Black Lives Matter

Recently, a young black woman who worked at a food concession in a Chicago zoo lost her job after grousing on Facebook about “rude-ass white people.” What the woman doesn’t fully grasp is that rude is rude, and there’s no reason to specify the race of the offenders. It’s true that most of her customers were white, but it’s also true that if most of them had been black, she would experience rude behavior from about the same percentage of them. In short, mentioning race here added nothing to the validity of her complaint. Saying “rude people” as opposed to “rude white people” would have served her purpose just as well.

To which black folks across America would be fully justified in responding: “Welcome to my world.” In that world, race is always mentioned by white people, whether or not it has anything to with anything, even in the most benign of contexts:

“I ran out of gas and this black guy stopped and gave me a lift.”

“There was a huge black woman in front of me in line.”

“A bunch of black teenagers came into the grocery store.”

“An old black gentleman was having trouble getting out of his car.”

In none of these statements does specifying the race of the actor affect what is being communicated. And, importantly, in none of them would race be specified if the actors were white. No white person would say “a white guy stopped and gave me a lift,” or “a huge white woman in front of me...” And so on.

The days of the most egregious and obvious race-based affronts to justice and morality, as typified by Jim Crow laws and customs, are long gone -- laws and customs that openly segregated public facilities of every kind, right down to the minutiae of drinking fountains; customs that, for example, forbade professional black athletes from eating in the same restaurants and sleeping in the same hotels as their white teammates; laws/customs that kept white and black kids from going to school together, or that systematically kept blacks out of most colleges and all the professions. We’re past all that, and many young people are aghast when they learn that such an era ever existed. As condescending as it may sound, it is fair to say that many young black people – with that era as a backdrop – don’t realize how good they have it.

That is not to say they have it good. The residue of Jim Crow that they’re left with is a more pernicious and subtle form of racism that is all the more infuriating to blacks because of white blindness to it. The consensus among most white people regarding the goings-on in Ferguson, for example, was that the protests were, at the very least, an over-reaction; that the sleights and injustices about which so much anger was expressed were overstated or even imaginary; that the protesters, while having some legitimate grievances, would be better off if they’d stop complaining and get on with their lives. In short, most of my white friends and acquaintances were unable to empathize. This, despite the virtual certainty, in my opinion, that these people, being intelligent folks with healthy egos, would be among the most virulently militant about the subtle and not-so-subtle indignities they would routinely experience if their faces were to turn black. My guess is they wouldn’t be so dismissive of the anger and frustration felt by a grown man or woman who gets pushed around -- figuratively and sometimes literally – and treated like a recalcitrant child, by a young white policeman.

Which brings us to “black lives matter,” a slogan and sentiment that many white reactionaries now characterize as an aggressively racist “movement” aimed at raising up blacks and putting down whites – a sort of latter-day Black Panthers thing. Their counter-slogan – which they believe to be a piquantly effective one – is “all lives matter.” The problem with that: the fact that all lives matter has never been in question. That black lives matter has been – in a thousand ways both subtle and overt – and is in need of re-affirmation in a way that the importance and value of lives in general is not. That all lives matter is a given. That black lives matter isn’t. People justifiably feel the need to re-affirm that blacks, just like whites, are individuals with strengths and weaknesses, hopes and fears, goals and aspirations. They are – like whites – short and tall, meek and bold, smart and dumb, athletic and ungainly, wise and foolish, industrious and lazy, pretty and ugly, strong and weak. They are not interchangeable. Racial stereotyping renders them interchangeable, and says, in effect, that their individual lives don’t matter. And that’s what the black lives matter idea is pushing back against.

Black Lives Matter should not be understood as a threat, although it will undoubtedly be employed in an aggressive way here and there, but as a plea for understanding and compassion and a reminder that even in this era of comparative racial enlightenment, a subset of the population struggles daily with indignities that range from subtle put-downs to flagrant injustices because of the color of their skin. Advice for white people: (1) Don’t indulge in racial stereotyping, even when it’s thought to be benign; (2) Have empathy for those who face it every day of their lives.

Political Correctness

It has become a favorite dodge of some folks to characterize themselves as victims of political correctness when they are called out for the mean-spirited, dumb, or simply wrong things they say, and to characterize themselves as forthright and courageous for saying utterly mindless things in defiance of this PC trend.  In the good old days before political correctness took hold, they seem to be saying, a person could, for example, insult great swaths of society -- blacks, Jews. women, etc. -- openly and without remorse or reprisal.  That was before people got so persnickety about this stuff.

War on Christmas

“Nation’s Oppressed Christians Huddle Underground To Light Single Shriveled Christmas Shrub”

That’s a headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion, taking dead aim at the incessant whining of a segment of the body politic about how put upon they are by secularism, the “mainstream media,” non-Christians of various persuasions, and their all-time favorite bugaboo, political correctness. By way of reassuring these folks during this holiday (Christmas) season, I offer up the following: Between now and December 25th the words “Merry Christmas” will be spoken 1 bazillion times (that’s just a round number, of course). Hundreds of millions of person-hours will be spent in churches of various denominations, observing the “true meaning” of Christmas. There will be as many nativity scenes around town as there were in 1953; Christmas trees will be put up all across the land. Millions upon millions of Christmas presents will be opened. Glasses will be raised, lights will be strung, lavish meals will be eaten, movie classics will be watched, many of which have the word “Christmas” in their titles, like “A Christmas Carol,” “A Christmas Story,” and “White Christmas,” and Christmas music will be played and sung to distraction.  All of this, and more, will be done out in the open without any interference (or criticism) from anybody. Hello, war-on-Christmas worriers: There is no war on Christmas. If you wish to participate, no one is stopping you. If other people don’t wish to participate, that’s none of your beeswax.

What Trumpists really want

Normal people are mystified by the way Donald Trump can repeatedly say bizarre, even irrational things – he witnessed something that didn’t happen, he thinks members of one religion should be kept out of the country -- and his poll numbers go up. It’s as if a light bulb goes on over the heads of these newest Trump converts: “Wow. I knew he was a blowhard and a bigot, but now I see he’s also delusional. I’m voting for him!” Unexplainable, seemingly. But, of course, what his people see in him isn’t about any of that. It’s about his promise to “make America great again.” And by “great” what his mostly older white male followers understand him to mean is a time when people who looked like them had all the good jobs; when there weren’t all these weird non-Christian religions around; when blacks, Hispanics, and women knew their place; when political correctness didn’t prohibit decent white folks from putting down racial and ethnic minorities. You just know – because he is unable to restrain himself – that Jews will be his next target, as he explains, using “just common sense,” that they control the media, Hollywood, and the banks. This is a turn of events that in a sane world would bring his candidacy crashing to earth in a ball of fire. But it will probably just end up recruiting a whole new wing of the slack-jawed to his bandwagon. Meanwhile, it’s worth remembering that the poll numbers Trump is garnering can be a little bit misleading. Recently, those numbers showed he had 35 percent of Republican primary voters in his corner. But Republican primary voters were just 38 percent of the people interviewed in the New York Times/CBS polling. Thirty-five percent of 38 percent is about 13 percent of the electorate.

