The Lower Depths (Updated)

Maybe we'd be better off if Trump just didn't make statements on tragic events:

President Donald Trump responded to the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue which resulted in multiple fatalities by blaming the synagogue for not having armed guards inside.

The gunman shot at least three armed police officers, but Trump did not appear to account for that in his remarks. Here is what he said to reporters:

This is a case where if they had an armed guard inside, they might have been able to stop him immediately...maybe there would be nobody killed.

And let's all remember whose campaign for president got $30 million from the NRA.

And in what kind of country do you hire armed guards to protect you at worship? Just for some perspective:

Donald Trump on Pittsburgh shooting at synagogue: “To see this happening again and again and again, it's just a shame.”

He's asked if there's anything that can be done: “Look at the violence all over the world. The world is violent. The world is a violent world." pic.twitter.com/lx4HfBmThf

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) October 27, 2018

Via Joe.My.God.

Let's face it, this is typical of Trump, and he's not going to change: he doesn't care about anyone but himself (and I'm very serious about that -- I have no doubt that he'd cut his children loose -- even Ivanka -- if he felt threatened enough). And let's be very plain about it: this is his doing. No, he didn't create this kind of toxic atmosphere -- that honor belongs to much more intelligent people than he is -- but he capitalized on it, and continues to do so, because it reflects his own thinking and resonates with the worst we have to offer: he's one of them, a bully with thin skin and a severe ego deficit:

President Donald Trump is refusing to acknowledge his role in this week's terror attacks which culminated in Friday afternoon's arrest of an anti-Democratic extremist Trump-supporting suspect.

"Not at all, no. There is no blame. There is no anything," the President told reporters late Friday afternoon from the White House lawn. He added that the suspect, Cesar Sayoc, merely is "a person that preferred me over others."

. . .

Trump went as far as to commend himself, saying he's "been toned down, if you want to know the truth."

"I could really tone it up, because the media has been extremely unfair to me and the Republican Party," President Trump told reporters. "The media has been unbelievably unfair to Republicans & certainly to me."

Anything that's not slavish adoration is "unfair."

Footnote: As might be expected, reactions to Trump's comments have been less than positive.

Ann Laurie at Balloon Juice takes the press to task, as well. The zinger:

the difference between the trump administration and isis is that isis accepts responsibility for the attacks it inspires

— m i t h (@ManInTheHoody) October 27, 2018

Update: And just to make sure the target is clear:

For the “both sides” hall of fame, here’s the New York Times insinuating that the people who received the bombs might have deserved it. Notable that they left CNN out of the piece. https://t.co/LzTwawdlA6

— Adam Jentleson 🎈 (@AJentleson) October 26, 2018

Lo! How the mighty have fallen!

Update II: And from Tom Levenson, a look at history and complicity:

Thirty six years ago, on September 12, 1982, a Lebanese Maronite militia invaded two refugee camps occupied by Palestinians. As The New York Times remembered on the 30th anniversary of the disaster,

In the ensuing three-day rampage, the militia, linked to the Maronite Christian Phalange Party, raped, killed and dismembered at least 800 civilians, while Israeli flares illuminated the camps’ narrow and darkened alleyways. Nearly all of the dead were women, children and elderly men.

That reference to the flares points to the miserable truth behind the blood and broken bodies: the people on the spot, those militiamen handled the killing. They pulled the triggers, broke the women, shattered the bodies. They were guilty of those crimes; they did the worst that human beings can do.

But there were others who stood aside, hands nominally clean while the predictable result of their actions and their studied inactions played out in Sabra and Shatila.

After the fact, the Israeli government ordered an investigation into the massacres, and they got a real one. It concluded that

Israeli leaders were “indirectly responsible” for the killings and that Ariel Sharon, then the defense minister and later prime minister, bore “personal responsibility” for failing to prevent them.

Sharon didn’t fire a single shot; no blood spattered the shoes of his colleagues, and the Israeli soldiers on the front lines in Lebanon did nothing more than stay out of the way. But as the report concluded, those in charge in Israeli knew what would happen if the Maronite militias gained free rein in the camps, and they let events unfold anyway. They were guilty not of murder, but of enabling the killings, of giving permission for an atrocity.

Fast forward to 2018 and a "leader" who gives permission for the unhinged and delusional to commit atrocities against their (his) "enemies."

