It is one of the more humorous phrases in the English language. Seems in Great Britain there are all kinds of signs on their subways to “mind the gap”. Of course, they are talking about the space between the sidewalk and the train. However, when I hear that phrase something a lot more sinister comes to mind. In the political science world gaps become a lot more interesting. This is particularly true when evaluating the past. At least then we aren’t in any danger.

I'm sorry, Texas but…

You re-elected Greg Abbott…and you thought somehow things would change?

You RE-ELECTED GREG ABBOTT and thought that mass shootings would magically go away?

You had a chance to do something…

BUT YOU RE-ELECTED GREG ABBOTT.

And it wasn't even close.

— Malcolm P. Johnson (@admiralmpj) May 7, 2023

Of course, the implication here is that Texans are getting what they want. Elections have consequences and we are obviously living through these times. I get the sentiment here and it obviously rings true when we look at the world from 30,000 feet. However, when we start magnifying the situation we see some cracks in that veneer. For one, we know that this is a singular issue and people obviously don’t vote with this issue in mind on election day. For another, we know that the Texas Democratic party is a mess and can’t seem to get out of their own way when it comes to winning statewide office.

As electrifying as Beto O’Rourke was and can still be, he seems to have “foot in mouth” disease when it comes to his position on things. There are a lot of progressives in Texas, but Texas just isn’t a progressive state and you aren’t going to win statewide office spouting views that most Texans find to be extreme. I can decry that and lament that fact, but wringing my hands over this point isn’t going to win any elections.

Politics used to be a lot simpler. People used to acknowledge reality. We got our news from one of the three major networks and from the local newspaper. We often felt differently about particular events and particular issues, but we all acknowledged that they happened and that they existed. We could all agree on a commonly agreed upon set of facts. We interpreted these facts differently and gave them different priorities, but we were a lot closer on these things. If you want to conduct an experiment then spend five or six hours watching MSNBC or CNN and then spend the next day watching Fox News, Newsmax, or OAN. It would be one thing if we heard a different perspective on the important stories of the day. After the experiment you would be convinced that these were either two different countries or two different times.

Far be it from me to identify reality through the noise. Maybe part of the problem is just naturally assuming we know what is right or wrong. That being said, we can see that both of those use fear in a way to reach their audience. One may focus on Hunter Biden and his laptop while another may focus on the former president and his many crimes. Yet, events like we have witnessed the past several weeks only gain significance when they are covered. If all I see is Hunter’s laptop then I am led to believe that Hunter’s laptop is the main thing that matters. It makes perfect sense. After all, why would you talk about it all the time if it didn’t matter? So, the above is not really what people want. It is what people are told they should want. Eventually the gap between objective reality and manufactured reality become untenable. That’s usually when there is some sort of revolution. We can only hope it is the non-violent kind, but I seriously have my doubts.

Successful electoral politics in the United States is ultimately about setting up successful dichotomies. There is you and your opponent and more people are like you. This is what all the “woke” nonsense is all about. The GOP realize they are on the wrong side of almost all of these issues. They are on the wrong side demographically and on just about every major domestic and foreign policy issue. The only way forward for them is to paint the left is somehow extreme and that they really are the “silent majority.”

If that phrase seems familiar to you it should. It has been a part of the conservative blueprint for more than half a century. It’s time to throw that whole sentiment on it’s ear. The basic campaign that Joe Biden needs to run is a run on basic decency. While certainly not a perfect man and not the ideal standard bearer for liberals, progressives, and leftists, Biden is easily the most decent person on the ballot. That is particularly true when compared with the entire GOP field.

A series of stories circulated this week that drive this point home. The first on my radar was the story of an assistant principal that was kicked so many times that she ended up having seizures and had to be hospitalized. The second involved a man that killed all of his neighbors after they complained about the loud gunfire at his house. The third story involved a man that shot a parking attendant over 40 dollars and then returned to the restaurant and completed his date.

I witnessed a hit and run on the way back home from a trip this past weekend. A truck had to stop suddenly because of traffic. He simply had to get somewhere quickly, so he quickly changed lanes and just shoved an SUV over so he could occupy the lane. He didn’t stop. He just kept going. These are four stories in the span of a week. Pick any seven day time span at any point on the calendar and you can either read or watch these stories unfold in fairly similar fashion.