Is it terrorism? Does it matter?

A recent trend is for members of one segment of the political spectrum to accuse others of bowing to political correctness by refusing to identify terrorism as terrorism. The thought is that this refusal stems from the fear of offending members of a religious minority. But it’s important to understand the actual meaning of terrorism. This definition comes from the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies:

“Terrorism is defined as political violence in an asymmetrical conflict that is designed to induce terror and psychic fear (sometimes indiscriminate) through the violent victimization and destruction of noncombatant targets (sometimes iconic symbols). Such acts are meant to send a message from an illicit clandestine organization. The purpose of terrorism is to exploit the media in order to achieve maximum attainable publicity as an amplifying force multiplier in order to influence the targeted audience(s) in order to reach short- and midterm political goals and/or desired long-term end states.”

In other words, terrorism needs to be understood as a tactic for changing the internal politics of a country, or even conquering that country, when it’s impossible to do so by more conventional means. Not every murderous act qualifies. But for the folks who routinely call others out for refusing to call a spade a spade, the only qualification necessary is that the act be committed by a Muslim. If the act is committed by a Muslim, it’s a terrorist act. If it’s committed by a non-Muslim, it’s something else.

To the folks who say gun laws are of no use in preventing “terrorist” attacks: When a member of the unhinged stockpiles guns and thousands of bullets and uses those things to kill and injure scores of innocent people – and anyone who would do that is a member in good standing -- their reasons don’t matter. Pick one: They heard voices through their tin foil hats; they’ve pledged allegiance to the grand wazier of ISIS; they hate all members of the you-name-it minority group; they like the smell of cordite in the morning. These peoples’ thought processes are off the rails, whether or not their acts are defined as terrorism. They can’t be allowed to have guns. There’s every reason to believe that if procuring an arsenal was more difficult and involved than it is, the mad plan of the San Bernardino murderers would have been abandoned or sniffed out in advance.













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Guns, Part 4: Conclusion

From an organization called the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence we get these statistics:

In 2010, guns took the lives of 31,076 Americans in homicides, suicides and unintentional shootings.  This is the equivalent of more than 85 deaths each day and more than three deaths each hour. 73,505 Americans were treated in hospital emergency departments for non-fatal gunshot wounds.2Firearms were the third-leading cause of injury-related deaths nationwide, following poisoning and motor vehicle accidents.3Between 1955 and 1975, the Vietnam War killed over 58,000 American soldiers – less than the number of civilians killed with guns in the U.S. in an average two-year period.4In the first seven years of the U.S.-Iraq War, over 4,400 American soldiers were killed. Almost as many civilians are killed with guns in the U.S., however, every seven weeks.5

These numbers are (one would hope) eye-opening.  And distressing.  They can’t be explained away by bumper-sticker sloganeering, as in “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” (Unless there are dramatically more of the types of people who kill people in the U.S. than there are in, say, Canada, the UK, France, or Germany.)  The problem of firearm injuries and deaths is clearly related to the immense number of guns out there and their relatively easy accessibility.  That’s not the only reason for the ridiculously high injury/death rate – sure, people do kill people – but it seems certain that the rate would be reduced, perhaps dramatically, if it weren’t so easy for people who kill (and injure) people, accidentally or on purpose, to get guns.

A big part of the problem is what has come to be known as the “gun culture” – a disturbingly large subset of the population that has a weird fascination with these implements – a fascination that borders on love or even worship, and one that appears to be borne of equal parts paranoia and fantasy:  We are always in mortal danger and we will be the hero of any scenario that develops when that danger manifests itself.

And so, according to reliable statistics, there are 88 guns for every 100 people in the U.S. The result of the ubiquitousness of these instruments whose primary reason for existence is destruction: Huge numbers of injuries and deaths that have nothing to do with protecting oneself or one’s loved ones from predators.

Let us be the first to acknowledge, however, that this is a complicated, multi-faceted problem for which there are no obvious (and/or easy) solutions.  The banning of guns in private hands, something that’s advocated by a sizeable number of presumably well-intentioned people, is a non-starter. – politically impossible, constitutionally questionable, and probably unnecessary.  Better to narrow the focus to steps that can actually be taken and that can be expected to significantly ameliorate if not fully solve the problem.

• Find a way to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.  This is not a solution for all the different ways people get killed or hurt by gunshot – suicide, accident, street crime, gang activity, etc. – but it would put a dent in one of the most appalling: the slaughter of innocent people, en masse or otherwise, by people with unhinged thought processes and revenge fantasies.

• Close the loopholes in the gun laws we do have, by which buyers and sellers can avoid background-check requirements by way of private and gun show transactions.

• Make guns safer – devise and employ technology that makes it impossible to discharge a firearm accidentally.

• Abatement of gun crime by swift and severe punishment.  This may include creation of a special docket in the courts dedicated to weapons offenses -- specified judges handling bail, trial, sentencing, and supervision of offenders. Proposed legislation to create such a docket has called for such measures as minimum cash bonds of up to $50,000, and swift and meaningful consequences for people who violate probation for weapons offenses. 

Responsible members of the National Rifle Association should disavow the leadership of this organization and publicly repudiate its role as lobby and mouthpiece for gun and ammunition manufacturers. 

People who own hand guns for protection should carefully think through the need they perceive for that protection and ask themselves if theft of their gun and/or its use in an accidental death or injury is more likely than the use they imagine for it; viz., thwarting an assault.  Private gun ownership is an important contributor to the tens of thousands of annual gun deaths and injuries.  Fans of concealed carry have their own particular danger-and-fantasy demons to deal with.  Fans of open-carry cannot be reasoned with.  Fans of the need to have and use guns to defend themselves (and the country) from their own government and/or from any number of other shadowy conspiracies can’t be reasoned with either, and need to be carefully monitored.  It appears they are mostly talk, paranoia, and swagger, but they  have the potential to be every bit as dangerous to the homeland as foreign terrorists.

