Griper Blade: New NRA Ad Suggests President's Family Shouldn't Get Secret Service Protection

Josh Marshall looks at the NRA's latest attack ad against President Obama and calls the organization "a disease on the body politic." It's a good call. If you want to get more specific, then my diagnosis is leprosy -- movie leprosy that is -- a sort of living rot that destroys the body politic with oozing, festering wounds like the one above.

"There are so many vile things about this ad. But one thing to note is the ad is really only designed to appeal to people who have a deep — really deep — animosity toward the President," he writes. "The sort of people who don’t think he and his daughters should be in the White House and wish him the sort of ill citizens should never wish upon a freely elected head of state."

And that's the key to everything here. Instead of asking, as the NRA's ad does, whether the President's children are more important than yours, ask whether the President's family has received more death threats than yours. Answer: an easy yes. The hypocrisy is not the President's, the hypocrisy is the NRA's. Understanding this fact means understanding that the president's family is under constant threat because of rightwing demagogues like the idiot or committee of idiots who wrote this ad -- people who spend all of their time whipping up a frenzy against Barack Obama in daily sessions of Two Minutes Hate. There's your hypocrisy. The lefty site DailyKos recently reported on the massive amount of threats this president and his family have received, which Gawker helpfully condenses:


According to a super depressing report linked from The Daily Kos, the Secret Service doesn't even tell the President about the threats on his life out of concern that knowing the precise level of crazy out there would distract him from all the important Presidenting he has to do.

A dubious-looking petition site claims Obama has received more death threats than any other President, and while the head of the Secret Service says the organization doesn't comment on the exact number of threats that face the head of the executive branch, multiple news reports have characterized the number of threats against Obama as "overwhelming" and "unprecedented."

But the threats haven't stopped at Barack; in 2009, a woman who knew the Obamas' Hawaii vacation itinerary and threatened to "blow away" the First Lady was arrested a mile from where the First Family was staying. Others have threatened the Obama girls, Sasha and Malia.


Here's an example -- from a mere two days ago.


[Daily Mail:]

The Secret Service arrested a registered sex offender in Michigan after he allegedly made a racist death threat against President Barack Obama and threatened to blow up the FCC.

James Allen Myers, 37, called the offices of the National Geographic and the Federal Communications Commission and threatened the president because he was outraged by the 'filthy sex and perversion' that was allowed on television, according to federal charges filed against him on Thursday.

He allegedly called Obama a racial slur and said: 'I'm gonna hang our... president from a tree outside the White House with a burning cross and a swastika on the lawn.'


So, does the President and his family need more protection than the average person? I'm going to go ahead and answer yes. The NRA can take their offensive, idiotic ad and jam it.

And really, do they expect anyone but the already chumpish gun nuts who follow them to be persuaded by this argument? Apparently not. And apparently they missed the last election -- the base isn't enough to create majority opinion. Who doesn't think the President needs security? What does the NRA think they'll be able to accomplish with this crap? Polling shows their favorability is crashing -- and BS like this is a big reason why.

We may not need to cure this disease. We may be watching it burn itself out in one last, frantic fever dream.

-Wisco

The NRA's Pro-Assassination Argument

According to George Mason University Historian Christopher Hamner, John Wilkes Booth was very clear on his reason for assassinating President Abraham Lincoln. Booth, considering himself a southern patriot, had plotted elaborate plans to kidnap the president, most of which were completely unrealistic fantasies; one "involved capturing Lincoln in his box at Ford’s Theater and lowering the president to the stage with ropes," Hamner writes. But it wasn't until he'd heard a speech by Lincoln that he settled on the easier and more realistic scheme of killing the president. The war was all but over, the confederacy had clearly lost, and Lincoln was looking ahead toward the future.


...Lincoln’s speech that evening outlined some of his ideas about reconstructing the nation and bringing the defeated Confederate states back into the Union. Lincoln also indicated a wish to extend the franchise to some African-Americans—at the very least, those who had fought in the Union ranks during the war—and expressed a desire that the southern states would extend the vote to literate blacks, as well. Booth stood in the audience for the speech, and this notion seems to have amplified his rage at Lincoln. “That means nigger citizenship,” he told Lewis Powell, one of his band of conspirators. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”


And so, on the night of April 14, 1865, a shot rang out in Ford's Theater, accompanied by the slogan, "Sic semper tyrannus!" -- "Thus always to tyrants."

