Catching up 2: White House White Trash

I'm not sure what more I can say about the astounding descent into howling madness that is Trump 47 than what I've already said over and over and over again.

 
Except that the scum in the GriftSkyBlue Reflecting Pool is the least-toxic scum currently associated with this Administration.

It's difficult for me, who lived through Nixon criming and Reagan selling missiles to the mullahs and Dubya getting GIs waxed in Southwest Asia and Felony Fats 45 helping kill millions with a preventable pandemic disease, to really get my mind around how utterly, jaw-droppingly, ridiculously awful the Second Coming of Tubby has been and will be.

Except this evening it's all going to be there. As Jim Wright sums it up:

"Jumping dirt bikes. UFC cage fights. Roaring 4-wheelers. Gratuitous military displays. Way too loud redneck music. Port-O-Potties and overflowing trashcans full of Taco Bell and McDonalds. All it needs is a Donut Burger stand and a 4-H cowbarn."

Words alone don't begin to describe the white trash tackiness of the Orange Fuhrer's Führergeburtstag. Here's the visual:

 

I...I...fuck. Words fail me.

All this lacks is a sagging couch on the West Portico and a rusted-out Oldsmobile up on blocks where the Rose Garden used to be.

Why is this a problem?

Because, frankly, I know that the world is full of people who love this grubby low-rent shit. The point is that the people who are supposed to be "leaders", the people We the People elect to do the hard work of governance, are supposed to be better than that.

I don't want to have some redneck goober in the Oval Office. In the Senate. Fuck, I don't want to have them in my local county commission.

Yet here we are.

And Trump being Trump - which is to say, a liar and thief - of course there's a grift:

"The Ultimate Fighting Championship announced on Friday that it will pay bonuses to fighters in a form of cryptocurrency issued by Trump family business World Liberty Financial at the heavily publicized White House mixed martial arts event on Sunday."

Sweet Baby Jesus. If you wrote this as part of a crime novel not even the most credulous reader would buy it.

There's no bottom to this cesspit. And no visible realistic way to fight free of it, because 1) somewhere between 25% and 40% of the U.S. public love and want it, and 2) the Constitutional framework we have now makes it entirely too easy for that toxic minority to tear the country down to the level of this ignorant crap and difficult to shove it back down into the shithole where it belongs.

I have no idea what comes After Trump.

But I don't think it's going to be good.

 
The brightest promise of this nation, the lofty aspiration of Liberty and Justice For All, of Equal Justice Under Law, of true republican equity, has always been more of a hope and ideal than a real thing.

Founded by wealthy white men, many of whom were slaveowners, it's hardly surprising that in the history of this nation the wealthy have always taken more than their share. 

The Rest of Us have had to fight over the scraps, and those of us even further on the margins, whether from birth or gender or color or belief or...well, all the other "other" things that have set us apart from the rich, the well-born, and the able...have been driven even further down and out, harassed and punished for the crime of not being rich or white or male or "Christian" and every other thing the wingnut horde hates. 

That those plutocrats have managed to convince a critical minority of the "rest of us" that, as one of the characters in the awful musical 1776 says, “...most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.” 

Or of being on top for being male, or het, or "conservative" or every other damn thing this Administration represents. 

The United States has had two immense upheavals where the original white plutocracy was challenged.

 
One was a civil war.

In theory it was "won" by the foundation of a Second Republic that pulled the people the First Republic had locked into slavery into the body politic.

The "Civil Rights Era" of the late Fifties and Sixties tried to fulfill the promises of Reconstruction (and the social revolutions of the Seventies and Eighties tried to continue that, to do the same for other pushed-down minorities such as women and people who didn't match the conventional stereotypes of gender, sexuality...).

 
The other was a depression that so threatened the nation with the specter of popular revolution that it forced the wealthy to cede a portion of their wealth and power to the masses.

The original thrones and dominations of 1789 haaaated both of these, and have worked tirelessly to reverse and destroy them. 

