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Sunday, July 10, 2016
Weekend Roundup
The biggest story in the US last week involved the fatal shootings
of seven people in three separate incidents: one each in
Louisiana and Minnesota (Alton Sterling and Philando Castile), and five in
Dallas. All of the shootings involved police and race, and appear
to be unjustifiable by any conceivable criteria. Needless to say, they
all involved guns, but one thing they had in common point been little
commented on: all eight victims were armed, and their guns worthless
for self-defense. (Remind me again how safe
we would all be if everyone had guns for self-defense.) As a practical
matter, carrying guns not only failed to save the victims, but probably
contributed to their deaths. The Louisiana and Minnesota incidents may
have occurred because police panicked when they discovered that the
black people they were harrassing were armed. The Texas incident came
later, when an ex-army soldier snapped and decided to shoot some white
police -- perhaps as indiscriminate revenge (isn't that how he was
trained to respond to "the enemy" in Afghanistan?), the sort of warped
injustice self-appointed vigilantes are prone to.
For some time now, I've felt that as long as people legimately
believe that they need to own and carry a gun for their own protection
it would be unwise and unfair for government to deny them that option.
However, I've always wondered whether carrying a gun actually made
anyone safer: has anyone ever studied this, putting such (probably
rare) events in statistical context against all the other things
that can go wrong with guns?
There are other ways one can approach these tragic events. One I
think should be given more weight is that the Dallas shooter learned
his craft in the US military, which no doubt considered him a hero
until the moment he started shooting at white American cops. Not all
killers were trained by the US military, but they do pop up with some
frequency. I'm reminded of a scene in Full Metal Jacket where
the Marine Gunnery Sergeant lectures his boot camp trainees on "what
one motivated Marine and his rifle can do," offering a few examples:
Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles Whitman, Richard Speck. Should we be
surprised that a country that is so invested in celebrating its
heroic killers abroad should more than occasionally encounter the
same at home? And not infrequently by the same hands?
Of course, another way to approach this is to note that last week's
bombing in Baghdad killed over 175 -- more than twenty times the death
toll discussed above. But that scarcely registers here, even though
the Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq is still most responsible for
continued bloodshed there. As bad as gun violence has become here, it
still pales against the violence of US forces and the rivals they stir
up abroad.
I suppose the second biggest story last week was the FBI decision
not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for risking classified data by running
a private email server while she was Secretary of State. FBI Director
Comey went out of his way to scold Clinton for being "extremely careless"
regarding state secrets before admitting that they couldn't come up with
a credible criminal case against her. The way Comey put it allowed
Republicans to reiterate their talking points, adding they couldn't
understand the decision not to indict based on Comey's exposition.
As I understand the "scandal" (see
Wikipedia for a long rundown, and perhaps also Clinton's own
The Facts About Hillary Clinton's Emails [PS: broken link]),
the problem with running
a non-government server is that it doesn't allow for efficient collection
of emails that are considered to be public records (under the Federal
Records Act). To comply with the FRA, Clinton had to sort through her
emails and turn over the ones she considered to be State Department
business while retaining ones she considered to be personal -- i.e.,
the two had been mixed. A better solution might have been to turn all
the emails over and let the Department sort out which ones were personal --
at least then she couldn't be accused of hiding emails that should have
gone into the public record. On the other hand, had she kept separate
public and private email accounts, there still would likely have been
cross-contamination. (There is a similar controversy here in Kansas,
where a member of Gov. Sam Brownback's staff was found to be communicating
with lobbyists via his personal account, thereby avoiding public records
disclosure.)
Still, one wonders why the FRA issue didn't arise while Clinton was
actually Secretary of State. It only seems to have been recognized as
a problem several years after she left office, when the Republican
Benghazi! witchhunt got under way. Further complicating things is the
question of whether Clinton's emails contained classified material.
Clinton, of course, had a top security clearance, but her private
email server wasn't fully secured for handling "secret" missives, so
it could have been, well, I'm not sure what, some form of breach in
the security state. Again, this seems not to have bothered anyone
until well after the fact. And curiously, the audits revealed that
some emails contained material that was classified only after it was
sent, so most of this charade has been focused on Clinton's threat
to national security. Frankly, I'd respect her more if she had been
a source of leaked data. But all this episode really shows is her
knack for getting caught up in trivial scandals.
I'd be happy to never hear of the email matter again, but there's
little chance of that. Instead, I expect the Republicans to flog the
matter on and on, much as they did every conjured taint from Whitewater
to Benghazi, even though their complaints will fail to impress anyone
but themselves, and in the end prove counterproductive. In particular,
those of us who consider Hillary at best a lesser evil will wonder why
they don't attack her with something she's truly guilty of, like voting
for Bush's Iraq War.
Some scattered links this week:
Phyllis Bennis: What the Democratic Party Platform Tells Us About Where
We Are on War: Unwilling to break with a past that has caused us
nothing but grief, of course. "The draft asserts that the United States
'must continue to have the strongest military in the world' and criticizes
the 'arbitrary cuts that the Republican Congress enacted as part of
sequestration.'"
Carl Bialik: The Police Are Killing People As Often As They Were Before
Ferguson: "The deaths [of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile] have
driven renewed attention to the more than 1,000 people killed each year
by police officers." I have to admit that's a higher number than I would
have expected, but maybe I was just being naïve. For instance, see:
Ben Norton: Before Alton Sterling, Louisiana police killed mentally ill
black father Micahel Noel -- and 37 others since 2015.