As for the constitutional right to bear arms, I will leave it to legal scholars to parse out and argue over the wording of the 2^nd amendment and the meaning(s) that wording was intended to convey, and suggest only this:  The motives of gun-enthusiasts who wrap themselves in the flag and position themselves as courageous defenders of the constitution are suspect.  Those folks would be more persuasive on this point if they were as passionate (and knowledgeable) about other parts of the constitution as they are about the gun part.

Guns, Part 3: Government Conspiracies

In Part 2 of this multi-part discussion of guns, the focus was on the fantasy component of hand gun ownership and concealed carry:  People envision using their guns -- and rationalize the keeping of guns -- to defend themselves and their loved ones in circumstances that almost never occur in real life. The cost of the widespread nurturing of this fantasy is injuries and deaths by gunshot – many thousands a year -- that are largely unintended.  So widespread gun ownership – an “armed citizenry” – instead of deterring criminals as its proponents argue will be the result, has the real-world effect of increasing exponentially the number of opportunities for tragic gun-related accidents.

Another corner of gun fantasyland altogether – one that makes a significant contribution to the culture of gun worship and the proliferation of guns in America -- is typified by the reaction from a tiny but vocal minority to something called Operation Jade Helm.  Jade Helm was a thing that came and went this past summer without most Americans being aware of its existence let alone bringing about the gun-confiscation and martial law apocalypse that wing-nuts in Texas and elsewhere had said was its hidden purpose.  In fact, Jade Helm was the name of a seven-state Army command and control mission – an otherwise obscure military training exercise – that right wing conspiracy theorists said was part of a plan to impose martial law and “population control.” Others said it was a plan on the part of the federal government to “invade Texas.” There was some stockpiling of guns and ammunition, at least one quasi-militia was formed to keep track of Jade Helm troop movements, and, incredibly (and shamelessly) the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, ordered the state’s national guard to keep an eye on things – to make sure that the U.S. Army wasn’t, you know, invading Texas. Also promising to look into the matter, thereby giving some patina of credibility to the whole ridiculous theory, were members in good standing of the very government supposedly employing Jade Helm to ruin our lives, including U.S. Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Texas) and Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. A particularly interesting and remarkably delusional (even in this world, where delusion is the stock in trade) component of the theory was that closed Wal Mart stores were to be used as FEMA detention centers, or as places for the military to stockpile supplies for Chinese troops who would be arriving to disarm Americans. 

For this corner of fantasyland, the one whose inhabitants believe the government plans to take away their guns, impose martial law, and take down the democracy, and that they are going to heroically fend it off with their six guns, I would offer this from turn-of-the-century commentator and contrarian H.L. Mencken:  “Communism, like all religions, consists mainly of prophesy.”  Replace “communism” with “gun-government conspiracy” and you pretty much have it.  The government never actually does this thing.  It is always going to do it.  Thus the great takeover is repeatedly and forever pushed into next week, next year, or some dystopian future.  Nor do they worry too much about the logistics of such a massive nationwide undertaking.  Would the U.S. Army participate in this?  The FBI?  Local police?  Or is there a secret (but necessarily gigantic) gun-confiscation force (possibly being housed and trained in the basements of closed-down Walmarts) that is poised to start knocking down doors, confiscating guns, and imprisoning citizens – quite an undertaking in that it would require billions of dollars, many years, and tens of thousands of people willing to participate in such a thing and  able to keep quiet about it until launch day. Gun conspiracy and perpetual danger religions, like all religions, consist mainly of prophesy.  Thus the true believers never have to be held accountable for the up-in-smoke fate of their nonsensical predictions.

For a complete rundown of the most current right-wing conspiracy theories, all of which are related in one way or another to the perceived need for gun ownership, see “Margins to the Mainstream,” an article in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s publication “Intelligence Report.”  It covers in detail Jade Helm and other conspiracy magnets such as Common Core, Agenda 21, the North American Union, Shariah Law, FEMA, money manipulators, secret Muslim training camps, and the homosexual agenda.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/margins-mainstream

Another astonishing idea, equally loony but far more reprehensible, is one in which armchair tough guys blame the victims of mad dogs with guns for their own injuries and deaths.   They should have defended themselves – rushed the shooter and taken him down.  Each should have been willing to sacrifice his or her own life for the sake of the rest, as they, the courageous purveyors of this theory, assure us they would have done. All people have to do is be willing to take one for the team and throw themselves at the muzzle of a blazing assault rifle.  By gad, that’ll put a stop to this mass shooting nonsense; there’s no reason to keep guns out of the hands of crazed shooters by limiting their availability.  Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson is leading this particular confederacy of dunces.

Another idea we’ve seen lately from the gun-obsessed is one that could be dismissed as simply cockamamie were it not so objectionable: that German Jews could have and would have prevented the holocaust had they not been prevented by the government from owning guns.  Or, to put it another way, had there been no gun restrictions, the Jewish people of Germany and occupied Europe, a significant percentage of whom were women, children, and the elderly, all would have had pistols and rifles and would have used those pistols and rifles to do what various countries’ armies couldn’t do and what it took the U.S. and the Allies many years to do – thwart the vast war (and “final solution”) machinery of the Third Reich.  The sheer reprehensibility of this appallingly stupid idea stems not just from its blame-the-victim overtones and its blind disregard for the facts, but also from its attempted use of the wanton murders of six million people and the devastation of the survivors and their progeny to advance a political agenda and pet cause. 

Of note: People who have advanced this theory have cited the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 as evidence of what can happen when would-be victims get their hands on guns.  What did happen: About two-dozen Nazis were killed.  All who participated in the uprising – some 750 people – were killed by the Nazis and some 50,000 people were sent to concentration camps.  As incredibly brave and courageous as those who rose up were, their procurement and possession  of guns did not do what latter-day gun enthusiasts apparently believe it did, and makes no case for private gun ownership as a defense against predatory government forces. The uprising was, in relatively short order and mercilessly, crushed.  Guns or no guns, it never had a chance.

There’s a more detailed discussion of the “if-Europe’s-Jews-had-guns” theory in this Huffington Post article…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/did-gun-control-prevent-jews-from-stopping-the-holocaust_n_2635989.html

Earth to gummint conspiracy theorists:  The United States government is not planning to confiscate people’s guns.  There is no plan afoot to declare martial law or to dismantle our democracy or to become part of a world government or to poison our children’s minds with socialist propaganda in the public schools.  There are no secret Muslim training camps or FEMA-sponsored concentration camps, and Muslims are not trying to overthrow the government and impose Shariah law.  There is no need for you to prepare to take pot shots from your kitchen window at forces trying to make these things happen.  Beat your guns into plowshares and find employment that makes you happier.