Two of these stories involved guns. Two of them didn’t. Some involved young people and some didn’t. Some involved people of color and some didn’t. I point out that all of them involved men, but I don’t know if that is a relevant factor here. I wish I could say that all of them involved conservatives but that would be a stretch and would be irresponsible. What I can say is that they involved four different sets of people that were not decent people. Decent people do decent things. Indecent people do indecent things.

I can comfortably say that I’ve never done any of these things. I don’t see me kicking someone while they are lying helpless on the ground. I don’t own a gun, so the two gun stories are out for me. I’ve had accidents, but I’ve never fled from them. I would reasonably expect that most of you are with me here on those counts. I know some of you own guns, but I doubt you’ve shot anyone on a first date. I would guess that the vast majority of Americans are in the same boat. The MAGA crowd applaud these people. They are those people. Whether they would do it themselves or not is immaterial. They represent the indecency that has become MAGA. It’s time for the silent majority to vote out indecency.

 

“Not my job.”
“Nothing we can do.”
“Not our role.”
“Shit happens.”

These four statements are the total and complete strategy of the New Trumplican Party regarding public policy that protects the citizens they represent.  Politicians in the Trumplican party seek office for one reason and one reason only, and that is to grab, and then keep power.  There is no thought given to public policy that helps anyone (except for themselves and their patrons).  The public policy initiatives they pursue are purely cynical, designed to keep their gerrymandered base wrapped around the axle and ready to explode at any minute.  Their ENTIRE strategy is to keep their alternate dimension dark, dangerous, unstable, unhappy, and increasingly fearful.  That’s it, period, the end.

The key feature of this strategy, which I call The Dodge, is to do nothing to prevent massive tragedies, then heap blame on strawmen to deflect responsibility for their own negligence.  The most advantageous feature of this strategy is that nothing bad ever sticks to them.  From statewide power outages to mass shootings in schools, The Dodge allows those in charge of governing to brush those off to “free market” principles or “god given constitutional rights.”  “There’s nothing we can do because constitutional freedoms won’t let us,” is the rote answer to all gun violence.  The “free market” is also a common excuse; here’s one –  “healthcare must be free market.”  This Dodge allows insurance companies to overprice and deny health coverage to millions of Americans.  Another good one is, “We won’t talk about immigration reform until the border is 100% sealed and there are zero border crossings.”  Since “sealing the border” is impossible, they have the excuse to never have to do anything.

Abbott is masterful at The Dodge.  He paid no political price for his incompetence and corruption with both ERCOT and the PUC that caused the massive power outages that cost hundreds of billions of dollars to the economy and cost as many as 700 Texans’ lives.  “Free market” was his excuse as well as bald faced lying by blaming wind turbines for the outage.  He also did it during the pandemic, providing zero support for closed businesses to protect people from the spread, and then using economic deprivation as an excuse to open the economy far too early, even overruling local government officials actually trying to protect people.  After causing thousands of unnecessary deaths, Abbott then blamed the CDC, the WHO, China, Anthony Fauci, Peter Hotez, Lina Hidalgo, and other “liberals” to cynically gain political advantage using illness and deaths that he caused as a weapon.

We’re not surprised when shitbags like Abbott, Patrick, Cruz, Cornyn, McCarthy, and many others use The Dodge to avoid accountability for their own corruption.  However, the most shocking and disgusting abusers of The Dodge are the six SCOTUS judges that now say that the Court has no role to play in reining in massive extreme gerrymandering, protecting voting rights, stopping unlimited buying of elections by billionaires, preventing massive pollution enabled by their rollback of EPA regulations, stopping the rewriting of the Second Amendment to create a right for idiots to carry and use assault weapons in public, and protecting women’s right to equal protection under Roe v. Wade.

These politicians (I’m including SCOTUS justices in that description) use The Dodge to deflect all responsibility for their own incompetence and profound corruption.  And it works.  By continually piling on boogeyman after boogeyman they can blame everyone and everything for problems they create or fail to solve.  Such boogeymen include(d) gays, ACORN, those who “hate the troops”, immigrants, China, gays, “gun grabbers”, “welfare queens”, gangs, gays, drug cartels, old people, “radical Democrats”, gays, “voter fraud”, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, transgender kids, drag performers, gays, and, last but not least, wokeness.  Oh, and gays.

