Category: Rants

Samuel Doe was the kind of person who would never have risen to or maintained political power without the Cold War. Doe, who ruled Liberia from 1980 to 1990, was the typical Third World dictator of that era: corrupt, brutally repressive, and propped up by one of the two superpowers. In Doe's case that was the United States. He was one of many American "allies" throughout the Cold War who understood exactly how to keep the flow of money, weapons, and food aid coming from Washington by spouting virulent anti-communist rhetoric and cracking down on leftist parties in domestic politics. We had a standing policy for the better part of 50 years to prop up any crackpot tyrant willing to line up on our side, turning a blind eye to the catalog of human rights abuses perpetrated under his rule.

As the Cold War wound to a close in the late 1980s, Doe and many others like him around the world found that they were no longer useful to the U.S. – or alternatively that their Soviet patrons were about to give up the ghost. Once Doe's role in the Battle against Communism became a moot point there was little reason for Congress and the Pentagon to support him. We abandoned him to his fate and in fact encouraged people who were trying to overthrow him, perhaps attempting to score a few brownie points by condemning his dismal human rights record we had long been happy to ignore. Liberian rebels, to shorten a long story, deposed Doe in a 1989-1990 coup; he was last seen having his ears sliced off (Reservoir Dogs style) before being executed by drunken rebels in a snuff film that still sells briskly on the black market in Africa (very NSFW).

Of course we were soon to discover that Charles Taylor, the leader of the rebels who overthrew Doe, would prove to be even more of a brutal killer than his predecessor. Turns out those rebels we had cheered were not terribly interested in democracy or anything else that Americans imagine to be the goal of revolutions worldwide. It was merely the exchange of one brutal thug for another, the only difference being the degree to which Doe was superior in sucking up to Washington's interests.

Fast forward to 2011 and hopefully it is clear why this tale comes to mind as we watch the events in Egypt and the rest of North Africa unfold. In the post-Cold War world America's counterproductive policy of propping up dictators has continued with only cosmetic changes, notably replacing "Communism" with "terrorists / Islamic fundamentalists." While Americans and especially American right wingers instinctively fawn all over protest movements by imagining them as a validation of the George W. Bush worldview ("Freedom is on the march!"), a little caution might be prudent here.

If Mubarak is toppled – and it appears likely if not necessarily imminent – what replaces him? Does a popular democratic movement sweep Nobel laureate Mohammed ElBaradei into power or does the anti-American, pro-extremist Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most popular opposition parties, come out on top? While there is no justification for keeping Mubarak's corrupt ass in power any longer, it's fair to recognize the possibility that the replacement might be worse.

If Mubarak is toppled, who fills Egypt's role as an intermediary between Israel and the larger Arab world? Does Egypt become a state friendly to terrorism, a la Syria? Do human rights abuses get even worse?

Let me stress again that in no way do I think Mubarak should stay (or be kept) in power; he is little different than any of the cheap thugs who served as Allies of Convenience during the Cold War. His situation does raise two issues, though. First, by repeating the failed foreign policy of the Cold War era and calling any jackass who will promise to help us kill terrorists a Valued Ally – and turning a blind eye to human and political rights abuses – we are bound to repeat its consequences. There will be more anti-American sentiment and more instability in already unstable areas of the world. Second, if America does the right thing and declines to interfere in these nations' process of determining their own political future there is an excellent chance that the resulting governments will be less friendly to the U.S. and possibly even hostile. Their memories of what we did to support the dictator who repressed them for 30 years will be long and unpleasant.

In other words, let's hold off on the knee-jerk cheering until we understand the long term consequences of current events. I hope the people of Egypt rid themselves of their self appointed President for Life. The U.S. has to brace for the possibility that the consequences of that eventuality might not be pleasant for either the Egyptians themselves or the world at large. I guess repeating the same foreign policy mistakes of the 1950s is the price we pay for convincing ourselves as a nation that the same policies somehow ended (and "won") the Cold War.

Playing off of the main theme of the State of the Union address, Very Serious Reasonable Centrist David Gergen asks a very basic question in his latest CNN piece: Can the U.S. still compete?

The question: Will the United States renew its capacity to compete in global markets so that we create quality jobs for our people here at home? If we do, America's best days are still ahead; if we fail, they will soon be far behind. It's about that simple.

