Archive for 2013

PHILIP KLEIN: Why coverage of ‘right-wing’ violence irritates conservatives.

So, the reason why conservatives get irked when “right wing” is used in reference to major acts of violence — often without an iota of evidence to back it up — is that the term “right wing” is broadly applied by the media to the entire conservative movement. I don’t think “right-wing” Jennifer Rubin and Sheldon Adelson get pumped every April for Hilter’s birthday, that “right-wing think tanks” like the Heritage Foundation burst out the champagne on the Columbine anniversary, or that “right-wing rock star” Scott Walker is a big fan of the Oklahoma City bombing.

They want to give that impression, though, at least subliminally.

WASHINGTON POST/ABC NEWS POLL: Majority of Americans Say Having a Gun in the Home Makes It Safer. “Moreover, the trend favors the guns. In a 2000 Gallup poll, the numbers were flipped, with 51% believing guns in the home made them less safe, while only 35% took what’s now the majority view. For all the pouting and griping that Obama did after the Senate killed his gun bill, these numbers help explain what really happened.”

UPDATE: An excellent point from reader Stephen Cobbs: “Even more crucial than the topline 51% support for guns is that the support from white women is 51%. As an influential legal mind has pointed out, nothing that middle-class white women do can ever be illegal.”

GUN CONTROL: Obama Lost Because Harry Reid Feared Debate, Got Fancy:

Majority Leader Harry Reid was free to bring the deal struck by West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey to the floor for an up-or-down vote, and this background-checks amendment might have passed. It did convince 54 Senators, including four Republicans.

But under Senate rules, a simple majority vote would have opened the measure to up to 30 hours of debate, which would have meant inspecting the details. The White House demanded, and Mr. Reid agreed, that Congress should try to pass the amendment without such a debate.

Majority rules would have also opened the bill to pro-gun amendments that were likely to pass. That would have boxed Mr. Reid into the embarrassing spectacle of having to later scotch a final bill because it also contained provisions that the White House loathes. So Mr. Reid moved under “unanimous consent” to allow nine amendments, each with a 60-vote threshold. . . .

Manchin-Toomey was rushed together on a political timetable, and a thorough scrub would have revealed that its finer legal points aren’t as modest as liberals claim. Tellingly, the White House blew up earlier negotiations with Tom Coburn on background checks. The Oklahoma Republican favored more and better checks across secondary firearms markets like gun shows and online, but liberals insisted that federally licensed dealers had to keep records.

In other words, keeping guns away from dangerous or unstable people was less important than defeating the NRA.

How’d that work out for you, Barack?

UPDATE: Related: What Republicans Can Learn From The Gun Debate. “The president commands little loyalty in Congress and generates enormous antipathy. His model for governing — demonize the other side, campaign around the country, get the media in a tizzy — is remarkably ineffective. And most important, it matters what is in legislation and whether there is an alternative offered by the GOP.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Where Obama Went Wrong In The Gun Control Fight. “’They screwed up. This thing was lost in March.’ . . . Although major gun control groups rallied support for the bills, the movement certainly lacked the fervor of the Tea Party rallies of 2010.”

I think the big mistake was picking this fight at all. The only strong constituency for gun control is to be found among Democratic journalists and pundits. And even there it’s weaker than it used to be.

Plus this: “The debate on the senate floor wasn’t about anybody being afraid [to vote for something] — it was about people looking at proposals that don’t address the problem.”

MORE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes:

Don’t forget to mention that he doesn’t have enough clout even to swing gun-control legislation in his home state of Illinois where Democrats enjoy a super-majority in the legislature. Recent legislation on control went down in a humiliating defeat an order of magnitude worse than the Senate debacle.

You would think that knowledge of his home state would inform his political judgment. Make of that what you will.

Well, the Illinois thing surprised me. But then, I didn’t spend 8 years in the Illinois State Senate.

JAMES TARANTO: Fascism by the Numbers: The thuggish majoritarianism of the Obama-era left.

What is unreasonable is the impulse to blame mainstream conservatives, including the Tea Party, a diffuse mass movement that has never been linked to any violence. Never forget that after the Tucson massacre of 2011, the New York Times editorialized that “it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible”–even though it was already known that the killer had no political motive.

What the hope-they’re-white crowd really wishes for is a reason to treat their domestic political adversaries as enemies of the state.

That’s hard to do in a democratic republic, especially one that is closely divided between right and left, as evidenced by the swings in election results between 2004 and 2006, 2008 and 2010 and 2010 and 2012–not to mention that 2012 re-elected both a Democratic president and a Republican House.

In an effort to overcome this close division, the left has resorted to a kind of thuggish majoritarian rhetoric in which a putative minority is demonized in the hope of uniting the majority against it. The most well-known example is the Occupy Wall Street effort, which made a scapegoat of “the 1%” in the hope of unifying 99% of the population against it. Another example is “white males,” a minority by definition, whose demonization is supposed to unite women and all other ethnic groups.

In his outburst of rage after gun-control legislation died in the Senate Wednesday, President Obama tried a similar gambit.

A fish rots from the head.

THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO PRE-ORDERED THE INSTA-WIFE’S BOOK. It stayed in the top 100 pretty much all day today, after peaking at #73 last night. Not bad for a book that won’t be out until June.

SLAPP LAWSUIT AGAINST PATTERICO dismissed.

I HOPE SOME TEA PARTIERS SHOW UP: Obama’s Political Army Targets Sen. Ted Cruz’s Office for Direct Protest. It’s tomorrow at 11:30, in Dallas.

They’re really afraid of him, aren’t they? But reminding Texans that he’s anti-gun-control probably won’t do him any harm. Mostly, it indicates just how out-of-touch the Obamites are on this issue.

IN LIGHT OF THIS WEEK’S EVENTS, a post from over a decade ago on Ares vs. Athena. More metis please.