Much of the Second Republic was undone by the end of the 19th Century. We're now in the process of undoing the New Deal as well as whatever remains of the Civil Rights acts and the individual liberties won between then and 2016.

Looking at this Sunday evening's trashfire at the supposed People's House, it's hard not to believe that the white trash is winning.

And difficult to imagine how the rest of us can fight our way out of the binding they're working constantly to impose on all of us they hate and despise.

(Next: Okay, well...how's it going out in the People's Republic of Portland, then..?)

Bearing Arms, Badly

One of the things about the Second Amendment crowd that kind of irks the shit out of me is how bad they are at this "keep and bear arms" stuff. Today's case-in-point of an Armed But Stupid Fucking Citizenry is Ms. Jamie Gilt of Jacksonville, Florida:

"Jamie Gilt, 31, who posts about firearms on her social media accounts was driving through Putnam County, Jacksonville, Florida, on Tuesday in her truck when she was wounded after the toddler picked up the weapon and shot her in the back. Her four-year-old son picked up a loaded .45 semi-automatic handgun from the back seat, pointed it towards his mother and pulled the trigger. The powerful round went through the front seat and passed through Gilt's body. Gilt and her son had been traveling to pick up a horse from a relative when the accident happened."

The weapon used by young deadeye when he put one through mommy's eight-ring was a "Kimber" M1911 knock-off, and that in itself makes me really pretty pissed off.

Because the M1911 and its variants may be the most mechanically safe handguns ever constructed.

Unlike most semiauto pistols that have no more than a single pushbutton or trigger safety the M1911 has three: a thumb safety (which is the equivalent of most modern semiauto's pushbotton/trigger safety), a half-cock safety (a very old-school sort of mechanism that was really a 19th Century military firearm hangover) and a grip safety, which requires a firm stock-weld with the firing hand to allow the hammer to fall.

The M1911 is a damn safe weapon, is what I'm saying. Even moreso if you follow Rule 1 of Handgun Safety; Never Chamber a Round Until You Are Ready To Fire.

It's really that simple, and the fraction of a second it takes to work the slide is not going to make half a nickel's worth of difference in "defending yourself". If the person threatening you has the drop on you to the extent that you can't chamber a round? You're pretty much fucked, anyway. But no more fucked than you are walking around with a live round under the hammer, as Mommy Gilt found out when little Chuckles picked up her hogleg and ventilated her ass.

In order to enable her spawn to put a live joe through her Mommy Dumbass must have, at the very least, had a live round in the chamber. The rest of the sequence is hard to figure out. Assuming the the hammer was uncocked little Nemo must have cocked it, which seems unlikely, so strike two against the Stupid Mother of the Year; she must have cocked it.

The other thing that the kid had to do was somehow grip the stock hard enough to engage the grip safety, which seems hard to believe for a four-year-old. Had Mommy gimmicked the grip safety somehow? If so, strike three, Mommy, and you're out with a bullet through the back.

So it's not their guns I fear. It's them. These fucking people. They're like an avalanche of Stupid, and they're Armed.

Did you think of that, Mister Madison? I sure as hell wish you had.

Update 3/23: So even in Florida you can be too goddamn stupid to carry a firearm. Turns out that the Mother of the Year is going to be charged under some kind of child-endangerment statute (I think...). But the new explanation - that Mombo had her hogleg lying around on one of the front seats, it slid under the seat (or possibly through the seat between the back and the cushion) into the back footwell where little Bubbles had unbuckled his carseat belt - still begs the question. Dumbass still had to have had a round under the hammer. I can't imagine that the little bastard knew to thumb the hammer back so the hammer must have BEEN back and the thumb safety off. And how the heck the kid managed to engage the grip safety I still don't know. The whole thing stinks, frankly, and just reminds me that this woman has NO business within the same grid square as a firearm.