Guns, Part 2: Concealed Carry Fantasyland

Gun enthusiasts apparently see themselves and law-abiding folks in general as being in mortal danger at all times, and they see an armed citizenry as the way to keep that danger at bay. If criminals think you are armed, the thinking goes, they are less likely to act. That is undoubtedly true, and so, as a remedy for gun crime, has a certain surface plausibility. The problem: Stemming the predatory behavior of criminals won’t have much of an effect on the overall problem of death and dismemberment by firearm, because relatively little of it actually happens that way. The model – criminal accosting innocent person in situation that would be prevented or ameliorated by the victim’s possible or actual possession of weaponry – is a relatively rare circumstance. 

The sad reality is that most gun tragedies are not perpetrated by armed predators who make a practice of hunting down victims with pre-meditated intent to rob or rape them at gunpoint and injure or kill them if necessary -- the only class of people who might logically be expected to be cowed by the possibility that their would-be victims are “carrying.”  On the contrary, most gun tragedies are perpetrated by people we don’t think of or classify as criminals – people whose acts of violence would not have been affected one way or the other by the foreknowledge that their about-to-be victims might be armed.  That being the case, the most likely outcome of more guns in the possession of citizens is more gun violence, not less.

We saw a pretty good cross-section on a news magazine show some years ago which reported on a week’s worth of gun-related violence involving young people across the U.S.  Not a formal study, true, but nevertheless illuminating. The report included several suicides, several accidental shootings, a “desperation” shooting (a 16-year-old ran away from home and ended up killing a young policeman in rural Kansas), one involving a fight between a boy and his girlfriend, one in which a woman previously convicted of firearms violations shot and killed her 3-year-old child, and some gang-related incidents…thirty-five in all.

In exactly three of them, the fact that the victim was or was not armed clearly mattered.  In two cases, a store clerk shot a holdup man.  In the other, a store clerk was shot by a holdup man. In a fourth incident, a man was killed in his car and was thought to have been a robbery victim. Giving that last one the benefit of the doubt, that’s four out of almost three dozen, about 11 percent, in which any rational reading would conclude that gun possession by the victim – or the perception of gun possession by all possible victims -- could have either prevented the incident from happening or changed its outcome for the better.  (The gang-related shootings are a good example:  The shooters undoubtedly would have had a reasonable presumption that their victims were armed, yet they weren’t deterred.  And, if the victims had been armed, there’s some likelihood that the violence would have been exacerbated, not stemmed.)

Recent example (October 2015): A woman with a concealed carry permit pulled her piece and squeezed off a few rounds at a purported shoplifter fleeing from an Auburn Hills, Michigan Home Depot.  If a bystander had been hit by way of this incredibly reckless act, that person would have been injured or killed and the woman would have ended up in prison.  That’s how the use of a concealed gun is more likely to play out:  Not good-guy-takes-out-bad-guy, but Barney Fife-like pretend sheriff sprays bullets at innocent people.  Other examples – children getting accidentally shot (often by other children), people shooting other people in bar fights, people waving and discharging guns in disputes over who cut off who on the road – abound. An armed citizenry will almost certainly mean a hundred of these kinds of incidents for every one in which our hero saves the day by stopping an evildoer.  It will also mean – already does mean – guns being stolen from the good guys by the bad guys.  It’s estimated that 1.4 million guns were stolen in household burglaries and other property crimes between 2005 and 2010, and gun thefts from vehicles has become a bigger problem than ever. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) has said this: “Lost and stolen firearms pose a substantial threat to public safety and to law enforcement. Those that steal firearms commit violent crimes with stolen guns, transfer stolen firearms to others who commit crimes, and create an unregulated secondary market for firearms, including a market for those who are prohibited by law from possessing a gun.”

The elephant in the room when it comes to concealed carry – and for that matter, hand gun ownership in general -- is that the need for it is less real than it is rooted in a Clint Eastwoodesque fantasy.  Or, more accurately, a small but powerful collection of go-ahead-make-my-day fantasy scenarios: (1) A bad person invades my home and I bravely defend it by shooting the rotten bastard; (2) I am accosted on a dimly-lit street by an armed robber, and much to his shock and amazement, I turn the tables on him by pulling my own gun, shooting the scumbag through the heart; (3) There is a crazed shooter in a public place, and I save the day by cutting him down with my pistol.

The likelihood that any individual will live out his life without ever encountering any of these scenarios, or any other scenario in which possession of a hand gun resolves the problem successfully, is near 100-percent.  When such things do happen, they are big news and generally treated as man-bites-dog stories, reinforcing not how frequently these things occur but how rarely they do. If you own a hand gun, what you should step up to is this: it’s not to defend yourself and your family from an actual meaningful threat. If you own a handgun (or a rifle that looks like an AR-15, an Uzi, or a grease gun), it’s because you like to imagine using it.

Guns, Part 1:The Slaughter of Innocents

Clearly, the gun people will say anything to steer the conversation away from any action that would prevent anyone, anywhere from having a gun. So, we get this exquisitely irrational plan: To prevent mass shootings by mentally ill people, instead of focusing on keeping guns out of their hands, the thing to do is focus on treating mental illness. Or, to put it another way, it’s important to protect the 2nd amendment rights of the unhinged to keep a dozen or so firearms and a couple of thousand rounds of ammunition in the trunks of their cars and to use them to carry out their revenge fantasies on people in classrooms and movie theaters, while we search for the cure for mental illness. Same thing with, say, airline pilots, I guess: The remedy for keeping a mentally ill person from flying an airliner full of people into the ocean isn’t to keep the delusional out of the cockpit. The remedy is to cure mental illness. A few hundred people may die while we’re doing that, but, oh well. In the gun discussion, it would seem the one thing everyone could agree on is the need to keep guns and the mentally ill separate. But apparently not. In the nonsensical words of Gov. Chris Christie, we must, instead “get tough” on mental illness.

So, let's be clear. The way to prevent mentally ill people from shooting up movie theaters isn’t to cure mental illness, as laudable a goal as that is. It is to not let them have guns. End of story. And it is not unreasonable to say that anyone who would commit an act like those committed by Aaron Alexis, James Holmes, Gerald Loughner, Adam Lanza, Dylann Roof, et. al. – and now Chris Harper Mercer -- is by definition mentally ill. At the very least, the act itself is prima facie evidence of thought processes gone haywire.