The reason I bring this up is because the word "tyranny" is being thrown around a lot by demagogues and the gullible types who hang on their every word. Most recently, it's come up in the debate over limits on guns. Gun nuts argue that the Second Amendment is some sort of inoculation against tyranny, so it pays to ask: who gets to decide who's a tyrant?

Imagine if the Second Amendment really meant what the gun nuts say it means. As the Constitution is written, the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of constitutionality. In their wisdom, the founders envisioned of the finest legal minds in the nation, assembled in one high court, tasked with untangling the intricacies of law and justice, in a deliberative, calm, and logical manner, through rational discourse and reasoned advocacy.

And, if that didn't work, constitutionality would then be decided by an angry person with a gun -- because angry people with guns historically have been such stellar decision-makers. If things don't turn out your way politically, it's your right as an American to start blastin'. By the NRA's version of the Second Amendment, Booth's cry of "Sic semper tyrannis!" was all the legal justification he needed. Lincoln was talking about giving African-Americans the vote, Booth thought that was tyranny, and he used his Second Amendment freedoms to put a bullet in the president's brain -- liberty in action! By this interpretation of the Second Amendment, there is no constitutional check on the Assassin's Veto. Where the ballot fails, the bullet rules. Because that's freedom -- the ability to vote, then overturn that vote through a tantrum of armed thuggery if the vote doesn't turn out the way you'd hoped.

While we're at it, wasn't the entire Civil War the gun nut's version of the Second Amendment in action? The south joined in rebellion against the union, because freeing people was tyranny and keeping slaves was liberty. Right? Once again, we see the genius-level decision-making skills of angry people with guns -- they set the south on a course that still has it leading the nation in poverty.

By the way, don't try that "it was about states' rights" dodge with me. It was states' rights to do what? Keep slaves, that's what. It was about slavery -- any other take is laughable revisionism, so keep it to yourself.

The only people who could possibly believe that the Second Amendment means the right to the Assassin's Veto are angry people with guns. Because, as I've pretty well established here, angry people with guns are idiots. As are people obsessed with imagined tyrants. Doubt that? Let's look at a few things that are "tyranny":

Health care.
Contraceptive coverage.
Abortion.
Taxes.
Marriage equality.
Environmental protection.
Digital television.
Vaccinations.
The secret UFO conspiracy.
The "oppression" of Christians by Jews.
Fluoridated water.
Anti-smoking laws.

No, the Second Amendment does not say that you get to start shooting people because your analog TV antenna doesn't work anymore, because you can't smoke in a restaurant, or because a couple of guys just sent you an invitation to their wedding. It's not a bulwark against tyrants, because you don't get to decide who is or isn't a tyrant. That was no defense for Booth and it would be no defense for you. The NRA's argument is an argument for legalized terrorism.

Somehow, I doubt that's what the founders had in mind.

-Wisco

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An Assault Weapons Ban, Piece By Piece

Let's get one thing clear immediately, the "assault weapon" classification is not some BS term meant to scare people away from certain guns. When someone tells you that the only differences between an assault rifle and a regular rifle are cosmetic, they're lying. The adaptations and customizations made to an assault weapon serve a purpose and that purpose is to make it easier to fire a lot of bullets in a short amount of time. To say there's no difference between a hunting rifle and an AR-15 is the same as saying there's no difference between a car off the dealer's lot and a street rod -- they look different because they are different.

There's a longer explanation here. But the shortest explanation is just as convincing: a "tricked out" AR-15 costs $1,000 at WalMart. Meanwhile, a regular deer rifle will cost you about 500 to 600 bucks. An example is here. It's very similar to a gun I used to use when I hunted deer. Out of 24 reviews at the site, 20 give this 500 dollar rifle five stars. It's not some cheap piece of junk. It's a perfectly good sportsman's rifle, used by hunters around the world.

Now, who in their right mind would spend twice as much for something that they know is different only in appearance? A gun is a tool. And anyone who pays that much more for a tool because they like the way it looks is a chump. There is obviously a difference and the people who love these weapons know it. When they say they "just look scary," they lie. And one person who knows this is Newton Police Chief Michael Kehoe.


[Raw Story:]

It’s been one month since the mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School and Newtown Police Chief Michael Kehoe says it’s time for the White House to ban military-style assault weapons, restrict high-capacity magazines and close loopholes in the background check system.

In an interview with NBC’s Michael Isikoff, Kehoe recalled that he was one of the first to respond to the December elementary school massacre and entered the school to find “the eerie silence in the hallways, the smell of burnt gunpowder and then the bodies of dead children on the floor of the classrooms.”

