesn't sell.

Talk about no drama.

Bitter Tea

I had intially wanted to use this post to write about the passing of Benjamin Hooks, a giant among giants in the civil rights movement who passed away this week.  Hooks deserves his own post, and will have one in upcoming days after the rest of the pack has had its say.

But at the risk of repeating myself -- and further legitimizing what most serious analysts consider a fringe movement -- I yet again turn my lonely eyes to the phenomenon known as the Tea Party, a purportedly grass-roots organization seemingly dedicated to the collapse of the federal government.  Their plan: a refusal to pay taxes, a willingness to take arms against a popularly elected president and a seemingly unquenchable desire to "take back their country" -- even though it's unclear exactly what "their country" was, who took it away from them, or why.

I just finished listening to "The Diane Rehm Show," a popular news chat program on my local NPR affiliate.  Today, Diane and her guests cogitated on the domestic news of the week, including the rising Dow Jones numbers, prospects for immigration reform and President Obama's push for tougher regulations on Wall Street.

What got my blood, to paraphrase Sachel Paige, "angried up," however, was an intense discussion of the Tea Party, which held high-profile rallies in Boston and Washington earlier this week.  The news roundup quickly pivoted into an intense Tea Party debate, turning on notions of race, class and facts that really aren't facts.  Rehm and her three-member panel attempted to distill the anger old white guys feel about the country's new direction now that an African American president is in office.

It also touched on the confrontational nature of recent TP protests, and some of the harsh rhetoric its leaders, like Sarah Palin, employ.  It's not uncommon to see signs calling for open revolution against the US government and not-so-subtle hints that violence is the only way to re-establish the America they want to see.

At one point in the discussion, after everyone acknowledged that calls for violent overthrow of the federal government, veiled death threats, overt death threats and people packing heat at presidential speeches are a bad thing, Rehm asked her guests if they know of any prominent leaders on the right -- congressmen, RNC Chair Michael Steele, Fox News talk show hosts, anyone -- who is "standing up and saying, 'Knock it off'."

Sadly -- but not surprisingly -- no one had an answer.

Usually, I would avoid linking to an hour of warbling from Rehm and the clubby, inside-the-beltway windbaggery of her largely color-free panel of pundits.  But this one deserves to be heard -- not only for the White Men Gone Wild discussion, but for lefty WashPost columnist EJ Dionne's verbal beat-down of conservative WashExaminer editorial writer Byron York.

On three occasions, Dionne dismantled York's misleading defense of the Tea Party, whose white-male, largely middle-class membership was detailed on the front page of the New York Times.  After reciting statistics from that story which calls into question the populist, grass-roots image of the TP crowd, Dionne then called BS on York when he threw out a popular but out-of-context fact conservatives use to work up the TP faithful: 47 percent of Americans don't pay taxes.

You know who doesn't pay, goes the unspoken follow-up:  THOSE people.

At most TP rallies, this chunk of bloody red meat is thrown out to show how the deadbeats among us don't pay their fair share while at the same time soaking up taxpayer-funded "entitlements" like welfare and unemployment benefits which add to the already bloated national deficit.  But Dionne, my favorite limousine liberal, put York's weak jumper into the cheap seats by archly pointing to a NYT piece by David Leonhard explaining the true nature of that statistic, and why it's so misleading.

Dionne also dope-slapped York after York claimed that the angry left was just as confrontational and disrespectful to the White House when President George W. Bush was in office.  Poppycock, Dionne replied  But York held fast -- until Dionne cocked back his rhetorical hand and let fly.

"I hope someone is studying this," Dionne, clearly irritated, said to York.  "Somebody should do empirical work on this.  One of us is right, and one of us is wrong."

But the one that nearly made me throw my radio across the room came from a journalist I  respect: veteran NPR anchor Linda Wertheimer, who declared she no longer believes that race is an unspoken central factor in Tea Partier's outrage at the Obama administration.

Say what?  Really? Joanie, set her straight.

History Lesson

I'm always fascinated by the disconnect some modern-day politicians have with our nation's history, and the broad assumption - largely proven, in many cases - that their followers don't know it any better, either.

I readily admit I'm no historian or scholar, but I do have a college-level grasp of how this nation was founded, and some of the things that happened on the way from Plymouth Rock to President Obama.