For more than a century, we didn't have to worry much about our greatness as a people. But times have changed. We may be the nation that astonished the world by building a transcontinental railroad.
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But today, as the president pointed out last month in a visit to North Carolina, we find that Shanghai in China has built more high-speed rail in a year than we have built in the past 30 years.
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For most of the 20th century, we were No. 1 in the world in education; today, we are ninth in the proportion of young people with college degrees, 18th in high school graduation rates among industrialized nations and 27th in the proportion of science and engineering degrees. China now graduates more English-trained engineers than the U.S. and has become the world's No. 1 exporter in high technology.

As others have become more competitive and we have slowed, American jobs have been disappearing…Can we turn things around? No one is certain, but the competitiveness commission — representing some of the best minds in the country — believes we still have a chance. In the 2010 report, its top four recommendations, in descending order of importance, were:

1. Upgrade U.S. K-12 education in science and math to a leading position by global standards.

2. Double real federal investment in basic research in math, the physical sciences and engineering over the next seven years, while maintaining the recent doubling in bioscience research.

3. Encourage more U.S. citizens to pursue careers in math, science and engineering.

The seductiveness of this argument and people like Gergen in general is that it is impossible to disagree with his point. We do suck at math and science. We are shedding jobs. We are a shell of what we used to be in terms of competitiveness. Although he doesn't say so explicitly, he is tapdancing around the fact that we're not really good at anything anymore except engaging in high-tech warfare for low-tech purposes, i.e. bombing the living shit out of some country that is already difficult to distinguish from rubble.

The problem is that this line of reasoning misses the point entirely. None of these problems that he identifies, as real as they are, will be solved by having more young people doing better in math and science. We could start churning out Stephen Hawking-caliber minds by the hundreds and it would not change the fundamental fact that we cannot compete with China and the "developing world." Everything "engineers" and scientists can do can and will be done more cheaply there. And we did this to ourselves when we decided that having cheaper consumer goods for the top 10% of income earners was more important than having a middle class making decent money and driving the economy with (non debt-supported) purchasing.

When the upper- and middle classes decided 30 years ago that it would be a good idea to phase out the working class in favor of cheap foreign labor it appears obvious in hindsight that they were opening floodgates that would eventually result in white collar and highly skilled jobs going overseas as well. But something – subconscious racism, American exceptionalism, or perhaps good ol' fashioned cockiness – convinced everyone in the suburbs and penthouses that this could never happen. Chinamen using computers? An Indian getting an MBA? Be serious! The unwashed masses of the Third World will never be able to do our jobs, said the comfortable elite. They will be useful for helping us break unions, but their skills are and ever shall be limited to menial physical labor.
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First they came for the autoworkers, and I did not speak up. Then they came for the steel mills, and I did not speak up. Then they came for the white collars, and there was no one left to speak up for them.

It doesn't matter how many math PhDs and computer scientists and engineers we produce. What's the point? Within the next 15 to 20 years, every single one of those jobs will be done in Southeast Asia.** The jobs are not coming back because there is not a single incentive, economic, legal, or political, for companies to hire American workers, be it for menial or highly skilled work. As Christina Freeland pointed out in a recent (and excellent) Atlantic Monthly piece, globalization has put you and I in the position of competing with someone who will do our job for 1/10th the compensation:

The good news—and the bad news—for America is that the nation’s own super-elite is rapidly adjusting to this more global perspective. The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told me that his firm’s investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter. "His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade," the CEO recalled.
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I heard a similar sentiment from the Taiwanese-born, 30-something CFO of a U.S. Internet company. A gentle, unpretentious man who went from public school to Harvard, he’s nonetheless not terribly sympathetic to the complaints of the American middle class. "We demand a higher paycheck than the rest of the world," he told me. "So if you’re going to demand 10 times the paycheck, you need to deliver 10 times the value. It sounds harsh, but maybe people in the middle class need to decide to take a pay cut."

Leave aside for a moment the ridiculous notion that we can start educating innovators and engineers while we're slashing funding for education, laying siege to those Greedy Teachers and their Unions, and making a push in some of our biggest states to start teaching kids that people rode dinosaurs (Think of how many great bioengineers and geneticists a nice, creationist education will produce!). America cannot compete, not because we are dumb, though we are, but because we have set ourselves against people willing to work for much, much less that us.