Three-Fifths Compromise

I'm sorry, but I'm done with arguing with ammosexuals about "Second Amendment Rights".

You can argue the semantics of the "well-regulated militia" clause all you want, but the bottom line is that too many goddamn people can get their hands on too many goddamn firearms and We the People aren't even trying to do a goddamn thing about that.

Hell, the Framers would have a goddamn kitten fit if they saw what We have done with the verbiage they doped up just to keep the slaves down and avoid paying for professional soldiers.

As a result we're killing more American people every day than in the wildest Islamic State jihadi's wet dreams and that's indescribably, ridiculously, grotesquely fucked up. The Constitution is not supposed to be a goddamn suicide pact.

And speaking of the Constitution, it used to classify folks who weren’t free white men as 3/5ths of a human being. That was fucked up, so we changed it.

The Second Amendment as currently interpreted has effectively classified folks who aren’t armed and insane as the targets for those who are.

It's time to fucking change that, too.

Court of Drone Chamber

Frankly, I'm not sure what irks me more; the implication that the Attorney General of the United States considers that there is an "extraordinary circumstance" in which, without a declaration or war, without determining that you are in arms against the United States, but through secret evidence secretly reviewed that you or I may be executed without arrest, without charge, without trial, and without sentence, or the extraordinary slippery weasel-speak that said Attorney General uses to deliver this pronouncement.

Of course this would be an "extraordinary circumstance". That's the entire point. At present a U.S. citizen in Yemen or Pakistan accused of being an "al Qaeda leader" can - and has - been killed without legal recourse or any hope of pursuing such recourse. No, duh; his first fucking hint that he's on the Kill List is Mister Hellfire Missile sailing in through the bathroom window. We know that.

And the President of the United States has the absolute authority to kill without trial an American citizen in armed rebellion against the United States. There's a reason that the Army of the Potomac showed up at Antietam and not the Attorney General; the fucking Rebs were looking for trouble at the end of a Springfield and they found it in spades. That's what happens to rebels in arms. We know that, too

The question Paul was asking - and keep in mind that I yield to no one in my estimation of the Paulites as semianthropoid gomers and in this case Paul's question was both intended as a "gotcha" and poorly phrased, to boot - was aimed directly at the gray area between the two.

Given that we don't seem to, either as a nation or as We the People, have problems with killing "them" over "there" but do have qualms about extrajudicial murder of "us" "here"...what happens if one of "us" "here" might - might - turn out to be one of "them" in the same way "they" are eligible for a missile-o-gram from Uncle Sugar? Not taken in arms. Not planting a bomb. Not in active combat. But accused by some unnamed informer of being a "person(s) he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons?"

For all that we have beavered away at our own protections under the law since 2001 it has always seemed to me that there is and should be a simple bright line defining the fundamental relations between a citizen of the United States and the U.S. government and between peace and war.

And that is, if that citizen is not openly in arms against that government, is located where the agents of conventional law enforcement may apprehend that person, and has not been convicted in open court of treason or proved beyond a reasonable doubt to be a rebel or an agent of a power at war with the United States, then that citizen has not forfeited the protections of the law. And if they wish to do harm to that citizen then it is incumbent on the U.S. government and its agents to do everything in their power to do that harm as they are required to do by the Constitution and federal statute.

And, if Holder and his department believe this to be true, then the answer to the question Paul should have asked is simple; No. No, I do not have the authority to summarily execute or otherwise do extrajudicial harm to this person, regardless of what "extraordinary circumstances" exist.

Instead, what Holder appears to be doing is doubling down on the precedent of Korematsu (a precedent that his own department had previously determined to be based on official error); that in times of danger the U.S. government is free to act in contravention of its own law, regardless of the fragility of the evidence (or the lack of evidence), to harm its own citizens.

