Dear Speaker Ryan:

If I may, I’d like to offer a few thoughts on your recent selfie with Republican congressional interns.

As you probably are aware, the Intertubes — snarky bastards that they are — immediately noticed that one thing about the photo.  Was it all the smiling, happy faces of the hopeful young, proud to be interning on Capitol Hill?  Was it your charming face?  (You are handsome, although I’d loosen up the hair a bit or regrow your stubble.) Was it your natural ease with a selfie stick?

Alas, no one seems to have given you credit for any of that.  I will, though.  Kudos for providing these young people such a great opportunity to serve their nation and a start on their path to the corridors of power.  Kudos for giving them (and their proud parents) such a cool moment to remember.  Kudos for your wit in titling your Instagram shot: “I think this sets a record for the most number of #CapitolHill interns in a single selfie. #SpeakerSelfie.”

No, the one thing that everyone noticed about the photo was how white it was.¹

Can we talk?

I don’t believe for a second that you or anyone on your staff have excluded people of color from your intern opportunities, although there are some of your fellow congresspersons about whom I am not sure I could say the same.  I’m sure you can very honestly say that the young men and women in the photo are exceptional and, while probably well-connected, the most qualified for the position.

Nor do I believe that anything about this selfie gave you pause.  It never dawned on you that the rest of America might think, “Hm, that group of people looks awfully… homogeneous…”  Nor did it dawn on you that the rest of America might think, “Mhm.  Republicans, amirite?”

Surely you can see what a problem this is for your party.  Even though you did not mean to send the message, the rest of the America got it loud and clear.  Remember Ballew’s Law of Theatre: The audience is always right, even when it’s wrong.²

You’re smart enough to fix this.  You know what you have to do.  In order not to have to second guess every photo op like this, you have to have a room full of people who more accurately represent the rest of America.  And for that to happen, you have to hire those people.

But what if they don’t apply?  That’s a very good question.  Here’s another very good question, which I hope has already occurred to you: if people of color, qualified people of color, are not applying to intern for Republican congresspersons, why not?  And how can you change that?

Can you change that?

Best wishes,

etc.

UPDATE: http://crooksandliars.com/2016/07/organizers-scrambling-replace-white

Merciful Cthulhu, eat me first.

—————

¹ If you like, see if you can spot the one kid of color in the photo.  It’s like Where’s Waldo? only different.

² Dr. Leighton Ballew, the genius director and founder/chair of the Department of Drama and Theatre at the University of Georgia back in the day.

Oh, Allen West, you adorable lunkhead! Here’s the deal, folks: people like Allen West got to be famous by stampeding the amygdalas, and they continue to rake in the old grift money by continuing to stampede the amygdalas.

What am I babbling about?  Here, from today’s FaceTubes: Illinois May Be The First To Do This For Muslims

Here’s the scary photo:

The writer wants you to connect that photo with Illinois.¹

I think I’ve dissected a piece like this before, where the writer (in this case not actually the lunkhead Allen West himself) clickbaits with a horrific headline/cutline, then copy/pastes a straight news item without a trace of the panic that informs the headline.  You get a couple of breathless introductory paragraphs, the copy/paste stuff (boring!), and then you get a pivot to something completely irrelevant — in this case the Muslim Brotherhood, which is framed as a significant threat to the U.S.  Which it is not.

Then you get to the last paragraph:

Are councils like this part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s grand plan? Not difficult to see it that way. And once this starts happening in Illinois, how long before it spreads across the country?

Definitely something to think about, isn’t it?

Ooga — and, dare I say it? — Booga!

Allow me to summarize:

• Here’s a thing we’re all scared of.²
• It could be coming true!³
• [copy/paste of completely un-scary news item]
• Here’s another thing we’re even more scared of and which we’ve endowed with super powers of evil!
• Are they related?  MAYBE!!⁴
• You should now assimilate this into your brain-thoughts as proven fact! RELEASE THE AMYGDALAS!

If this were turned into me in a journalism class, the writer would fail.

—————

¹ Spoiler alert: the photo is not from Illinois.  It is from Egypt, the super secret lair of the Muslim Brotherhood.  I forget whether they’re Marvel or DC.

² For differing values of all.  And scared.

³ It is not coming true.

⁴ They are not related.

So, it seems that one of the favorite shibboleths of the gun fondlers is that these mass shootings often occur in a “gun free” zone, like a school or a church or some place where, I don’t know, reasonable people might reasonably assume they’re not going to get shot.¹

“Sitting ducks” is how the gunhumping crowd describes the victims who apparently assumed incorrectly that they were safe.  If schools and churches and bars and other such places allowed guns, then those very sad deaths would not have occurred.

But I have to take exception to their argument.  These zones are not “gun free,” are they?  That’s just what we’d like them to be: free of guns.  We tell people, “Hey, no guns here!” and that’s what reasonable people who reasonably assume they’re not going to be shot there will do.  They don’t bring guns.