We cannot compete with a China that keeps manufacturing workers in quasi-prisons, working 12 hour shifts making iPods for pennies per hour.

We cannot compete with a China, India, or Mexico in which industry pollutes without the slightest hesitation on a scale that would embarrass an 1890s American steel mill.

We cannot compete when imported goods compete with domestic goods on even terms in the U.S. retail market.

We cannot compete when your college friend from India gets the same degree as you do, returns home, and does the same job for 1/4 the salary.

We can't compete until you're willing to take that paycut our socioeconomic betters now demand, because our most glaringly obvious problem is that you currently make too much money.

We can't compete because we have spent the last 30 years seeing to it that we cannot, and will not, compete.

How unfair it is that so many of the people responsible for our current state of competitiveness will have the luxury of dying before its consequences fully unfold.

** Including yours. Yes, yours. I know everyone in these fields has rationalized a reason that they will never be Outsourced, but recent history has given the lie to any theories of exceptionalism.

Heather Wilson bemoans the failings of the pool of Rhodes Scholar applicants in Sunday's Washington Post:

Unlike many graduate fellowships, the Rhodes seeks leaders who will "fight the world’s fight." They must be more than mere bookworms.
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We are looking for students who wonder, students who are reading widely, students of passion who are driven to make a difference in the lives of those around them and in the broader world through enlightened and effective leadership. The undergraduate education they are receiving seems less and less suited to that purpose.

An outstanding biochemistry major wants to be a doctor and supports the president’s health-care bill but doesn’t really know why. A student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university hasn’t really thought about whether a world in which great powers have divested themselves of nuclear weapons would be more stable or less so, or whether nuclear deterrence can ever be moral.
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A young service academy cadet who is likely to be serving in a war zone within the year believes there are things worth dying for but doesn’t seem to have thought much about what is worth killing for. A student who wants to study comparative government doesn’t seem to know much about the important features and limitations of America’s Constitution.

I think Cecil Rhodes himself would be impressed with the extent to which the foundation that bears his name appears to be stuck in the Cold War. I was not previously aware that today's young people were big on nuclear disarmament and the dilemma of "nuclear deterrence.
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"

The real core of Heather's lament – it only gets dumber beyond this excerpt – is a simple question in every sense of the term: Why aren't any of the smart kids wingnuts? Can't we get more kids with outstanding grades who think Bill Kristol is right about everything? Why don't today's high achieving students conform to our bizarre, quasi-anachronistic conception of "leadership", a nebulous concept traditionally relied upon to favor the boarding-schools-and-Ivy-league crowd with their trained and perfected manners over the intelligent ruffians of the public school set?

It's quite a mystery, H-Dawg. Quite a mystery. I wonder if every Rhodes scholar applicant is a straw man of what the Ivory Tower Libruls are doing to today's kids – Buzzwords! Touchy-feely cultural studies! Can you believe Latin is no longer required in most colleges!?! – or if the ones she used as examples in this column just happened to fit that profile.
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Bob and Mary live in rural northern California. Neither graduated college and they struggle to make ends meet in the economic wasteland that prevailed after the logging and manufacturing industries pulled up stakes in the 1980s. But a new industry swept in to take their place – the California Department of Corrections threw up a lot of prisons in which to house the bounty of Orange County's war on the state's underclass, and state governments know from experience that the best places to build a Big House are A) far away from the suburbs and B) in areas so desperate economically that they'll accept state dollars in any form with open arms.

Being a prison guard pays more than anything a person with limited skills and education can find in rural areas, so Bob is happy to have the job.

But it's brutally difficult work. Violence, paranoia, and the constant threat of more violence tend to wear down even the most mentally stable people. Bob isn't well equipped to handle it. He starts to drink quite a bit in his off hours. He becomes more violent and difficult to deal with; a few times he even slaps his wife around.

Everyone understands that there is a problem here.