Our government has done great harm to us citizens in times of crisis; indeed, one of the reasons that wars and emergencies are greatly to be feared is that they afford great opportunity for frightened or ambitious men to do great harm to the rule of law. But in the main our government has, upon reflection, been willing to admit that such harm WAS harm. Our courts have ruled against those actions, and later administrations have disavowed them.

This opinion appears to, instead, insist on the right to do such harm.

And whether it is done with a missile or with a knife, I cannot find that reassuring.

(h/t to Pierce for the original article and the link to the Holder document)

Bearing Arms

The Newton Massacre has brought all the usual rhetorical suspects to our discussions on this subject over at MilPub and my friends' Jim and Lisa's blog Ranger Against War.

I've said quite a bit on the subject of the "right to keep and bear arms" against the right to not have some armed sonofabitch busting caps at you for no good reason at both places. But I wanted to take a moment here to clarify my position on this whole business.

There seems to be two main veins of argument against any sort of tightened regulation of firearms. Boiled down to their bones, they are 1) humans are awful and will do terrible things, so there's no point in trying to use firearms regulations to do anything about that, and 2) the "right to bear arms" is sacred and guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and any attempt to mess with said right is to commit grievous harm to the liberties of American citizens.

Before I move on to my own points let me address both of these, which I consider largely canards and excuses not to do something that the speakers find either inconvenient to themselves or intellectual distasteful rather than actually critical to the issue of reducing the toll of dead Americans.

Regarding the first point, yes; humans are fucking awful. They are also miraculous, delightful, irritating, ridiculous, and bizarre. Man was born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards says the narrator in the Book of Job and what was true for the Hebrews of the Old Testament is certainly true today.

This human tendency towards fucktardry is one of the reasons that human societies devised things like laws and rules in the first place. We know that people will cheat each other if possible, so we institute things like certified weights and measures so that your butcher will not short-weight your beefsteak or financial regulations so that your bankster will not steal from your 401K. We know that people will rape other people, will drive too fast and do all sorts of other nasty, irritating business if not constrained by rules.

So it seems at best rather louche to pretend that this human bastardy is a reason against, rather than for, devising ways to decrease the mechanical advantage of firearms provided to people in general. I may feel perfectly capable of driving 120 in the interstate - and I may well BE capable of doing just that - but to allow that the state of Oregon would have to allow that fucking idiot in Clackastan driving the clapped-out beater of a Chevy K-car. That's a good reason for keeping the speed limit down to 65; the lower, the safer for all of us.

As for the second, well, the "right to bear arms" is only a part of the phrase "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." To understand this phrase is to delve into the minds of the Framers and understand the conditions of the United States at the time of this writing.

The men who wrote the Bill of Rights had had their belliesfull of goddamn regular soldiers. The British government had taxed the colonies to pay for the troops that had fought the French and Indian War and had forced the colonial gentlemen to house and feed those regular troops - you'll notice that the Bill of Rights contains another entire Amendment, the Third, that prohibits "quartering" of troops by fiat - and then used those regulars to try and suppress the colonists when they rebelled. So the idea of a standing force of regulars was a hissing and a byword amongst the lead men of this new nation.

The notion was that the United States would be defended by a hardy force of volunteer militamen arising from the armed populace; tens of thousands of Cincinnati rallying to the Colors when the nation was in danger, bearing the arms that they kept. This way the nation would be both free of the danger of Praetorian treason and the expense of paying for arms and equipment of a standing army - a win-win for the impoverished country!

So the Second Amendment is directed specifically at "providing for the common defense". The arms that the People are not to be infringed from keeping and bearing were for the security of the free state; target shooting for pleasure, home defense, fighting off the zombie apocalypse?

Not so much.

So; can we agree that, first, humans are shit and that's a reason FOR, not against, letting them have all the rounds they can shoot and, second, that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution does NOT provide for unlimited private firearms possession but, rather, for the provision of an armed civilian military reserve with the implicit authority of the federal government to determine the nature of that armament in the same way it arms the regular military forces?

Well. Whether or not you agree I will continue.