Like day follows night, the discussion of “red flags” follows these shootings. And there is never any shortage of flags, nor is there any shortage of theories about why they were ignored or misunderstood or went unseen – why the dots weren’t connected. Heeding the flags and connecting the dots -- identifying people who shouldn’t have access to guns and then denying them that access – seems like the most productive area of concentration in the effort to stem the tide of gun deaths, because it’s both narrowly focused and politically possible. It won’t stop gun crime or gun accidents or gang shootings or suicides. But it should make the slaughter of innocents by the mentally deranged a considerably less regular occurrence, and that would be a huge accomplishment.

Yes, there are obstacles. It’s not an easy thing to do for a variety of reasons involving the difficulty of determining the mental health status of a given individual, privacy considerations (and laws), the indifference of gun manufacturers and, especially, gun sellers, and the sheer numbers of guns out there. But there has to be a way to prevent the Chris Harper Mercers of the world from getting their hands on guns and ammo. Never was the cliché more apt: Where there’s a will, there’s a way. But it’s important to avoid getting distracted by blue-sky remedies like curing mental illness or, on the anti-gun side, ridding the country of guns altogether or banning them by law, neither of which is ever going to happen. Keeping guns and mentally ill people apart isn’t everything. But it’s a lot. Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

If You Build it, Will the NFL Come?

So, Joe Buck enters the fray and says this: “…when you step back and look at the timeline and realize how hard a ticket this was when the team was good ... Dome or no Dome, it didn’t seem to matter. As we sit here in 2015, I would agree the stadium isn’t good enough. It doesn’t make fans want to trudge down there.” Thus, Buck posits in the first sentence that it’s the quality of the team that matters to fans, and in the second that it’s the quality of the stadium. Memo to Joe: It’s the team. When the Rams were good, no one stayed home because they were unhappy with the stadium. And the “trudge” would be the same, new stadium or old.

This much is clear: The fans don’t care about a new stadium. Most of them are mildly critical of the existing one and like to grouse about it, but the reality is this: Fans, being generally sensible people, understand that when they go into a stadium, they’re not moving in and setting up housekeeping; they’re going to be in there for about three hours, eight times a year. They’re okay with it if it is reasonably clean, has seats, lights, a field, plenty of bathrooms, and plenty of readily available beer and hot dogs. And they know that any new stadium, no matter what “tier” it occupies in the eyes of league officials and owners, will also have those same (entirely sufficient) basic requirements – seats, lights, field, bathrooms, beer – and nothing else they really care about. No matter what bells and whistles are added to it to assure its exalted place in tierdom, it will still be just a football stadium. What keeps the paying customers coming is a competitive team. So unless the place where that team plays has dark corners where unidentified things skitter in the shadows, they’re generally okay with it. And so, the great mystery: If the fans don’t care about a new stadium and the owner doesn’t care about a new stadium (more on that later), who does?

And speaking of tiers, who in their right mind enters into a contract calling for top tier status in which the definition of top-tier is not unambiguously spelled out, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph? What exactly, the stadium lessors should have demanded to know, does being in the top 25-percent consist of? The agreement they entered into instead seems to say,“the stadium must be rendered top-tier – we don’t know what that means exactly, but we’ll know it when we see it.” Talk about a moving target.

“Is this it?”

No, that’s not it. Try again.”

There’s a memorable scene in the movie “The Fugitive” where Harrison Ford shouts, “I didn’t kill my wife!” and Tommy Lee Jones, his pursuer, shouts back, “I don’t care!” Jones is trying to get Ford to understand that it’s not about that. Which seems to be what Stan Kroenke is conveying, by deed if not word, to the folks working feverishly to offer him a new stadium for the Rams to play in: He doesn’t care. It’s not about that.

At this point, the stadium undertaking appears to be exactly what its proponents have gone to considerable lengths to deny that it is: A last-second Hail Mary launched in the forlorn hope that it will keep the Rams in St. Louis, even though there is scant indication that it will work that way. I could be wrong about that and I am open to any new information regarding exactly who is going to occupy the thing. But as far as I know, Kroenke has never said that dissatisfaction with the stadium situation in St. Louis is what's pushing him out the door. He isn't saying that he would keep the Rams in St. Louis, or consider doing so, if a new stadium were built or the existing one refurbished to his liking. He isn't saying that where he locates his business is in any way connected to St. Louis stadium facilities. Hasn’t said that in the past…doesn’t seem to be saying it now. What he has said, by his actions if not his words, is that he wants and intends to move the team to Los Angeles.

But maybe the folks pushing for construction of a new stadium have information to the contrary about Kroenke's thinking on the matter. If so, they should tell us what they know. Tell us there is evidence that construction of a new stadium will keep the team here. Because so far, all the evidence we’ve seen points to the Rams leaving, stadium or not. It also seems to be the case that no consideration is being given by the NFL to expanding, and no existing team is considering moving to St. Louis. Here again, if someone knows something that suggests otherwise, say so. If there is solid information out there suggesting that a new stadium would actually be occupied – by the Rams, by a new team, or by an existing team -- let’s hear it. Doesn’t it make sense to have something lined up before you throw $800-million at a stadium project?

In a heartbeat, the stadium discussion has gone from blue-sky speculation to “no new stadium, no team in St. Louis, period.” How and why that happened is a mystery. But it’s important to understand that “if you don’t build a stadium, there won’t be a team” is not the same as “if you do build a stadium there will be a team.” We’ve heard the former, but not the latter.

When you question the need for a big civic project like a new stadium you risk being accused of not understanding the big picture – the way these sorts of enterprises work together in a synergistic way to have and hold world class things, and the quality of life to which those things contribute. They keep the big wheel turning, and the visionaries understand the need to keep it turning, and what it takes to do it. I get that. Civic foresight is about big ideas. I just don’t see a rightful place on the big wheel of commerce and prosperity for a new stadium, and certainly not for one whose occupants, as of now, will be tractor pulls and rock concerts. If you build it, they (the NFL) will come? Right now, that’s the billion-dollar maybe. Again, if there is reliable information regarding an NFL occupant for a new stadium, please let the rest of us in on it. Anyone? Anyone?

