AFTER THE DALLAS POLICE SHOOTING, TIME TO REFLECT… AGAIN

Summary: Five officers are dead and seven are injured in Dallas in what has been called the worst mass killing of police officers since 9/11. At this stage, we are still too early in the process to have a definitive idea what happened. Naturally, narcissists like Donald Trump, former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh, the Republican national committee, and the Westboro Baptist Church have weighed in, and the usual political food fight is just ginning up. But at this stage, it really is too early to draw definitive conclusions. Instead, it’s time for a considerate silence as we try to figure out what do we think? What do we know? What can we prove? Nonetheless, I feel disgust at having to have yet another go at this column. Jesus Christ, not again.

_____________________________________________

When the news hit concerning the mass shooting in Dallas, which left five officers dead and seven injured, my immediate frame of reference for comparison was the Sandy Hook school shooting, the events in Tucson which led to the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the death of  United States Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll, and last month's horrific mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.  But, even before that, my very first reaction was the almost invariable one of invoking the Deity.

Oh, my God. Jesus Christ, not again

My second reaction, equally ineluctable, was to ask who has done this and why.

The immediate temptation under such circumstances is to begin pointing fingers and assigning blame.  Certainly, the last 12 hours have seen a veritable feeding frenzy, as commentators, pundits, and others on both sides of the political divide lob verbal broadsides at one another, as former Congressman Joe Walsh probes the outer limits of the First Amendment with race baiting tweets, as Donald Trump tries as usual to make political capital, and as Hillary Clinton and President Obama do the adult thing, the right thing, trying to calm a shocked nation, and as the rest of us try to make sense of the worst killing of police officers since 9/11.

At some point, however, we must allow ourselves to be moved, if not by the better angels of our nature, at least by a sense of personal and professional responsibility to step back, putting our emotions aside and seeking truth from facts.

In short, we need to ask some basic questions: what do we know? what do we think?  What can we prove?

At the moment, what we know is that five officers are dead and seven officers have been wounded.  We know that a suspected shooter is dead, not shot by the police or by himself, as is usual in such situations, but blown up by a robot-deployed bomb.  We know that the suspected shooter is Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, a veteran of the Army reserve from Mesquite, Texas. We know little beyond that at this stage, such as, were there additional shooters, where their connections to any known terrorist organizations, or was the shooter just another crazy man, acting on some sort of sense of grievance, but alone?

What we think is a more problematic issue.  From this morning’s events, politicians, activists, commentators, pundits, and plain old bomb throwers have drawn whatever conclusions suit their own agenda and confirmation bias. Certainly, Donald Trump, who has been dogged recently by accusations of anti-Semitism, has seen this incident as a godsend to restore the hopes of his failing, flailing, floundering, foundering, campaign. Meanwhile, the Westboro Baptist Church, which can always be depended upon to say something outrageous in such circumstances, can be expected let fly with its usual hateful tweets, and former Republican congressman Joe Walsh has already made a fool of himself with a race baiting tweet on the subject that serve no purpose other than to probe the outer limits of the First Amendment. About the only conclusion that seems to enjoy any support at all across both sides of the aisle is that perhaps we need as a country to take a timeout, to think long and hard about the extent to which the tone of our political dialogue has served to enable extremists who prefer bullets to ballots, and about the ease of acquiring guns and ammo in our society. We also need to think long and hard about the extent to which we are enabling fanatics of every description.

Winston Churchill once famously defined a fanatic as someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.  By Winston’s definition, there may be a disturbingly large number of fanatics abroad in the land.  Fanaticism is in many ways an infantile disorder; many of us have passed through phases in life in which we have been tempted to treat every difference of opinion as irreconcilable, and every issue as a matter of unalterable principle, but for most of us, the operative word is “phase.”

What separates the fanatic from the well-adjusted person is that the fanatic remains stuck in that infantile phase.  The fanatic cannot, or will not, acknowledge the possibility that reasonable minds may differ, even on contentious issues.  Moreover, the fanatic, by forever misapplying first principles to trifles, will inevitably convince himself (and most of the great fanatics of history have been men) that not only does he possess truth with a capital T, but that those who disagree with him are in error to such an extent that they cannot be suffered to live.