Oops! Somebody Let the Cat Out Of the Bag

It would be interesting to see the demographics of NRA members:

CHUCK HOLTON (NRATV CORRESPONDENT): You know it really has been fascinating to just kind of get an overview of the gun laws and how they affect -- how the culture affects the gun laws, I guess. Because you take a place like Switzerland, where they have a strong gun culture, number two to the United States as far as gun ownership and although they have very, very low crime. Very, very low murder rates. Essentially, maybe one per 100,000 a year or less. Very, very low and yet -- so what I’m saying is that it doesn’t have anything to do with the crime rate, as far as more guns equals more crime. That’s not true. What I’ve seen is actually the safer places that we’ve been, be that Monaco, San Marino, even Italy to some extent up in the north, and here in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, those places tend to have higher gun ownership but lower crime. And it really doesn’t have anything to do, I don’t think even with gun ownership, as much as it does with the homogeneity of the culture. That is, the people who just -- they feel like they’re part of a country, they feel like they’re part of one culture and they aren’t so divided like we are in the United States. And that’s something that kind of makes you go man, it would be really nice to go back to that time in the U.S. where we all just felt like Americans and we left each other alone to, you know, hey, it’s a free country.

GRANT STINCHFIELD (NRATV HOST): Yeah, regardless of color or race or religion, or any of those things. Where we all just were Americans.

Nice try, Stinchfield, but there's no cleaning that one up. And you know what? A lot of us -- probably most of us -- still feel like we're all just Americans, in spite of what your paymasters in Moscow are doing to change that.

Via Joe.My.God.

This Month's School Shooting

Like Digby, I have nothing to say, so I'm just going to borrow her post:

She also includes a comment from David Hogg:

Get ready for two weeks of media coverage of politicians acting like they give a shit when in reality they just want to boost their approval ratings before midterms.

— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) May 18, 2018

Just recently saw a comment that we're twenty weeks into 2018 and there have been 22 mass shootings.

Welcome to Trump's America, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the NRA.

Today In Disgusting People

The NRA's own Dana Loesch (and surprise! It does not rhyme with "roach.")

The National Rifle Association tweeted out one of Dana Loesch's NRA propaganda videos Thursday night, and social media commentators are neither pleased nor impressed. The video literally and figuratively evokes violent imagery, and in a stunning act of hyperbole tries to defend President Trump.

"We are witnesses to the most ruthless attack on a president, and the people who voted for him, and the free system that allowed it to happen in American history," Loesch begins. Originally released last year, it's titled "The Ultimate Insult."

"From the highest levels of government, to their media, universities and billionaires their fate will be failure and they will perish in the political flames of their own fires. their hateful defiance of his legitimacy is an insult to each of us," Loesch says.

“But the ultimate insult is that they think we’re so stupid that we’ll let them get away with it. These saboteurs, slashing away with their leaks and sneers, their phony accusations and gagging sanctimony, drive their daggers through the heart of our future, poisoning our belief that honest custody of our institutions will ever again be possible. So they can then build their utopia from the ashes of what they burned down. No, their fate will be failure and they will perish in the political flames of their own fires," she continues.

“We are the National Rifle Association of America. And we are freedom’s safest place.”

Well, yes, it's a little over the top -- probably a sure bet for the "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" Award. As for the "most ruthless attack" bit -- think back over the years from 2008-2016. Just sayin'. (And as one tweet points out, Abraham Lincoln would probably disagree with her.)

The video is at the link, if your stomach's up to it. Also, the Twitter responses, which were not supportive -- to say the least.

March for Our Lives, Part 7: Turning Over Rocks

And it looks like the kids turned over a lot of them. This may turn into a link dump, if I get fed up enough.

First, in order of appearance in this morning's surfing, this bozo from, of course, NRA TV:

“Their leaders told them that they [assault weapons] need to be banned and so often times what happens is they follow. The reason you don’t see NRA members marching on Washington is, one, I believe we’re in the majority of where we stand on gun rights. We are right and the Constitution is in our favor. And we’re not in a position of weakness. When people march now, in modern day and maybe even across time, they are in positions of weakness.” – NRA TV host Grant Stichfield, speaking on today’s YouTube show.

He puts it in very interesting terms, from a psychological/propaganda standpoint, and of course his audience will swallow it because they consider exercising critical thinking skills to be the Original Sin. Sure -- a million people march on Washington because they're weak. NRA members don't march on Washington because they'd have to get out of their Barcaloungers, and they couldn't get a million people to do that. Except to go to the fridge for another beer. (And by the way, NRA members strongly support various gun-control measures -- but those aren't the members the NRA brass is listening to.) Commenter Acronym Jim at the link brought up a good point: Only weak people need to carry guns and wear bulletproof vests when they protest.