The Stars and Bars

            One afternoon a few years ago, several members of my family and I, along with a dozen or so other pods of people, were taking the gulf breezes on a beach in Florida when a group of five or six youngsters, college age or thereabouts, came along and picked out a spot not far from us.  They staked out their territory in the customary way, plopping down their coolers, laying out their blankets, and deploying their beach umbrella.  But then, all of that done, they unfurled a sizable confederate battle flag and planted its staff deep in the sand.

Our reaction to this was visceral and, I believe, normal: We were sort of dumbstruck by the effrontery of it and a little worried about the group’s intentions. Did they mean to make some political statement? Were they unilaterally designating this as a blacks-not-welcome place?  Were they itchin’ for a fight? I don't know.  Nothing happened, and we went our separate ways at the end of the day.   Once again, though, the rebel flag proved itself to be a potent symbol, certain to elicit immediate reactions and strong feelings, most of them negative.

This all comes to mind as the confederate flag once again gets in the news, as it has from time to time over the years when reasonable people have voiced their objections to its being flown in various public places.  Fortunately, in many quarters, public officials are now hearing those objections. Others are not, though, and there are still pockets of people who continue to argue not just in defense of the right to display the flag but also in defense of the appropriateness of displaying it.  This is still predominantly (though not exclusively) a southern thing and my unsolicited advice to those southern folks as to whether they should continue to fight for the right to display the rebel flag:  Sure -- assuming, of course, that they wish to portray themselves -- and reinforce and perpetuate an image of southerners in general -- as slack-jawed, back-woods racist.

Most Southerners, of course, are not that, and, presumably, neither are the self-described Missouri “rednecks” who get in such high dudgeon over criticism of their confederate flag flying.  But they should realize that in associating themselves with this symbol, they’re risking labeling themselves, and by proximity and association, others, in exactly that way.

And let’s not be coy about what the rebel flag stands for.  It stands for racism. It has, at various times, been used as the banner of the KKK.  It was the banner of the Dixiecrat Party whose platform was overtly and unabashedly anti-civil rights. And it is widely if not universally understood, among both blacks and whites, to be associated with sensibilities ranging from intolerance to hate. Ask any black person if he or she, upon seeing a group of whites displaying the flag, would interpret it as a sign of welcome.  And ask the displayers if they consider it to be one.  The insistence by sons of the Confederacy types that the rebel flag is nothing more than a benign memorial to the Confederate movement and its fallen soldiers is, to put it cvharitably, disingenuous.

And as to that Confederate movement, its true believers (and the flags they wave) here in the early part of the twenty-first century represent at the very least an inexplicable fixation on, and homage to, an era now a hundred and fifty years and many generations distant.  No matter how loudly these southern colonels rattle their sabers and eulogize their great-grandfathers, their connection to it all is tenuous.  Still, blood ties to and reverence for their fallen Civil War ancestors of so long ago is a theme we hear much of from Southerners of this particular bent, but not nearly as much from the descendants of Union combatants who fought and died in the same war. The underlying suggestion is that the Confederate cause was in some way more worthy -- that it was one in which the South fought valiantly against overwhelming odds for something it believed in, and that it thus had a nobility that the North’s lacked

To put it not so charitably: Baloney. The South’s action was an insurrection.  Whatever they believed and however they justified it, what they did was attack and attempt to tear apart a country, the United States, that had been formed a hundred or so years earlier at great cost in blood and treasure -- the “noble experiment” which, until the Civil War, had operated not perfectly but pretty successfully in terms of the liberty and prosperity enjoyed by its citizens -- and wage a war in which they killed some 365,000 of their fellow Americans from the North and in which about 165,000 of their own were killed, a war in which many of their cities and farms were ruined, their railroads destroyed, and their industry and trade brought to a standstill.  And the high cause for which all of this was done -- for which the sons of the South spilled so many rivers of blood:  the right to enslave, for their own ease and economic benefit, three and a half million of their fellow human beings.

That many if not most of the southern soldiers were apolitical and maybe only dimly aware if at all of the issues on whose behalf they waged war may be true; and that being the case, it’s certainly appropriate to lament, and memorialize, their suffering. Unfortunately, the rebel flag doesn’t do that.  What it does instead is memorialize the repugnant cause they did the fighting and dying for.

A younger generation with a more clear-eyed view of the South’s role in the civil war appears to be in the majority now  -- people who understand the incendiary nature of the rebel flag and are finally ready to disown it as a public symbol of who they are and what they believe.  It’s good to see that they’re getting on with it.       

There are no Clocks in Baseball

To borrow and shamelessly recast a mantra of the 60s: A baseball game needs a clock like a fish needs a bicycle.  Nevertheless, major league baseball games now have, of all things, clocks. Their purpose: to enforce rules aimed at speeding the pace of the game, something a small but vocal segment of baseballdom has been obsessing over for years, repeatedly (and annoyingly) offering up various stratagems for “saving” time having mostly to do with how long a pitcher can take between pitches and whether or not a batter will be allowed to step out to knock dirt out of his spikes and adjust his, um, equipment.

That group has finally gotten its way. So now…

·        Batters must keep one foot in the box at all times, except after foul balls, steals and other scenarios that can occur during an at-bat.

·        Breaks between half-innings are timed. Once there are three outs, a timer will be set (2:25 for local games, 2:45 for national broadcasts), requiring pitchers and hitters to be ready for action when the timer winds down to 20 seconds.

·        There will also be a timer for pitching changes, with a maximum break of 2:30. The clock starts when the new pitcher crosses the warning track or foul line onto the field.

Pitch clocks haven’t been instituted yet in the majors, but will be.  They are now being used in AA and AAA games.

All of this, of course, is a solution in search of a problem.

One sportswriter characterized the “problem” this way: “Anyone who has attended a baseball game in recent years, whether it’s the big leagues, the minors or even tee ball, will tell you that baseball is too slow, an increasingly plodding exercise.”

In fact, no one has told me that. In recent years, or ever.  No one, except this tiny but apparently influential group of nattering nabobs of negativism.  Not once, as I’ve left a game, have I heard anyone say, “boy, am I glad that’s over; that last twelve minutes was torture,” so it doesn’t appear that this perceived need is in response to any outcry from the fans, who continue to vote -- when it comes to the attractiveness of major league baseball games as an entertainment alternative, at whatever duration -- with their feet.  As for its being “an increasingly plodding exercise” I say, nonsense, it’s the same plodding exercise it has always been.