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Bob knows he drinks too much and needs help. Mary knows that she should call the cops on her abusive husband. The problem is that if Bob is named in a domestic violence call, he'll lose his job. And she knows how much both of them need his paycheck.
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Alternatively, if he tells the CDC that he is an alcoholic who needs help with anger and violence, he goes on suspension and the possibility of future advancement disappears. So a system designed to help people – there state funded resources available for domestic violence victims and employees like Bob who have psychological problems – ends up driving them away. The incentive to get mental help is never going to be stronger than the incentive to remain employed.

This is not an isolated example. Just this past summer the FAA finally changed a longstanding policy of barring commercial pilots on antidepressants from the cockpit. The primary effect of the regulation was to prevent pilots who thought about getting psychological help from getting it. This is a lesson the FAA should have learned from its earlier experience with the issue of alcoholism, wherein a ban served mostly to make pilots really good at hiding their heavy drinking.

Now that we have predictably concluded that having 200,000,000 firearms circulating in our society is not a contributing factor to firearm-related violence, 2nd Amendment Patriots have succeeded in re-framing the argument to focus on mental illness. Are we really Doing Enough to ensure that a few Bad Apples like the Tucson shooter don't end up with guns they shouldn't have? Obviously we collectively accept that a mentally disturbed person shouldn't be able to walk into a gun shop and buy whatever he wants. Nonetheless, the focus on the shooter's apparent craziness fits the NRA gameplan to a tee. Aside from the likelihood that "tougher" restrictions on guns for people with diagnosed mental disorders will just encourage a larger number of people to deny that they need help, the NRA knows that:

1. Any discussion of the mental illness issue reduces the focus on guns themselves
2. A crackdown on mental health issues feeds directly into the paranoia that is popular among the hardcore NRA crowd ("Some librul judge and some Jew psychiatrist is gonna decide that yer crazy, and then the FBI and the Army and the Police and the surviving members of the Warren Commission are gonna come and a-take yer guns!")
3. We already know that laws banning individuals from owning guns are terribly effective
4. In the end everyone will talk in circles for a week or two and nothing at all will happen, and the status quo is always their preferred outcome

Good times. At best we'd end up with an easily circumvented system after a lengthy witch hunt against the mentally ill. More realistically we'll just get a whole lot more of the same.

One more set of comments and then I'm getting off of the Giffords thing. Palin and Glenn Reynolds and the torrential flow of stupid is making my head hurt. Like yesterday, I have two separate but related points. Unfortunately (for me) a lot of writers around the internets have already jumped on these, but I'll say my peace anyway.
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So let's talk about the 800 pound gorilla in the political aftermath of America's semimonthly mass shootings. Let's talk about guns.

1. This is not a photo of the actual weapon used in the shooting on Saturday, but it is the same caliber and with the same magazine:

Since the Assault Weapon ban was allowed to die in 2004, cheap, high capacity "extended" magazines have flooded the market. They are illegal in a handful of states but easily available online, at gun shows, and so on. No one who identifies as a strong pro-gun advocate has ever been able to offer a remotely convincing (or even plausible) answer to my question regarding the above photo: what legitimate purpose can this possibly serve?

Recreation? I'm pretty sure you can recreate with the standard 15 round magazine.

Hunting? Who in the hell hunts with a pistol? And if you did, do you need 33 rounds in case the deer call for backup? Personal defense? Well, that looks very difficult to conceal and remarkably awkward to handle, aim, and fire under duress – and once again, only in the most sophomoric Rambo fantasies can anyone concoct a scenario in which you would need to shoot 33 times at a mugger or home invader. The gun pictured above was basically designed around the firearm needs of Mexican drug cartels.

This is an example of what's wrong with gun politics, and the NRA in particular, in this country. Americans, including Ed, have no problem whatsoever with the fundamental right to own a firearm. But the NRA has been insisting for 30 years (Does anyone even realize that they used to be sane?) that Americans are guaranteed the right to own every and any type of firearm their hearts desire. This is patently false, unsupported by anything in the Constitution or laws that followed it. Armor-piercing bullets! .50 cal anti-materiel rifles! Full automatic! 35 round magazines! Hand grenades! You can't ban anything because it will be a slippery slope to banning everything!