So here's what I believe on this subject, and let me state for the record that this will be my final post on the subject; I will try and fully expound on what I believe here so we will not have reason to further address this here.

1. I don't think that there is ANY way to prevent people from killing other people. Homo homini lupus said Plautus in 195BC; "Man is a wolf to man". We are killers; with our native American genocide and the way we've applied - and are applying - our devastating military power overseas the United States certainly qualifies as one of the great killers of history. As individuals and collectively we have killed, and certainly will kill, our thousands and tens of thousands.

That, in my opinion, makes it a reason for, not argues against, making it more difficult for us to kill each other.

2. I believe that there are steps we should take on the social and medical fronts to make these massacres more difficult and less frequent. It should be simpler for troubled people to get serious mental health treatment. It should be simpler for people who know people who are troubled to get those people referred to treatment, and simpler for people who fall into the legal system and show signs of genuine mental trouble that looks dangerous to get treatment.

This will not prevent these nutter-shootings, but it might help.

3. But I also believe that we can take steps to prevent private individuals from turning up heavily armed in public spaces.

- Nobody needs to fire more than six rounds without reloading. Period. If you are a hunter and you cannot drop your buck in six rounds you are a sorry excuse for a hunter AND a menace to both wildlife and your fellow hunters.

This is a simple solution; starting tomorrow every magazine will be manufactured with a fixed six-round cutoff, and a program established to buy-back all unaltered magazines. Possession of an unaltered magazine will be a Class C felony punishable by a ginormous fine.

- Close the "gun-show" loophole, and stiffen background checks. Prohibit sales of firearms, ammunition, and magazines over the Internet. Period.

- If you purchase a firearm you will be required to purchase a locking safety device such as a gun safe and a trigger lock and required to use it when not actively firing.

- Purchase of a firearm will require successful completion of 8 hours of firearms training, to include safe storage, handling, and operation of your firearms, to include a practical exercise. If you cannot or will not successfully complete this training you cannot possess a firearm. This includes every individual who buys a new firearm. You say you're a fucking expert and know every facet and quirk of your weapon? Too fucking bad; age and knowledge are no guarantee that you won't walk around doing stupid shit like keeping a round under the hammer.

I would consider these a minimum.

I don't pretend that these measures will end nutter shootings. NOTHING will end the human delight in destroying other humans. But it will make it harder for the nutters.

The simple fact is that killing people with firearms is simple. A child can do it, and children have. And firearms that produce volumes of fire make this simplicity even simpler. Forcing the nutters to reload once or twice would at least give their victims a chance to escape, or to tackle the nutter.

I don't consider these regulations "infringing" on people's "rights". Financial regulations don't "infringe" on banker's rights to make bank and speed limits don't "infringe" on your right to drive. But they do put some sensible limits on the abilities of skeevy bastards to endanger your bank account and your car insurance premium and as such constitute a fairly sensible approach to limiting risk while still allowing human commerce and travel.

You could still "keep" and "bear" your arms. You'd just have to do it in a way that insures a bit more domestic tranquility and provides a touch more public safety.

And...in case you think I'm being drastic, you have no idea.

Frankly, I think that young American males are waaaaayyyy too groiny about autoloading weaponry and waaaayyyy to casual about the horrors of war. With the end of the draft there are far too many young men whose sole experience with soldiering and warfare is through the ridiculous lens of Call of Duty Black: Ops or some such video crap. As a society we have far too little understanding of the ugly realities of what weapons do and mean. I think that has a lot to do with the casual way we treat the secret wars we are fighting in Asia right now; we have no skin in the game.

If I had my way I'd draft every goddamn mother's son for a sixteen-week basic military training. And this would be as nasty as I could make it; grim, spartan, physically painful and stressful. The guys would fire and clean their weapons repeatedly under the nastiest conditions, fire them until they were sick of the sight of them, clean them until they hated the smell of Break-free. They would live in the mud and the cold, eat cold rations, and march until their legs came off. They would get as close to the worst conditions of soldiering that I could make them.