Fanaticism of that kind, with its stark rejection of any view not absolutely accordant with its own, and with its sense of exclusive custodianship of the Truth (with that capital T), and its concomitant insistence that those with other views are not merely to be silenced, but eliminated, invariably arises in contexts in which disputes and controversies tend to become inflamed.

No one would argue that the downturn in our American economy has left many Americans of all political stripes fearful, fretful, and frustrated.  Difficult times have a way of fraying the fabric of civility which is -- or ought to be -- one of the critical components of a successfully functioning democracy.  When people are angry and afraid, extremism becomes not merely easy, but tempting.  And indeed, we need to take a look at this incident in the context in which it has emerged. Though it is become easy for some on the conservative side to demonize the Black Lives Matter movement, it has awakened the mind of  non-black America to a disturbing trend in which much of the law enforcement community apparently has declared open season on black males. Since March, 1991, when a group of LA cops administered a beatdown to Rodney King, the trend has been noticeable in American society.

Indeed, it is nearly 2 years since Michael Brown was “executed” by a street cop in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, we have become accustomed to a doleful litany: Eric Garner in Staten Island, Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and in just the last two days, Philando Castile outside of Minneapolis and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And yet, we continue to point accusing fingers at Black Lives Matter as if they, somehow, were the problem, as if there were a "war on cops" that is about as legitimate as the "war on Christmas" that forms a predictable trope of Fox "News" and Glenn Beck at every holiday season.

It’s easy, if you enjoy a certain measure of white privilege, to dismiss the concerns raised by Black Lives Matter. If, for example, like me, you can pass for straight, your interactions with the police, as a white male, are generally going to be respectful and professional. If your Otherness is too obviously manifest, that dynamic is altogether different. If my demeanor were to suggest to a cop who does not know me that I am in fact a queer fellow, as I am, the tension in our interpersonal dynamic would be much greater. Because, in fact, like my African-American brothers and sisters, I am an Other.  And law enforcement doesn’t deal well with Others. Law enforcement in America tends to see itself as the curator, custodian, conservator of what it considers “ought” to be the “correct” values of society. Those values tend to reflect a default paradigm of whiteness and straightness. Thus, like my African-American brothers and sisters, I tread lightly around law enforcement, because I can’t know if the cop I encounter is an ally, whether he is actually queer like me, or whether he represents that traditional law enforcement paradigm which tends to view queerfolk as cultural subversives. Though my understanding of the African-American experience with law enforcement is at best incomplete, seen through a glass darkly, as St. Paul wrote in his first epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 13:12), it does give me enough knowledge for empathy.

But while I can empathize with what Black Lives Matter is trying to say to us, I can also empathize with the pain and suffering of the survivors of last night shooting. What happened last night appears, at first approximation, to a been a cowardly and dishonorable act, meriting the strongest possible condemnation. Nonetheless, it’s too early to do more than that.

Thus, when shocking events occur, such as those which transpired in Dallas yesterday, the first and greatest challenge is to take a metaphorical deep breath, to wait before rushing in with theories, allegations, or accusations.  As Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, we have very few known knowns at this point.  There are far more known unknowns, such as the true motivations of the shooter, or whether he had assistance, or whether there were in fact others involved. It’s a pity Mr. Rumsfeld’s fellow Donald, that cheeto-faced ferret-wearing shitgibbon Donald Trump apparently had neither the decency, nor the impulse control, nor the self-awareness to clap a muzzle on his foolish mouth before sounding off in an unhelpful way that has only made the situation worse.

In the days to come, the situation will develop further; more information will presumably become available about the shooter, his motives, whether there are accomplices, and whether this morning’s events were an isolated occurrence or part of something larger and more ominous.  At the moment, however, none of these facts have been developed; the evidence is too thin to justify drawing any significant conclusions, as much as we may be tempted to do so.