Let's be clear: the 33 round magazine for a 9mm handgun – like the one pictured here and used in the Giffords shooting – serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever except to enhance the number of rounds that can be fired in a spree killing or drive-by shooting. On the off chance that Congress considers a knee-jerk ban on these magazines it won't matter, as tens of thousands of them already circulate in the U.S. And capacity is certainly not the only relevant factor, as the Virginia Tech shooter used handguns with standard 10- and 15-round magazines (although even the 15 was banned until 2004). What this is, however, is an excellent example of how the "Guns don't kill people" argument is deeply flawed. With 15 rounds, the Tucson shooter hits (and possibly kills) half as many people. Our insanely lenient gun laws directly resulted in him being a better and more productive killer. We have ensured that when people snap and decide to start shooting people, they can shoot more, and more powerful, ammunition.

2. Fox News is furiously pounding away at its collective pud over the non-story of the innocent bystander who was armed and rushed over to confront the shooter – the typical right-wing "saves the day with his concealed handgun" fantasy. Alas, the assailant had already been subdued by (unarmed) bystanders when Johnny Rambo arrived. What the WSJ story that started this meme neglects to mention is pretty stunning:

"I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready," he explained on Fox and Friends. "I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this.
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" Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. "And that's who I at first thought was the shooter," Zamudio recalled. "I told him to 'Drop it, drop it!' "

But the man with the gun wasn't the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. "Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess," the interviewer pointed out.

Zamudio agreed. "I was very lucky. Honestly, it was a matter of seconds. Two, maybe three seconds between when I came through the doorway and when I was laying on top of [the real shooter], holding him down. So, I mean, in that short amount of time I made a lot of really big decisions really fast. … I was really lucky."

When Zamudio was asked what kind of weapons training he'd had, he answered: "My father raised me around guns … so I'm really comfortable with them. But I've never been in the military or had any professional training. I just reacted."

In other words, the effect of Zamudio's weapon in this incident was to dramatically increase the odds that someone else who had nothing to do with the attack was shot and perhaps killed. Among right wingers, the "saves the day with guns" fantasy has cured more unresponsive penises throughout the years than all of the Viagra in the world. While it's commendable that he (and other unarmed bystanders) intervened, Zamudio is the prototype of the self-certified, self-trained, self-appointed vigilante who dreams of blazing away at the bad guys but in reality can only produce one of three outcomes:

1. Vigilante shoots the assailant. Victory parades are held in his honor.
2. Vigilante shoots additional victims, either through poor aim or mistaken identity.
3. Vigilante is shot by the real cops who arrive to find some idiot in street clothes blazing away like John Woo is directing him.

One of those three is a positive outcome, and it is arguably the least likely one by far. Just as guns kept in the home for "defense" are infinitely more likely to be used in a suicide, homicide, or firearm-related accident than to be used against actual Bad Guys, introducing more armed people into spree shooting scenarios offers poor odds of making the situation much better along with much higher odds that the situation will be made worse.

It's a great Prospect Theory problem if ever there was one.

What follows is a story that is true in every detail, a tale that is, to borrow a phrase from ex-President Bush, "uniquely American." Rather than giving away the ending, I will tell the story chronologically (and for the sake of the reader, as succinctly as possible).

Nov. 30, 2010: Recognizing that I would run out of a prescription medication sometime in early January, I called my doctor to make an appointment. As is the case with most "managed care" insurance plans such as the one offered to employees of my current university, patients are funneled through a ludicrously small number of "primary care providers" who serve as gatekeepers to specialist physicians, lab tests, outpatient care, and prescriptions through the insurer. Since it takes an average of around 6 weeks (yep) to see this overwhelmed small medical practice, calling shortly after Thanksgiving afforded me a slim chance of seeing the doctor before my pill bottle ran dry. I was lucky enough to secure an appointment, though.

Dec. 31, 2010: My Blue Cross health insurance expired effective this date because…

Jan. 1, 2011: Having had the temerity to get married in 2010, I started a new insurance plan with the new calendar year under which my spouse is also covered. The new insurer (I will point no fingers, but it rhymes with "Miser Hermanente") sent me not one piece of information in the four months (August 7 wedding) preceding this transition. Not an email, not a new insurance card, not a form letter. Nothing. I had to re-check with HR several times to ensure that I had filled out the requisite paperwork correctly. I was assured that new coverage would begin on 1/1/11.