Jessica Elgot: Tony Blair could face contempt of parliament motion over
Iraq war: Not quite a full hearing at the Hague, but the Chilcot
Report makes clear what we already pretty much knew -- that Blair lied
to Parliament and the public to join Bush in invading and occupying
Iraq in 2003 -- and a public rebuke is in order. Public opinion in the
US is if anything even more unanimous in recognizing Bush's scheming
to launch that war, yet the prospect of Congress acknowledging this
with a similar resolution is, well, unthinkable.
Harry Enten: Is Gary Johnson Taking More Support From Clinton or Trump?:
Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, is the Libertarian
candidate for president this year. In theory a larger than usual slice
of Republicans should lean Libertarian given that the GOP candidate is
basically a Fascist. A Libertarian should have less appeal to Democrats,
especially on economic issues, but Hillary is exceptionally weak on two
issues that many Democrats care about, ones Johnson could exploit: drug
prohibition and global warfare. Enten's research doesn't shed much light
here, but polls that bother to list Johnson show him gathering close to
10% in western states like Arizona and California (also Vermont). I have
a friend who thinks that Trump will destroy the Republican Party and
Johnson's Libertarians will rise to take the GOP's place. I think the
chances of that happening are nil. For one thing, more of the Republican
base leans fascist than libertarian, and for another, the Kochs have
pretty clearly shown that no matter how much they may philosophize
about freedom, they put their money on the party of graft. On the
other hand, given that both major party candidates have extremely low
favorability ratings, this will likely be a good year to be "none of
the above."
Stephen Kinzer: Is NATO Necessary?: I would have preferred that the
UK vote on leaving NATO over quitting the EU, but I have seen a number
of (admittedly left-wing) Brexiters touting their win as a rebuke of
NATO. Indeed, any Englishman worried about loss of sovereignty to the
EU should be apoplectic about NATO, which the US regularly uses to
consign British soldiers to fight and die in America's imperial wars.
Britain's vote to quit the European Union was a rude jolt to the encrusted
world order. Now that the EU has been shocked into reality, NATO should
be next. When NATO leaders convene for a summit in Warsaw on Friday, they
will insist that their alliance is still vital because Russian aggression
threatens Europe. The opposite is true. NATO has become America's
instrument in escalating our dangerous conflict with Russia. We need
less NATO, not more. [ . . . ]
This week's NATO summit will be a festival of chest-thumping, with
many warnings about the Russian "threat" and solemn vows to meet it
with shows of military force. The United States plans to quadruple
spending on NATO military projects on or near Russia's borders. In
recent weeks NATO has opened a new missile base in Romania, held the
largest military maneuver in the modern history of Poland, and
announced plans to deploy thousands more American troops at Baltic
bases, some within artillery range of St. Petersburg. Russia, for
its part, is building a new military base within artillery range of
Ukraine and deploying 30,000 troops to border posts. Both sides are
nuclear-armed.
Ever since the Brexit vote the US has been escalating its focus
on Russia, inflating the threat by provoking it, all the better to
keep Europe subservient to US schemes in Africa and the Middle East.
Nancy LeTourneau: Some Things You Need to Know About the Dallas Police
Department: Evidently before last week's shootings, Dallas Police
Chief David Brown had made notable progress on reducing complaints of
excessive police force, including "a 30 percent decline in assaults on
officers this year, and a 40 percent drop in shootings by police."
Conor Lynch: Paranoid politics: Donald Trump's style perfectly embodies
the theories of renowned historian: Reference is to Richard Hofstadter's
1964 book The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Lynch is part
wrong: the book was written at a time when McCarthyite paranoia could
be viewed as history, which is part of the reason Goldwater seemed so
ridiculous. Hofstadter's examples go further back in history, and it is
true that had he not died he could update with a new chapter on Trump,
with Roy Cohn and Glenn Beck key intermediaries. (Indeed, the Cohn
connection is almost too karmic to be believed.)
Sean D Naylor: Out of Uniform and Into the Political Fray: A
profile of former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who appears to be a leading
candidate as Trump's running mate. Flynn's name was familiar to me
mostly due to Michael Hastings' book The Operators: The Wild and
Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan. Flynn
was deputy to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was fired by Obama for
insubordination and/or his monumental cock up of command -- Flynn,
of course, was a key factor in both. Flynn was subsequently head
of the DIA, then retired to become Trump's "military adviser."
The US has a long history of nominating ex-generals for president,
but unlike Flynn all the previous ones achieved distinction in
wars the US won -- most recently Eisenhower. (Since then George
Wallace selected a general for his running mate, and Ross Perot
picked an admiral -- precedents, sure, but not the sort that make
Trump look better. Flynn, by the way, has a book coming out, The
Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam
and Its Allies, written with neocon Michael Ledeen, one of the
dumbest fucking assholes in America.)
Heather Digby Parton: Following the Trump money: He's running his campaign
just like his casinos -- as a big scam: "If it's true that they've
collected somewhere between $25 and $50 million for the campaign in the
last month then the real grift is just about to kick in. Remember, Trump
told Fortune magazine back in 2000, 'It's very possible that I could be
the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.'"
Nomi Prins: Donald Trump's Anti-Establishment Scam: "After all, he's
brought his brand to a far broader global audience on a stage so much
larger than any Apprentice imaginable. He could lose dramatically,
blame the Republican establishment for being mean to him, and then expand
the Trump brand into new realms, places like Russia, where he's long
craved an opening."
Ask a question, or send a comment.
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