Because that was what cured me.

I went into the service like most other green kids, thinking that it would be cool to be the Lord of War. But spending hours with a green plastic issue toothbrush and a black bottle of Breakfree grinding carbon off the bolt after more hours hunkered down in a concrete culvert staring at plastic Russians in the misting rain and cursing the forward assist knocked the magic and the mystery out of semiautomatic fire.

Knowing how to handle a rifle safely and accurately is a skill, and one (in my estimation) worth knowing. But the grim reality that comes with that skill, and is implied every time you squeeze the trigger, is even more worth knowing, and I would gleefully beat that knowledge into the fat head of every wannabe Rambo that came through my BT company. I came by it the hard way. I would be happy to provide that wisdom free of the charge in blood and death.

And then...I'd send them on to two years of National Service.

Those who chose could go on to the uniformed services. The others could pick a sort of Civilian Conservation Corps, doing pick-and-shovel work on infrastructure projects, or a VISTA/Peace Corps sort of national or international assistance doing anything from teaching kids to read to drilling wells to deworming goats.

After two years of this hopefully that would return to American life a bit more experienced in the world, and a bit less eager to barge about knocking things over. Plus a bit more knowledgeable about the sort of other people out there, the ones that many young men never know about other than through the television news, as fables and nonsense, or...through the sights of a rifle.

But that's just my wild notion.

On the subject of firearms I have no hope that any of my ideas will get past the idle discussion stage. Whilst we have gleefully pissed away so many of our rights in the current nonsensical wars against "terror" and "drugs" we find a critical minority of our fellow citizens unwilling to even consider a check on our "right" to bear any sort and any number of firearms.

We torture and even kill our helpless prisoners, hide them in secret without even admitting their names, we consider secret snooping and spying normal and natural. We lionize those who send out our soldiers to invade nations that have no injured us while we prosecute those who reveal the crimes of those we have celebrated. We have given up huge portions of our rights to speedy and public trials, to freedom from imprisonment without due process of law, to a free press and free speech.

And yet, on the question of restricting the "right" of a lunatic to shoot more than six rounds at a go we are adamant; this shall not pass!

What the fuck are we thinking?

Update 12/23 p.m.: And just because people who are smarter and funnier than you are should always receive their due, I refer you to the blog Goblinbooks for the most incisive and funniest takedowns of the whole firearms-as-the-guarantee-of-liberty horsepuckey. Good stuff and you can say I said so.

Update 12/25: And here's Badtux the Firearms Penguin with a rather brilliant explanation of why removing the sort of handguns and rifles used in the Newton Massacre (and many of the other nutter-shootings) would have a vastly minimal effect on private possession and use of firearms. I have no doubt that this will have zero effect on the sort of person whose masturbatory fantasies "need" two or more AR-15 knockoffs. But I sure as hell wish that Congress would read it.

Friday Constitutional Crisis Blogging

What does it take?

We have an Administration that publicly asserts that its actions are above the law. This shouldn't be news, exactly. We've seen and heard this before.

What's sickening to me is that we, the People, now apparently lack either the capability or the willingness, or both, to BE sickened. That's fucking wrong.

This country was founded by people - let's face it, by men - who were so sickened by the arrogance, despotism and contempt of their sovereign that they we willing to risk their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor" to be rid of the royal pest. Have we - are we - so much less than they that today that we will suffer this wretched little man, this smirking, sneering, privileged patrician twerp, to undo in two piddling terms of office what the Founders fought and died to establish, and the hundreds of thousands who fought here died to preserve?

Do these words have no more import then the scribblings of a hoodlum on a bathroom wall:

"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

Jefferson famously said: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure." Our present leaders consider that bullshit will serve.

Why aren't we furious about that?

Update 5pm 9/20/07: Glenn Greenwald says it again, and better here.