My theory is that all this comes mainly from (a) that generation of sportswriters that is emotionally and intellectually, to put it delicately, not fully evolved, and who’ve been chronically over-stimulated by video games and trash sports and therefore tend to be rendered cranky by anything short of relentless high-intensity action and continual motion; and (b) team owners, whose principle interests in being connected in any way with baseball have to do with money and bragging rights but do not extend to actually liking the game, and whose top priority when in attendance at one is figuring out the earliest possible inning they can exit the premises without jeopardizing their reputations as passionate devotees of the sport.

I think what both of these groups really believe, deep down, is that baseball is fundamentally boring, and therefore the shorter the games, the better.  What they offer as their public rationale, on the other hand, is that (at least as I understand it) games would be more to the liking of the public if they were ten or twelve minutes shorter, and that more people would therefore attend games than already do.  The whole thing makes little sense, and when subjected to even the most rudimentary analysis, pretty much falls apart.  To wit…

           

How long is a piece of string?  Apparently the shortening crowd hasn’t noticed that not all baseball games are the same length.  In fact, generally speaking, no two games are the same length, rendering any talk of cutting the length of an average game meaningless.  Is a 4:10 game improved by cutting its length by 12 minutes?  A 2:38 game?  A 1:55 game.  Well…no, no, and no.  So if there’s a need for ball games to be shorter, the question has to asked – shorter than what?  And of course the duration of virtually every game is determined not by the dawdling of the pitcher but by his overall effectiveness; that is to say, games featuring the most offense, which this crowd admittedly likes best, take the longest.  Pitchers’ duels, for which they have the least affinity, are the shortest.  Go figure.  The bottom line here:  Ball games take a couple or three hours, and if twelve minutes are trimmed from them, they will still take a couple or three hours.

Why is there so much downtime in baseball?  There isn’t.  Baseball has somewhat more of it than hockey and basketball and considerably less of it than football, a sport which uses about thirty seconds of planning and discussion (the huddle) for every ten seconds of action (the play) and which stops every game dead in its tracks, exactly in the middle of the action, for 30 to 60 minutes.  There seems to be some confusion over whether all these pace-of-game measures are aimed at overall game length or within-game inaction, but the accusation that baseball is “slow” and needs to be “speeded up” clearly comes from people who are interested in the game only when balls are flying out of the park or bases are being feverishly circled.  They disdainfully refer to people who are actually interested in other less frenetic parts of the game, which is most of the people who watch baseball regularly, as “purists.”  For these millions who actually enjoy the game, the almost infinitely variable interplay of pitcher vs. hitter – something that takes up more of a baseball game than any other single activity – is not downtime.  But for the shorter-is-better crowd, it is.

In a seeming paradox, from the same sort of mindset that is always arguing for the shortening of baseball games comes the increasingly strident bitching about baseball officiating and the grand injustices visited upon the hometown heroes because of it, and consequent calls for stepped-up use of video replay to set things right.  Waiting for yes-or-no decisions to be made by way of video playback has become a significant yawn-time contributor. But it’s not a really a paradox.  Both ideas spring from the mind of the literalist – the sort of person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing; the sort of person who can get way down in the weeds and ferret out facts that he then draws like a gun, but who is congenitally unable to see the big picture. 

So, this isn’t about pitching changes or trips to the mound by the manager or time elapsed between innings. Its about the game itself.  That’s what these people are bored by: Baseball.  Those of us who are not bored by baseball don’t think the time we spend watching ball games needs to go by any faster than it already does.

Anti-Semitism in State Politics

Tom Schweich, the Missouri state auditor and a candidate for governor, committed suicide after complaining about a Republican political ad that compared him to Barney Fife, the bumbling deputy sheriff in the old Andy Griffith show, and about a pernicious “whispering campaign” among Republicans regarding his religious affiliation – specifically, that he was Jewish, a heritage that, if true, would doubtless cost him the votes of some of the electorate’s dimmer bulbs.  He believed party chairman John Hancock was responsible for the rumor.

Hancock denied it, saying he “may have” mentioned in passing that he thought Schweich was Jewish but that any such mention was innocent and done in the same way that one might mention that someone was Presbyterian or Catholic, and therefore had no anti-semitic overtones.

There are a couple of problems with that:

1. There is no “may have’ here.  Either Hancock did or did not say, or speculate, that Schweich was Jewish.  So, when he says “may have” that means he did.  If he didn’t. he would have denied it.

2. Schweich was not Jewish.  He was a prominent member of St. Michael and St. George Episcopal; Church in Clayton, a church that doubtless counts among its members some staunch Republicans, prominent or otherwise.  That Hancock, party chairman and former top political consultant whose job is to formulate and implement the strategies that will defeat Democratic candidates, didn’t know what religion Schweich was is simply not plausible.  He did know, but brought up the Jewish thing anyway.

3. The contention that mentioning in passing that someone is Jewish -- in general and particularly in the context of a political campaign -- is the same as mentioning that they're Presbyterian or Catholic is such obvious claptrap that it’s hard to believe anyone would take it seriously. The Hancocks of this world mention Jewishness "in passing" for one reason and one reason only: to produce a reaction and a result  -- part of a long tradition of mentioning Jewishness to produce a result.

Hancock’s defenders have denied the existence of any whispering campaign, arguing that it was a delusion -- the product of an unhinged mind.  Schweich’s suicide is evidence that he was, in fact, unhinged, and there is every reason to believe that his problems ran far deeper than distress over political advertising and dirty-tricks speculation regarding his religion.  But the fact that the whispering campaign was not a reason to commit suicide does not mean that the campaign didn’t exist.  The fact that Hancock speculated on Schweich’s Jewishness, even though he doubtless knew better, is evidence that it did exist..  Further, the state’s most distinguished Republican, former Senator John Danforth, said in his eulogy for Schweich that such a campaign did in fact exist and he sharply criticized his party for doing it.  Danforth may not be the party kingpin that he once was, but the idea that he doesn’t know what’s going on in Missouri Republican circles is not believable.  He does know.

The shame here is twofold:  That people resort to anti-semitic innuendo, and that there is a market for it.  They do and there is.

After-the-Fact Quarterback

No one feels sorry for professional football coaches, who have astronomical salaries, legions of adoring acolytes in the public and sporting press, and more than the normal allotment of toadies.  But they do have their crosses to bear, most notably the lacerations inflicted by football tacticians whose expertise is born entirely of hindsight.  These people are known – in football and, metaphorically, in a thousand other pursuits -- as Monday morning quarterbacks.  Their primary function: To dissect the tactical worth of play calls after the outcome of those plays is known.