By creating these boogeymen, these politicians accomplish their key goal which is gaining and staying in power by avoiding accountability.  They couldn’t care less if you live or die.  The textbook examples of this callousness is their disregard of human lives taken my massive gun violence and their willingness to sacrifice the old and sick for the economy during the pandemic.  If you doubt any of this conclusion, I invite you to listen to Rep. Burchett (T) Tennessee:

’nuff said.

I write about gun violence on occasion knowing full well that it’s an exercise in futility.  Why?  Easy; our elected representatives, our law enforcement organizations, and now the courts have been overtaken by weirdos and ideologues who have morphed the powers of local, state, and federal government from “law and order” to an alternate reality believing that overturning over 200 years of legal precedent and history and putting guns into the hands of everyone is somehow sane public policy.  We’re 24 days into the new year and have already had 40 mass shootings in the US, killing 74 and wounding 170.  In that same period of time, over 2,800 people have died from guns and over 2,100 have been wounded.  Gun violence has overtaken car accidents and drug overdoses as the leading cause of death in children in America.

There has been an unrelenting effort by the gun lobby to rewrite the Second Amendment from its original intent into a gun-humper’s dream.  The amendment that provided for a citizen army to protect the newly formed government in the late 1700s has been turned onto its head with junk law and fake “studies” to turn the amendment into a Guns for Everyone ideology.  In unwinding 200 years of case law, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito have relied on bullshit and junk law to justify their politically motivated rulings which included gutting Washington, DC and New York gun safety laws.  They’ve relied on a doctrine of  “originalism” which, translated from Bullshit to English, is an excuse to turn everything on its head forcing 21st century technology into an 18th century framework of law.  The Heller case was the death blow to sanity by declaring that an amendment that provided for a citizen army lead by state and local authorities was actually enumerated a person right for any idiot to carry a firearm anywhere he/she damn well pleased.  Using this insanity, even more insane state politicians use the same junk law codified by the SCOTUS to unwind centuries of gun safety laws all over the country.  As Michael Waldman, Director of the Justice Brennan Center at NYU Law, said after the Court struck down the NY gun safety law,

“The ruling Thursday says that all these judges got it wrong. Instead, the majority said, courts must assess gun rules especially focusing solely on ‘history and tradition.’ Don’t look at public safety; search for analogies to past laws from a very different time.”

Waldman has written extensively about the history of the effort to rewrite the Second Amendment.  The gun lobby did it in plain sight, pumping out bullshit and fake studies while at the same time paying Republicans to kill federal funding into gun violence for almost 40 years.  Add that to decades of gutting the ATF and attacking any authority trying to curb gun violence, and the takeover of America by gun nuts is complete.  SCOTUS has already communicated that the gun safety law debate is over and insanity won.  The Congress won’t protect us, the President can’t effectively act alone so he can’t help; red state governments have completely unraveled what gun safety law we had left, and ideologues sue local and state governments who dare try to protect their citizens.  This war is lost.

Until the Court was bought by the multi-billion dollar Federalist Society, we had a chance.  But that was lost with the triple assist from TFG.  The SCOTUS is now a zombie court that has asserted that it has no authority to protect Americans from massive gun violence, radical gerrymandering and unlimited money that has completely corrupted our elections and destroyed democracy from within.  This war is lost so we have two choices – give up and go arm ourselves and join in the chaos and carnage; OR fight back.  Grass roots is all that’s left and the job is massive.

The only solution to this dystopian alternate reality is to get rid of the Second Amendment.  I know that sounds crazy, but we’re already up to our eyeballs in crazy, so we have nothing to lose.  In 2018, Justice John Paul Stevens proposed just this in an op-ed in the NY Times.  He was right then, and remains right today.  Let’s stop niggling over definitions of assault weapons and semi-auto firearms.  The solution is to start – and win –  a new war that takes back the safety of our citizens away from the gun nuts and zealots.  I know that by no means is this going to be easy, but it’s the only solution left.