 In short, we know very little, we think -- perhaps -- too much, and at the moment we don’t know what, if anything, we can prove.

Nonetheless, whether this morning’s shooting was a political act, or merely the random crime of an unbalanced individual, to the extent it may have arisen from the embittered tone of our political dialogue, or to the extent that it is a false flag, Reichstag fire incident designed to benefit the Trump campaign, it should still be a warning to us that when we lose the ability to disagree agreeably, we put our democracy at risk. It should also be a warning to us, however, that there is truth in the scriptural admonitions that as we sow, so shall we reap (Gal. 6:7) , that they who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7), and that those who draw the sword shall die by it (Matt. 26:52). We do not know, and should not venture opinions on, whether the shooting was truly an insurrectionary act – in which case, there are larger issues in play which require our urgent attention — or whether the shooting was what it may well have been in truth, the random crime of a crazy person

So today, let our thoughts and prayers be with who were injured for their recovery, as well for the repose of the souls of the five officers whose lives were so tragically cut short.  Tomorrow, and on the days that follow, it will be time again to ask what do we know?  What do we think?  What can we prove?

For now, we should observe a principled and considerate time of silence, leaving off with partisan rhetoric and poisoned comments.  A decent respect for the dead and the injured should demand no less of us.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, California, where he practices law.  He served two terms on the Cathedral City city Council from 2002-2010.  The views expressed herein are exclusively his own.  This post is adapted from the one he wrote when Congresswoman Giffords was shot and U.S. Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll was assassinated. Like President Obama, Mr. Marchand is sick and tired of having to rework the same comments every few months.

NOTE: comments on this post will be much more strictly moderated than might otherwise be the case.  Comments containing any personal attack will not be published, nor will comments that, in the view of the author, are intended to shed more heat than light.

Mr. COMEY LAYS AN EGG

Summary: FBI director James Comey laid an egg yesterday. His attempt to lay to rest the question of whether Hillary Clinton will be indicted was marred by his editorializing, and it pleased no one. To Democrats, he went too far, while to Republicans and their enablers in the national media, he didn’t go far enough. To Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders, neither one of whom would been satisfied with anything less than Hillary’s bleeding head on a spike, the director’s performance was not what they had desired. The Republican response demonstrated that the “scandal” over Secretary Clinton’s emails was nothing more then a partisan witch hunt. The response of the hipster left and the Sanders campaign was just as bad. Bernie has not played his losing hand well, having ruled himself completely out of the running with his behavior. The rest of the country, the country that works for a living, the country that is not part of the undergraduate Sanders left or the hateful Trump right, will greet this announcement with a momentary flurry of interest, followed as always, by a collective “meh.”


If FBI director James Comey thought he had laid to rest the issue of Hillary Clinton’s emails, his performance at yesterday’s press conference impressed no one. To Democrats, his performance went much too far and included extraneous political matters that should have been left out. Republicans, on the other side of the case, are having conniptions over his decision to recommend no charges be brought.

At all events, Comey managed to politicize further a process that has already been much too politicized already. The coverage has varied, depending on the partisan agenda of the institution doing the reporting. Fox “news” led the charge with its usual hyperventilating appeals to conspiracy theories and debunked, discredited notions. CNN, whose antipathy toward Hillary Clinton is an open secret, and whose drift into the camp of Donald Trump has been the subject of scornful wonder, led off its website today with half a dozen spin stories all faithfully repeating the Republican Party line.

Over at fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver and his numbers crunchers what may be the most likely verdict on the whole sorry imbroglio, that this will last one or two news cycles and be greeted by the American public with a collective “meh.”

This, notwithstanding the apoplectic reaction from the Republican national committee, various Republican lawmakers, and, most particularly, Donald Trump and diehard real or ostensible supporters of Bernard Sanders. The reaction from the right, with which I include the supporters of Bernard Sanders, was to be expected, and, with the usual exception of Donald Trump’s outraged tweets, bore all the hallmarks of preprepared, staged, indignation intended for the consumption of the base. And, of course, the right had a great deal of time to prepare. For some time now, the Bureau had been telegraphing the result of the investigation, whose expected result came as absolutely no surprise, as a whimper, not as the bang director Comey and the Republicans were hoping it would be.