“I was sickened, I was angry,” Kehoe explained. “It was something I never could have imagined could have happened in any school in Newtown.”


"Ban assault weapons," Kehoe says. "Restrict those magazines that have so many bullets in them, shore up any loopholes in our criminal background checks... We never like to think we’re going to be outgunned in any situation we’re dealing with. We do a good job of securing dynamite in our society... [Assault rifles] are another form of dynamite... I think they should ban them."

The problem, of course, is that the House of Representatives will probably never pass an all-out assault weapons ban. But this is not the big problem that you might think. Already, cracks are showing in the GOP's opposition to banning anything even remotely gun-related. Specifically, members are saying that they won't rule out bans on high-capacity magazines -- and high-capacity magazines or "banana clips" are one hallmark of an assault weapon.

An assault weapon is a weapon with a specific group of features. If we can't outlaw them all at once, we can shut them down one by one. None of them would stand up to public scrutiny very well (i.e., who needs a grenade launcher or a bayonet mount?).

If we have to take on assault weapons piece by piece, then that's what we should do. Because we can't let these weapons go unchecked. Since the original assault weapons ban expired in 2004, mass killings have risen. In fact, statistician Sam Wang calls the period during the ban "peaceful by US standards." Instances fell during the period, then rose again after the ban expired. Wang concludes that "renewing the assault weapon ban as a route to pre-2005 conditions seems like a rational response to today's horrific events." Everything you've been told about the ban from gun nuts is wrong: it made a difference, crime didn't rise because people were disarmed, and -- most importantly -- Joseph Adolph Hitlerstalin didn't rise up and throw everyone into death camps. If you're old enough, you probably remember never living in a Hitlerstalin death camp.

We can get assault weapon ban back again, just maybe not all at once. We can have something approaching sane gun laws in the US, it just may take more time than we'd like. Not passing an assault weapons ban wouldn't be an end, it would be the beginning of a much longer alternative approach.

-Wisco

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The NRA Exists to Sell Guns and Ammo. Period

Yesterday, Public Policy Poll released numbers showing that the National Rifle Association's favorability had slipped into negative territory. It was close -- 42% positive vs. 45% negative -- but PPP reported that this represented a "10 point net decline in the NRA's favorability" compared to their numbers before NRA President Wayne LaPierre's disastrous press conference. You remember that press conference, the one where he revealed he's insane. The issue is dragging House Republicans' numbers down as well.

What the NRA desperately needs is to change their image from a collection of trigger-happy psychopaths with a gun fetish -- which is what they act like -- to an organization of levelheaded protectors of freedom -- which is what they pretend to be. The problem is that they apparently have absolutely no idea what the hell "levelheaded" looks like. As a result, they stage PR nightmares like this one yesterday, reported by NPR:


Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and her husband, Mark Kelly, have formed a political action committee to support prevention of gun violence. The announcement came Tuesday, the second anniversary of the mass shooting in Tucson that left six dead and wounded 13, including Giffords.

Churches and fire stations around the city rang bells in memory of the victims and in commemoration of other mass shootings since Tucson.

The Tucson Police Department also held a gun buyback Tuesday. Police want to destroy the 206 firearms turned in to them. But the National Rifle Association says that would violate Arizona law.


The buyback is funded not with city or state money, but with private funds. Sponsored by the grocery chain Safeway, people turning in guns receive a $50 gift card for the store. Police officers were needed merely to check the guns "to make sure they hadn't been stolen or used in a crime" and, I suppose, as gun safety experts to make sure the guns were empty and harmless.

Initially, I found it hard to imagine why the NRA would care about this -- the people turning in these guns clearly don't want them, so no one's "rights" were being abridged -- and why they decided this would be an excellent fight to pick, considering the nose dive the organization is in in terms of public opinion.

Then I remembered that the NRA is a trade group devoted to selling as many guns and as much ammo as possible. If those guns are sitting in someone's attic, no one makes money off them. If they're destroyed in a gun buyback, ditto. But if the government sells them, that's a different story. The buyers will want bullets. Ka-ching.

I can't stress enough that the NRA is not a gun rights organization, they're a gun sales organization. When Wayne LaPierre demanded in that press conference that the government put armed guards in every school in America, what he was really doing was demanding that the United States government buy a buttload of guns and ammo. At no time will the NRA ever suggest a policy that doesn't increase the sale of guns and/or ammunition. Concealed carry sells guns. "Stand your ground" laws sell guns and actually encourage shooting -- which sells ammo. When LaPierre said, "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," he wasn't making a logical argument so much as he was making a sales pitch. He was envisioning a nation where every gun is countered by a second gun -- i.e., a nation with twice as many firearms as there are now. And, since America is plagued with an insane amount of guns already, that would be a bonanza for arms merchants.