Friday, Jan. 7, 2011: I saw my doctor for about 30 seconds. He wrote me another 12 months' worth of prescriptions and refills. See you in 2012, health care provider! I'm glad we had this talk.

Saturday, Jan. 8: Having missed the closing time of the Kroger pharmacy on Friday evening, I went to pick up my medication on Saturday morning.
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They informed me that my old insurance number was invalid.
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Never having received a new one, I called Miser Hermanente. They have no customer service reps of any kind available on weekends. None. I resolved to call them first thing on Monday and return to Kroger.

Sunday, Jan. 9: My prescription ran out. Abruptly quitting anti-seizure medications can cause…seizures. I am worried.

Monday, Jan. 10, 10 AM: I call Miser Hermanente and discover that due to inclement weather, all Georgia offices are closed and only a skeleton crew is available. The weather is no one's fault. I wait on the phone for an hour before a nice, harried lady tells me they have no record of my existence. I have no account number because "They're a little backed up entering new customers for 2011.
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" 30 minutes pass before she manages to push whatever magic buttons are necessary to enroll me in their system and give me my very own ID number for the insurance plan.

12:00: Armed with this information I return to Kroger. They cannot bill my insurer because Kroger pharmacies are not in the Miser "network." Nor is CVS. Nor Walgreen's. Nor Wal-Mart. Nor…anything except Rite-Aid, which I thought had gone out of business in the mid-80s. The nice pharmacist calls all three Rite-Aids in town to transfer the prescription. None are open due to the winter storm (or what passes for one in Georgia).

1:00-3:00: I work the phone attempting to find an open Rite Aid and arrange the necessary bureaucratic mating rituals. Shortly before the Kroger closes at 3, I find that one pharmacist has arrived late in the afternoon at an open Rite Aid 25 miles away. I catch the Kroger pharmacist as she is walking out the door. She angrily agrees to call the Rite Aid for me.

4:29: I arrive at the Rite Aid. Due to the lack of snow/ice removal equipment in the south and the complete inability of anyone in Georgia to drive a car in winter conditions, the 25 mile trip takes almost 75 minutes (I left around 3:15).

4:30: Armed with my Member ID number, I stride with pride into the empty Rite Aid. The kind pharmacist readies my medication, and none too soon. I am feeling shaky (literally and figuratively) at this point.

4:35: Apparently, says the pharmacist, Miser uses some subcontractor to manage its prescription billing and they have no record of my existence.
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My ID number and other information from Miser is useless. I call the company again. Fortunately, wait times are reduced as more employees staggered into work throughout the afternoon.

4:55: With the Rite Aid about to close (and freezing sleet starting to come down atop the snow) the Miser representative gives me a final "I give up. Call back tomorrow or something." I take out my American Express and pay $633.35 for 30 pills – about 55 hours after I went to pick up the prescription the first time.

April, 2011: Ed receives reimbursement from his insurer, although it is much less than the amount he paid because their rules state that prescriptions should be billed directly rather than paid and submitted for reimbursement.

THE MORAL: Aren't you glad we don't have government-run health care? Just imagine the high cost, poor customer service, long wait times to see a physician, and nightmare of bureaucratic hoop-jumping we would have to deal with. Why, we would have to navigate a labyrinthine bureaucracy for days on end just to refill a lousy prescription.

Even the most casually observant American, especially one who spends any non-negligible amount of time on the internet, realizes that there are a lot of nutty people in this country. Everyone has one neighbor they make a point of avoiding. Everyone has one co-worker who is a plausible candidate for an office/factory/whatever killing spree. Everyone sees anonymous comments scattered about the internet that leave little doubt that there are people out there who are…out there in more ways than one.

Given the number of nuts we know to be out there, we are remarkably tolerant of the kind of political dialogue that A) stokes the paranoia of people who are already nuts and B) strongly encourages people who could otherwise be normal and sane to adopt the attitudes, beliefs, and thought patterns of someone who is nuts. The average gun- and silver-hoarding militiaman is, by and large, a sane person capable of leading a normal life who instead withdraws into a world of conspiratorial thoughts, paranoid reasoning, and dangerous beliefs. The average 9/11 Was an Inside Job idiot is another example. These people are not born, they are created.
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They have and will always exist. The question is why America seems to have so goddamn many of them.