But I don’t think director Comey and the Republicans were anticipating was how, in just the 24 hours since director Comey’s much vaunted, but ill advised press conference yesterday, growing questions about the legitimacy of his press conference, about the Bureau’s conduct of this investigation, and about the whole so-called email scandal have begun to emerge and flutter about like hummingbirds congregating for nectar.

Let’s take a look at how director Comey managed to cast such doubt on the legitimacy of his enterprise.

First, by adding considerable “editorial” commentary to his announcement, he lent credence to the view that the Bureau was conducting what amounted to a partisan witch hunt. He would like to have been able to refer the matter to a grand jury, but apparently, his judgment as a member of the Bar and an officer of the court overrode his partisan inclinations in this case. Nonetheless, his extraneous, uncalled-for, remarks clearly were intended by him to serve as Republican talking points for the general election campaign. This is not the first time that an FBI Director’s disdain or antipathy toward a high-ranking official has called the legitimacy of the Bureau itself into question. 

FBI Director Louis Freeh’s clearly demonstrated antipathy toward President Bill Clinton helped cast significant doubt on the legitimacy of the effort to drive him from office. The FBI director seems to have forgotten the lessons of the past, and by allowing himself to take political potshots at Secretary Clinton, to squander the FBI’s political capital as an impartial enforcer of the laws, possessed of unimpeachable integrity. Instead, we seem to have retreated 50 years to the time when J. Edgar Hoover was in charge of an agency that was to all intents and purposes a state within a state, or what we might now call a bulwark of the so-called Deep State.

Worse even than Director Comey’s missteps has been the unseemly Republican display of outrage, all of it nakedly partisan, and none of it even remotely connected to legitimate concerns over national security. When House Speaker Paul Ryan and his colleagues in Congress and at the Republican national committee had their collective conniptions, calling for investigations of the investigation, it was as clear as if they had shouted from the housetops their partisan anger at the FBI investigation’s outcome.

We should recall the remarks of Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Bakersfield’s gift to American politics, who admitted the partisan motivation for the investigations of Secretary Clinton, saying “[e]verybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.” The Washington Post swiftly and mercilessly dissected Mr. McCarthy’s remarks noting that “[t]he Republican-led House hasn’t been particularly good at governing, but perhaps governing has never been the point. Why govern when there’s a future election to influence?”

For director Comey, a Republican stalwart who contributed to both John McCain and Mitt Romney, there was political capital to be made from going in front of the press and delivering an announcement that went considerably beyond his agency’s brief. It was the FBI’s job to determine whether criminal prosecution was warranted and whether there should be referral to federal prosecutors. Everything else beyond that, as we have noted above, was surplusage, and Comey should have known it.

But if Comey's ill considered and gratuitous remarks, together with the predictable, but utterly unconvincing partisan outrage from the Republicans were not enough to demonstrate that what has taken place is indeed a partisan witch hunt, which would probably never have been set in train against a male former Secretary of State, and which has even less substance to it than the alleged misdoings of former CIA Director John Deutch, his foolishness, and the misconduct of Republicans on the Hill is nothing compared to the misbehavior of Donald Trump and of the Bernard Sanders campaign.

Trump’s reaction, of course, was utterly predictable. When the man-baby, or as the Scots describe him, the cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon, who has absolutely no impulse control, took to Twitter, his tweets were the usual-for-shitgibbon stuff: whines about how the system is “rigged,” attacks on any target who enters his field of vision, and the by now nauseating self-pity in which he so constantly indulges. The performance was typical, vintage Trump, and while it may have thrown red meat to his base, it did little to assuage the growing discomforts of many Republicans, and did absolutely nothing at all to attract the uncommitted and alienated voters he needs to have any hope of victory this November.