Texas is now distributing DNA kits to schools.  Abbott signed the law to do so at the end of the 2021 legislative session, feigning that they were to be distributed to identify children who were kidnapped and trafficked.  The occurrence child kidnapping is tragic, but rare.  What is more common, especially in Texas, is mass shootings by deranged young men who are legally allowed to purchase assault rifles and unlimited ammunition that can kill dozens of kids in just a few minutes.  The law was passed after the mass shooting at a public school in Santa Fe.  The state says the kits are to be used in the event of an “emergency” and are trying to make it about kidnapping, but since bullets fired from an AR-15 cause massive injuries, including decapitating 6 year old school children, the kits are necessary to identify the bodies of victims of these now commonplace shootings.  In Uvalde, some of the children’s bodies were so mangled that they had to be identified by their shoes.

The answer to mass shootings is unbelievably “complicated”, and only 32 of 33 advanced countries around the world have figured it out.  The only way we stop these shootings is banning these weapons and the ammunition shot from them.  We can only do that with brave leadership.  Because Americans don’t vote like they should, that brave leadership will never materialize and the problem won’t be fixed.  The gun and DNA kit manufacturers are perfectly happy with the status quo.

 

Yesterday, the leaders of Texas and the GOP held one of their perfunctory press conferences. It was one of those deals where we decry the tragedy, offer our thoughts and prayers to the families of the victims, and tell ourselves there was nothing that we could have done to prevent it. One of these is done by rote. One of these are empty. One is a lie. I’ll leave you to figure out which one is which.

 

Yesterday, the Democratic contender for the governor of Texas decided to interrupt the proceedings. His message was simple. The performance art on stage was exactly that. We know how to prevent these things. We knew it would happen. We know not the exact time or the exact place, but we knew it would happen. Then, he was given the message we all are given in this moment: you are politicizing a tragedy.

Beto wasn’t taking it and decided to cause a scene. I’m not sure if what he did will help or hurt his election chances. My gut tells me a few things. First, it tells me that 95 percent or more of the voting public has already made up their minds. My gut tells me most Texans agree with Beto and most Texans think Greg Abbott has been a disastrous governor. My gut tells me all of this won’t matter and that Abbott will somehow win the election anyway.

Yesterday morning, our daughter texted us from school. She was hiding in a closet in her Chemistry classroom. She was looking around for items to throw in case a gunman penetrated the classroom and the closet space. It was somewhere between 15 minutes and 30 minutes until the district and/or news organizations finally said everything was okay. Those were the longest 15 to 30 minutes of my life.

Earlier this year, they essentially lost two days to bomb threats. We went through the same cycle of worry, dread, and relief. These two events are cruel reminders that we don’t have the control we think we do. They are cruel reminders that all of this can end in the blink of an eye. They are cruel reminders that we can’t afford to wait until “the time is right” to politicize a mass shooting.

Unfortunately, there is always a mass shooting in the forefront of our brain. Maybe we can politicize Buffalo now. In Texas, maybe we can politicize Santa Fe now. Maybe we can politicize church shootings, mall shootings, theatre shootings, and concert shootings. Maybe someone should send out a rule. Maybe it could be a mandatory waiting period.

I say to hell with that. I am not going to lose my daughter because a right wing politician doesn’t want to somehow suppress the image of 20+ dead Texas children and teachers while they accept a check from the gun lobby. I am not going to lose my daughter because the NRA wants to have their show and advertise their wares on the same week as a mass shooting in their state. If you are going to have the audacity to do that then you will have to stomach all of it. You will have to stand there and tell the world that you care more about someone’s right to own an automatic weapon than about the lives of school children. I’m going to politicize every damn second of it.

Either lives matter or they don’t. Either you care about the safety and security of our children or you don’t. Either you have compassion for all of the people walking this Earth or you don’t. Certainly compassionate and caring adults can differ on policy. We are all adult enough to realize that. Compassionate and caring adults do not have a waiting period to solve a problem. If the floods are coming you don’t make people wait to develop solutions not to drown. When people are freezing to death you don’t tell them that heat is political and shouldn’t be discussed during the crisis. The notion is patently ridiculous. When our children are being blown away at school it is most definitely a crisis and it is most definitely political. We better talk about it right damn now before the next one of these happens again.