That was rather mild, compared to this from Jesse Hughes. In case you've never heard of Hughes, he's the front man for Eagles of Death Metal, whose one claim to fame is:

The Eagles Of Death Metal are the American band that was onstage in November 2015 as terrorists opened fired at Paris’ Bataclan Theater, killing 89 people.

After reading through portions of his diatribes against Parkland kids, my only conclusion is that this guy is really, really sick.


And what do you find when you get to the bottom of the barrel? Why, Rep. Steve King (R-Berchtesgaden):

 

By the way, if you follow the link, you'll see that nothing in that tweet is true. And he didn't get off scot-free -- one of the Pulse survivors let him have it.

Pat Buchanan doesn't think the Parkland kids are very smart -- not nearly as smart as the protesters against the Vietnam War he hated in the 1960s. (Sorry if that busted your irony meter -- I should have warned you.)

And Alex Jones, of course, thinks they're going to kill you. Click through for the quotes -- I just can't deal with him this morning. But be warned -- it's a word salad composed entirely of alternate facts.

And of course, there's the Nazi comparison. Didn't anyone ever tell this woman about Godwin's Law?

That's all I can handle right now.

Image du Jour

This, from this post at Balloon Juice:

(Matt Davies via GoComics.com)

It's an open thread, but what's in the post is thought-provoking: in the past few generations, who is it who has changed the course of America? The kids. ("Kids" in this sense being anyone under 30.) I mean, this is sort of amazing:

Just talked w/ some DC teenagers preparing for Saturday's rally: they've coordinated > 300 host families for other high schoolers coming in from California, Florida, Conn and more. Organized meals for Friday and Saturday, have first-aid stations/emergency contacts. Incredible

— Astead (@AsteadWesley) March 20, 2018

And another thought: No, it's not the NRA's lawn -- but whose is it?

This Is Getting Real Old Real Fast

Another day, another school shooting:

NBC News reports:

A student pulled a gun out and shot two other students at a high school in southeast Maryland Tuesday morning before the shooter was wounded, the St. Mary’s County sheriff said.

The gunman entered Great Mills High School in Great Mills, Maryland, at the beginning of the school day and shot a female student in a hallway, Sheriff Tim Cameron said live on News4. A male student also was hit by a bullet.

Information was not available immediately on the relationship between the students, Cameron said. The shooter exchanged fire with a school resource officer, trained, armed deputy sheriff, Cameron said. The shooter was wounded; the officer was not. All three students are in critical condition.

By all means, let's make guns easily available to everyone, including teenagers. Kids going through all the stress of puberty, learning to forge relationships, learning to be adults, and being in school should have ready access to guns. Sure they should.

As of the latest update, the shooter has died.

Add in a good helping of disgusting people. From NRA spokesbot, Dana Loesch:

It [the Parkland massacre] cost peoples lives and it also contributed to a state of poison in our national discourse where you have politicians and celebrities and everyone else impugning the characters of millions of law abiding members just because they choose to voluntarily enter into a fellowship and call themselves the NRA. That’s the problem here, it created even more victims of a different sort.

She's starting to sound like a conservative "Christian" -- whatever you're doing to other people, accuse them of doing it to you.

Last I heard, a strong majority of NRA members support rational gun control laws. But then, the "members" the NRA actually listens to -- the manufacturers -- don't. There you have it.

For Sure, We Should Arm Teachers

One of Trump's (actually, the NRA's) more insane ideas: let's arm the teachers so they can . . . what? Well, here's one scenario:

A Georgia high school teacher is facing a number of charges after he barricaded himself inside an empty classroom and fired a handgun while students stood outside the door, authorities said Wednesday.

The shooting, which took place around 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, led to a frantic lockdown at Dalton High School. One student suffered a minor ankle injury while running down the halls, police said at a press conference.

Dalton police spokesman Bruce Frazier said the teacher, identified as social studies teacher Jesse Randal Davidson, 53, locked himself inside of the room and refused to allow students inside.

“When the principal put a key in the door to try to unlock the classroom, Mr. Davidson apparently fired a shot from a handgun through an exterior window of the classroom. It does not appear that it was aimed at anybody,” Frazier said at a press conference.

It doesn't take much imagination to transpose the teacher's actions to a classroom full of students.

Needless to say, teachers are vehemently opposed to the idea, as are school administrators and just about everyone else who has any experience with, for example, being in a combat situation. It's not a popular idea -- except, of course, with the NRA and their wholly-owned subsidiaries in Congress and various state governments.

Via Hullabaloo.