Part of the answer lies in our values and laws. People have the freedom to disseminate any information (factual or otherwise) or opinion they choose.

That is something that should never change. The real issue, then, is why we are so socially tolerant of behavior and belief systems that are so aberrant. Herein lies the problem. In some ways American society is stunningly judgmental; in others we are too hesitant to judge. This, I believe, is the partisan political component of Saturday's events in Arizona, because the mainstream Republican Party has fallen particularly short on this issue (although all of us share blame to some extent).

There is a very simple, useful question that we do not often enough ask in the United States, especially where politics are concerned. The GOP, in the last several years, has avoided it altogether. We need to make a concerted effort to stop excusing or encouraging insane behavior and ideas with one question: "What in the hell is wrong with you?"

No one asks that anymore, which is odd given how often the need to do so arises.

When someone shows up at a presidential event with a semiautomatic rifle over his shoulder, conservatives rush to justify it. He has a permit! It's a 2nd Amendment right! Guns don't kill people, people do! Nobody is willing to grab the guy and ask, "You brought an AR-15 to an event where the President of the United States is appearing in public? What the fuck is wrong with you?"

When a Republican candidate suggests "Second Amendment remedies" to the "problem" of having Democrats in elected office, the Republican primary voters of her state reward her with the nomination for the Senate. They do not stop and ask, "What in the hell is wrong with this person?"

When radio and TV pundits tell a country already overpopulated with potentially violent, armed nutcases that Obama is just like Hitler and Stalin and One World Government is on the way and the Federal government is coming to confiscate your guns and so on and so forth, Republicans say "Wow, look at his ratings! I gotta get me on that show!" They do not pause and ask the media personality, "What in the hell is wrong with you?"

When the Republican nominee for Vice-President distributes an advertisement with 20 Democratic members of Congress in rifle crosshairs and constantly uses what she innocently calls "hunting imagery" like "locked and loaded" to "take down" the opposition, right wingers trip over themselves to explain away her behavior as harmless. None of them look at their own movement and ask, "My God, what in the hell is wrong with some of you?"

When someone shows up at a Tea Party rally with a sign that says "We came unarmed [this time]", his fellow protesters think it's so cute that it becomes a popular catchphrase and t-shirt slogan. They don't say, "Put that down, you imbecile.

What's wrong with you?"

When a Republican media darling Congresswoman says "I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us 'having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,' and the people — we the people — are going to have to fight back hard if we're not going to lose our country", far too few people in the party are willing to ask her, "Michelle, what in the hell is wrong with you?" and her district returns her to Washington repeatedly.

When a young man devolves into incomprehensibility and obvious mental imbalance right out in public for everyone to see, he is much more likely to find a community of people with similar beliefs who will encourage him rather than a shocked society that asks, "Dude, what the hell are you talking about? You need help."

I've called out the GOP here because violent, overblown, apocalyptic, and, most importantly, false rhetoric is a much bigger problem on the right. We are all afraid to say that and they squeal like teakettles if anyone even suggests it. If your first reaction is that "both sides" share equal blame, listen to or read some Coulter, Savage, Limbaugh, Beck, et al and ask yourself who you think you are kidding. Read The Eliminationists and get back to us with some equivalent examples of "leftists" trafficking in similar rhetoric.

The point is that this is yet another opportunity for our society to reject the prosaic "just a bad apple" theory of why violence like this happens. We can say: Yes, there are always going to be nutjobs out there…so in what way is it remotely responsible for the media, party leaders, and elected officials to fan the flames with violent, paranoid rhetoric? Why is there so much rationalization and so little condemnation when we hear and see this kind of behavior? Because everyone is Entitled to Their Opinion, no matter how insane it may be. While that is true in the legal sense, it is not absolutely true.
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We need people in general, and Republicans in particular, to take a more active role in condemning this kind of rhetoric – before something terrible happens, not when the body count starts rising.

I've offered just a few examples here of the kind of words and actions that are likely to push otherwise normal people toward skewed ways of seeing their fellow Americans and to push people who are already borderline nuts over the edge. When you encounter this stuff, how do you react? Do you justify, condone, rationalize, and excuse? Or do you state in no uncertain terms that balanced people in a civilized society consider such behavior unacceptable?