Also calling into question the legitimacy of the FBI’s findings was the “meltdown” of diehard, white privileged, Bernard Sanders supporters, who like man-baby, shitgibbon Trump, took to Twitter to express their disappointed outrage that their magical thinking had not produced the results they wanted. For the diehard Sanders people, the angry Bernie Bros and Bernie Bro-ettes who make up the diminishing “never surrender,” “100 million die together” remnant of the so-called Bernie or bust movement, the FBI’s decision not to recommend criminal charges against Secretary Clinton knocked the last prop out from under their magical thinking belief that Bernie’s path to the nomination, now closed to him, would somehow magically reopen if only Hillary were indicted. When, of course, the FBI investigation did not produce the desired indictment, such as Sanders supporters as That Idiot Rosario Dawson, Mark Ruffalo, and, of course, the unbelievably un-self-aware Susan Sarandon, took to Twitter like little Trumps venting their infantile disappointment, and suggesting that they had, once again, been “victimized.” Along with them, much of the hipster left found itself in mourning that one of their fondest pet theories had been put down.

Of course now that would’ve happened had Bernard Sanders not grossly maladroitly overplayed a losing hand. Against his two pairs of deuces and treys, ten high, Secretary Clinton could play a high inside straight, reflecting the careful, methodical style in which she waged a campaign. Unfortunately, neither the Senator nor his supporters seem to have played much poker. The Senator had an opportunity to leverage his position into a possible vice presidential nomination or high-ranking cabinet post  – had he been smart enough to have suspended his campaign and endorsed Hillary Clinton the day after the June 7 California primary. At the same time the Vermont Senator ought to have instructed his supporters to get with the program and flip their support to Hillary Clinton.

Instead, Bernie insisted on tergiversating, equivocating, triangulating, and making demands which he had no right to make. Had he been full throated in his support of Hillary Clinton, and had he taken the necessary steps to achieve party unity on the best terms he could get, even if they weren’t the terms he wanted, he would right now the enjoying a reservoir of goodwill from all parts the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, Bernie chose to take the Leninist Road of his youth. Considering all differences of opinion to be irreconcilable, Bernie encouraged the militant tendency among his supporters toward foolish, Trotskyite thinking. Instead of telling his hipster left supporters to get with the program, Bernie encouraged a dangerous tendency toward what has come to be known as “puritopian” thinking, in which the perfect is not only the enemy of the good, is the enemy of the best and most practical policy obtainable.

As Bernard Sanders’s hopes go glimmering, the anger from his puritopian supporters, or at least the decreasing percentage of them which is not come home to Hillary, has grown. Because the Senator will not admonish his supporters, and will do nothing to bring them into the fold, they have decided that they would prefer to bern the country down, to “heighten the contradictions” in American society in the hopes of provoking some sort of revolution in the near future. As both Soviet and Maoist theoreticians might observe, this is a “right deviationist error.” To the extent that Bernie Sanders is indulging in magical thinking with his refusal to endorse Hillary Clinton and get on board with her, he is engaged in “right deviationist” thinking.

But one thinks that Senator Sanders is aware of his right deviationism, and that he embraces it. One is forced to the regrettable conclusion that Bernard Sanders really does want Donald Trump to be victorious this November. That, like his hipster left followers, Bernard Sanders wants to heighten the contradictions American society to the point where they will explode into some sort of outbreak of “revolutionary” violence. The only way that Sanders can accomplish this Leninist objective is to ensure a Trump victory by acting as an active fifth columnist within the Democratic Party. Sadly for the Ilyich from Burlington, not only is Hillary Clinton not facing the indictment he desires, but the Democratic Party is also rallying to her in unexpectedly large numbers and with an unexpectedly cohesive degree of unity.

Hillary Clinton emerged from yesterday with a distinctly equivocal victory, but it is still a victory, if only for having brought vexation to the Republican Party and their media outlets, to Donald Trump, and to Bernard Sanders and his diminishing cohort of hipster holdouts.