And that's why I refer to the NRA as the blood lobby. They don't care about public safety and they only care about people's rights when it serves to sell more guns and more ammunition. Why defend ownership of a 30-round clip no one in their right mind wants or needs? Because it takes thirty bullets to fill it, instead of six or eight. Duh.

But it looks like the gun sellers' amoral greed has finally gotten the best of them. Public opinion is in a tailspin and they're still pulling stupid maneuvers like suing over gun buybacks. They could possibly pull themselves out of this hole, but they're too busy digging for gold down there to find the time.

-Wisco

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Meet the Newtown Truthers

I'm a little stuck as to how to start this thing, so I'll just throw the whole bunch of crazy at you right off the bat:


[Sun Sentinel, Florida:]

A communication professor known for conspiracy theories has stirred controversy at Florida Atlantic University with claims that last month's Newtown, Conn., school shootings did not happen as reported — or may not have happened at all.

Moreover, James Tracy asserts in radio interviews and on his memoryholeblog.com. that trained "crisis actors" may have been employed by the Obama administration in an effort to shape public opinion in favor of the event's true purpose: gun control.

"As documents relating to the Sandy Hook shooting continue to be assessed and interpreted by independent researchers, there is a growing awareness that the media coverage of the massacre of 26 children and adults was intended primarily for public consumption to further larger political ends," writes Tracy, a tenured associate professor of media history at FAU and a former union leader.

In another post, he says, "While it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place — at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation's news media have described."


You can understand why I'm so flabbergasted. I suppose it's to be expected -- the ability of some to deny obvious reality is proven again and again to be endless. The University has disavowed Tracy's views, but apparently he's still got a job teaching. In fact, he's teaching exactly this sort of lunacy to his students. His class is called "Culture of Conspiracy."

That's disturbing enough. But what's more disturbing is online poll posted with the story. It asks, "Does FAU prof James Tracy make the case that last month's Sandy Hook school shootings may not have been the massacre as reported?" Here are the results, as they appeared when I visited at 9:00 am central:


Yes, it says the results aren't scientific right there on the graphic, but still... WTF?

Over at No More Mister Nice Blog, Steve M. notes that this whole conspiracy theory seems amazingly well fleshed-out.


And I know I ought to resist nutpicking, but I'm struck not so much by the percentage of commenters who think the professor is on to something (not quite half in the Fox thread, an apparent majority in the Sun-Sentinel thread), but by how well developed Newtown trutherism is already...


In other words, all these conspiracy nuts seem to be on the same page. Steve would like a pollster to see how widespread this "Newtown trutherism" actually is -- so would I.

But I wanted to know where this is coming from. Do conspiracy theorists' minds all just work alike or is all this coming from some source I'm unaware of? It turns out, it's the latter.


[Talking Points Memo:]

Like many traumatic national events, the Newtown shooting has already spawned its share of wild conspiracy theories that draw in everything from British finance to the Hunger Games.

A false rumor spreading rapidly on fringe sites like Infowars and assorted Ron Paul messageboards ties the school murders to an existing hoax surrounding the Aurora, Colo. movie theater shooting. After that attack, conspiracy theorists fixated on the accused shooter’s father, Robert Holmes, pointing to media reports that he worked as an anti-fraud scientist for credit scoring company FICO.


Add to those, the white supremacist site Stormfront.org, where a discussion of Tracy's theorizing was started on the message board back in December. I won't link to it, because I refuse to drive traffic there. If you absolutely need proof, google "Evidence of Newtown Crime Scene site:stormfront.org." Otherwise, just take my word for it.

And that's what strikes me; how the paranoid ravings of the Tea Party right so often mirror the paranoid ravings of the racist right. For people who claim not to be racist, they sure share a lot of ideas with racists. In fact, these parallels are so often the case that it's impossible to believe there isn't some crossover here -- maybe a lot. At the very least, it's proof positive that Tea Party chunkheads are exactly as gullible as neo-nazi chunkheads.

It would be interesting to see how many Republican voters believe this newest conspiracy theory. After all, we know an astounding percentage of them are birthers, we know they were mostly poll truthers, and nearly half believe that Obama stole the 2012 election -- why wouldn't they be Newtown truthers?

-Wisco