A lot of this goes on in a lot of different activities, but it is endemic to football. It goes on, to a greater or lesser extent, with just about every play (since every play has an outcome.) God knows it’s a thoroughly explored phenomenon here in St. Louis where legitimate coaching shortcomings have kept the Rams out of the playoffs since the Clinton administration.  But legitimacy often gives way to irrationality, as when a play goes for a touchdown, and then, when the exact same play is stuffed at the line of scrimmage, the team is accused of, quelle horreur!, unimaginative play calling. Or, to put it another way, a play that works is a good call, and a play that doesn’t work is a bad call, even if it’s the same play. This is the equivalent, in baseball, of saying your slugger should never have swung at that pitch, unless he hits a home run, in which case he should have. Never once has a football fan been heard to say, following a touchdown, “I wish they hadn’t run that play; it was a bad call.”

Which brings us to the 2015 Super Bowl and the more or less instant judgment – and something that became conventional wisdom before the confetti settled to the ground – that calling the pass play on which the outcome of the game turned was a demonstrably and self-evidently idiotic decision..  The thing, however, is this:  Had that play gone for a touchdown – and it absolutely could have – no one, as the trophies were being handed out and the breathless winners were being interviewed and the Gatorade was being splashed about, would have been saying what a dumb idea it was. The likelihood, in fact, is that the exact same people now calling the exact same play moronic would be calling it dazzling and tactically amazing and would be nominating Pete Carroll for genius of the century.

But wait.  Everyone knows that calling for a pass play in that situation is crazy…something no one does and no one of sound mind would ever do. Right?  Wrong. That strategy -- trying a pass play on second down inside the five -- is not a wrong one or even an unusual one.  Nor is it a particularly risky one.  From Benjamin Morris of the Web site FiveThirtyEightSports, we get this information: “On the 1-yard line, quarterbacks threw 66 touchdowns with no interceptions prior to Wilson’s errant toss. Not mentioned: They also scored four touchdowns on scrambles (which Wilson is pretty good at last I checked). That’s a 60.9 percent success rate. Just for comparison’s sake, here’s how more than 200 runs fared this year in the same situation: 125 led to touchdowns; 94 failed to score, of those, 23 were for loss of yardage; two resulted in lost fumbles.”

So, the idea that it was an inexplicably cockamamie call from nowheresville is just wrong.  In fact, it was closer to being a customary call in that situation. There is an element of class resentment in play here, as in “these overpaid geniuses can’t see what we ordinary joes can see as plain as the nose in your face.”  But what all the ordinary joes need to get their heads around: The play call didn’t fail.  The play failed.  (If they are prepared to say they’d have branded the play dumb and crazy even if it had won the Super Bowl for the Seahawks, then I stand corrected.)

Here’s the Morris article, which contains lots of interesting information about this episode…

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-head-coach-botched-the-end-of-the-super-bowl-and-it-wasnt-pete-carroll/

Palin Again

(This post was first published in 2011.  Unfortunately, it again seems relevant.)

A recent declaration by Sarah Palin that she doesn’t intend to shut up is the best news the Democrats have gotten in months. In her public life to date, everything that has come out of her mouth that hasn’t been uninformed in content and inarticulate in execution has been hopelessly bland and non-specific -- completely lacking in any indication that she has any but the vaguest understanding of basic principles of governance, conservative or otherwise. And there’s no reason not to expect that to continue.

Soon after the election, it seemed that the Palin phenomenon had ended -- that she had disappeared from the national stage for good, and, as conservative pundits and politicians had their inevitable what-was-I-thinking moment, the idea of her taking on the leadership role in the Republican party had receded further and further into the gloaming.

But no. She reappeared with a book, then a television show, and has managed to stay alternately on the fringes or in the forefront of public consciousness throughout. People who seem otherwise reasonably sensible are again saying things about her – things which, if they say them, they presumably believe them -- that are totally at odds with the evidence – the evidence she herself has supplied with her every public utterance.

An article by James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal asks “what's behind the left's deranged hatred” of Palin. The answer is, it’s not deranged and it’s not hatred -- and it’s not just the left. It’s a simple recognition of that fact that she is the lightest of intellectual lightweights – an unschooled talking-point repeater totally lacking in statecraft skills and with no real understanding of “the American people” she repeatedly and thoughtlessly invokes. Granted, she has this in common with many politicians, maybe most, but still… this is the person that seemingly sane party strategists see as their leader?

The more relevant question, then, isn’t what's behind the left's deranged hatred of Palin, but what’s behind the right’s deranged infatuation with her. What has she said or done, or thought or written, that demonstrates to this constituency that she belongs at the top of government? Nothing about her stands up to detached analysis, leading to the conclusion that their support is, at bottom, emotional – schoolboy/schoolgirl crushes formed during the time of her initial public emergence that they haven’t gotten over yet. In any case, they continue to say things about her that are demonstrably not true. One pundit, for example, referred to Palin’s “obvious smarts” – a real head-scratcher, because if she has any smarts, to date, they’ve been anything but obvious.

The flip side of the conservative punditry’s inexplicable enthusiasm for Gov. Palin is the indignation with which they’ve reacted to the less-than-enthusiastic reception her initial selection received in many quarters, and their righteous anger at what they consider to have been unfair treatment in the press. Well, one pales at the thought of the lacerations these same people would be inflicting on Gov. Palin if she were a Democrat and been offered up by that party as its VP candidate. This person is a lightweight, not national-candidate timbre, is what Republicans would be saying – and much, much more – if Palin were on the other team. Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh and all the rest would have set new records for sneering.

To risk stating the obvious, Sen. McCain didn't pick Gov. Palin because he thought she would make a good vice president or a good president. He picked her because he thought it would help him win the election, and he didn't hesitate to put her the proverbial heartbeat away. Ironically, the calculation, cold as it was, that Palin’s selection would drive votes to the Republican ticket was remarkably clueless, and demonstrated the bizarre understanding McCain and his team seemed to have about actual voters out here in flyover territory. At the very least, the idea that this would bring women voters over to their side speaks loudly and clearly about their low opinion of women voters.

In the days and weeks after the election, Sen. McCain diplomatically declined to publicly implicate Palin in the failure of his ticket. But he has to know that her selection was a ghastly mistake that came perilously close to making a laughing stock of his campaign. As for Gov. Palin’s political future: The likelihood is that her refusal to “shut up” will lead, sooner or later, to her exit from the national political stage and a retreat to the television reality show hosting career that her cynical thrust at high office may have been aimed at all along.