Today, the Tea Party rallies in Boston, theoretically returning to its namesake location to underscore its roots as an anti-tax, small-government organization of the little people.  But as I mentioned in an earlier post, the Tea Partiers again demonstrate their seemingly willful ignorance about the country they claim to cherish.  NPR sets them straight in a report outlining what every fifth-grade history student -- or even a former viewer of Schoolhouse Rock -- should know:

The Tea Party in Boston Harbor wasn't to protest outrageous taxes or large government intrusion into the lives of colonists; it was a protest against taxation without representation.  King George took their money but didn't give them a vote in Parliament.   Kind of like where I live here in Washington, which takes my tax money but doesn't provide me with a sitting senator or voting member of Congress.

Meanwhile, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, swimming in the wake of Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell's recent ham-fisted nod to the Sons of the Confederacy, doesn't believe that the dustup over slavery doesn't amount to "diddly."  He contends that people who are upset about McDonnell's declaration of Confederate History Month without acknowledging the evil of slavery -- the very issue that prompted Virginia to fight for its "independence" in a war of secession -- don't really get it: it's about the Confederate soldiers and their sacrifices.  And he reminded people that he declared Confederate History Month in Mississippi a long time ago -- even though his state has one of the nation's highest populations of African Americans.

The Post's Eugene Robinson has a few suggestions on how Barbour, McDonnell and others can catch a clue.  I don't think Jackson, Miss., gets the Post's early editions, though.

This Week in Race Relations

I have to admit I was surprised but not shocked when newly-elected Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell, still in the early months of his first term, decided to declare April as Confederate History Month, celebrating "the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War," and how their "fight for independence" helped shape present-day Virginia and the rest of the nation. 

Well, heck.  There's so much there I hardly know where to begin.

As a former longtime resident of the Old Dominion -- I went to college there, and spent the first seven years of my career working for the Richmond Times-Dispatch -- I'm not quite sure exactly why the governor felt compelled to make the declaration.  I mean, it's not as though sympathetic residents of Virginia ever stopped celebrating, studying or honoring their Confederate heritage.

Take Monument Avenue, for example, one of Richmond's crown-jewel landmarks, a beautiful boulevard that's chockablock with statues honoring Confederate heroes from the familiar (Robert E. Lee, JEB Stuart) to the obscure (Oceanographer Matthew Maury).  Then there's the Lee Bridge.  And Jefferson Davis Highway.  And Lee-Jackson-King Day, a cognitive-dissonance, only-in-Virginia state holiday honoring two Confederate generals and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.  (he got stapled on to the holiday as a sop to the black community, much the same way tennis legend and Richmond native Arthur Ashe's statute was a backhanded, 20th-century addition to Monument Avenue).  And the Confederate History Museum, which was a few blocks away from where I live.  And the re-enactors who dress up in period costumes and lay wreaths at Lee's statute on the date of his birth.

It led me to wonder what's next: Slavery Appreciation Week?  Klan Day at Richmond Stadium -- free hoods to the first 500 whites through the turnstiles.  Massive Resistance special-edition license plates?  What about giving a nod to King's assassin with Lee-Jackson-King-Ray-Lee Day?  Has  nice ring to it.

I could go on, but you get the point.  Actually, the NYTimes' Gail Collins does a much better job of it.

April madness

Here's hoping the NCAA greedheads get what they deserve on Monday: a Butler-West Virginia men's basketball championship finale, one that would lack a marquee team to root for, like, say, Duke or Kansas or North Carolina, and send the TV ratings for one of college sports' biggest games into a nosedive.

If schadenfreude is the goal, though, it would be a tough pick in a Bulldogs-Mountaineers matchup.  The 'Dogs represent, well, the underdogs like my alma mater -- hard-working, mid-major teams that try to actually graduate their players. A Butler win would validate the perception that nice guys can finish first in a corrupt, money-grubbing system.

On the other hand, if the Mountaineer triumph, it would confirm the suspicions of cynical critics who believe that the 'Eers' Bob Hudgins represent everything that's wrong with big-time college athletics: greedy, self-absorbed coaches who exploit needy, sometimes selfish players in order to land the next million-dollar contract by colleges seeking reflected glory on the basketball court.

State of Independents

This post, by Dylan Matthews, a guest blogger filling in for the vacationing Ezra Klein, captures what I've long suspected about the so-called "independent" vote, and how crucial it allegedly is to the political process.

Rather than a voting bloc that's true to its name, the independent vote is quite partisan, yet likes to consider itself more broad-minded than a narrow definition like Democrat or Republican (never mind the fact that those definitions also include wider band width, such as 'moderate' or 'progressive.')

Given the analysis, Obama's "outreach" to Republicans seems to be more about helping out the aforementioned moderate Democrats than bridging the apparently insurmountable gap between the two parties.