But nothing ever prevents a person with a gun from bringing one there.  They are not “gun free” zones at all, are they?

So saying that gun free zones are useless and should be done away with so that gun fondlers can protect us from the bad guy with the gun is kind of dumb.  There are no gun free zones in this country.

Oh, wait.

There are gun free zones in this country.  Perhaps we could look at those spaces and see how many people die in them from being shot when they had reasonably assumed they wouldn’t be.

We have the U.S. Congress, for starters.  No guns are allowed there.  Yes, security has guns, but those guys are heavily trained and heavily licensed, and not even they would be allowed to bring their gun into the Capitol if they showed up with Aunt Sally for a tour, would they?  So there’s an actual, honest-to-Cthulhu gun free zone.

How many people have been shot and killed in the U.S. Congress?  Go google that.  (Spoiler alert: the only people who have been shot in the U.S. Congress are those who tried to bring a gun into the gun free zone.  It’s almost as if they intend to have no guns there.  Because of not wanting to be shot or something.)

Hey, here’s another gun free zone: The Republican National Convention in Cleveland!  (You will have noticed that both zones are stocked to the gills with employees of the National Rifle Association, i.e., congresscritters and Republickers.)

I rallied to the cause a couple of months ago and signed the petition to allow guns in the Republicker convention.  After all, don’t they want it to be safe?  How can it be safe if it’s a gun free zone?

However, we were soon informed that while the NRA employees who are convening there might be sympathetic to our freedomz because freedom, the Secret Service made the rules and they’re the ones who have made it gun free.

Huh.  It’s like the Secret Service thinks that guns are a safety issue and would somehow complicate their job of making sure that Donald Drumpf can reasonably assume he’s not going to be shot there.  Weird.

And have you noticed that the NRA has not called to overturn the Secret Service’s rules about the Republicker convention?  Why isn’t Wayne LaPierre ranting about the restriction of his employees’ precious Second Amendment rights to pack heat on the floor of the Quicken Loans Arena?  Why is he allowing their rights to be crushed by the tyrannical overreach of the federal government?

Here’s the point: when it comes right down to it, the only way to keep people from being shot is to guaran-damn-tee that there are no guns.  That’s the bottom line, and all the whinging about Second Amendment rights cannot change that.

The only argument that the gunhumpers can make is that if they’re allowed to play Good Guy with a Gun, then the number of shooting deaths at your child’s school might only be eight instead of 26.  They do not — because they can not — promise zero deaths.

Oh, and the Second Amendment?  About that.

—————

¹ You will notice that the NRA has not made that an issue with the Dallas shootings.

“We’ll do plenty of stories,” Mr. Trump promised enigmatically. “O.K.?”  [NYT, 6/7/16]

With all due respect to reporters Jason Horowitz, Alexander Burns, and Maggie Haberman, enigmatically is not the word you’re looking for.  Enigmatically implies there is a secret reality that is being concealed.

There is no secret reality.  Trump has nothing in his head but the words that come out of his mouth. The word you’re looking for to describe Donald J. Trump’s response is cluelessly.

Just kidding.  The people who make these things up are impermeable to any form of logic, even ones that involve simple pictures.

Today on the FaceTubes:

Oh, where to begin?  Let’s start with the easy stuff, the inevitable grammar errors: State Department is capitalized, please, as is Muslims, and our sentences need a period at the end, don’t they, Johnny?

Okay.  Let’s untangle the presumptions first.

#1: The State Department had an opportunity to intervene in the events of Sep 11, 2012, at the American compound in Benghazi, Libya, and for some reason decided not to, resulting in the deaths of four Americans.  The implication is that this action was deliberate, callous, and probably criminal.

#2: The feckless—and yet omnipotent—Obama administration is preparing to bring over nearly a quarter of a million Muslim refugees (a word curiously missing from the poster) and saddle our taxpayers with the cost.  The implication is twofold: a) those people are terrorists; and b) “those people.”¹

The point of the poster is to convince the reader that since the State Department weren’t competent enough to accomplish presumption #1, they are likewise clearly not competent enough to accomplish #2, which in any case they shouldn’t even be doing.

First, boys and girls, before we can address the legitimacy of the argument, we should examine the truth of each presumption.

Despite the fevered dreams of the right wing, the tragedy of Benghazi was not due to the criminal masterminds of the State Department.² To date, there have been seven investigations of the event by the Republican-controlled Congress.  The results have been published, and not one of them found that the State Department failed to take action that could have prevented the loss of life.  The most popular shibboleth amongst the brethren is that orders were given to military air support/rescue missions to “stand down”; no such orders were given.

Currently Trey Gowdy and the House Select Committee have covered themselves with embarrassment by digging and digging and digging for two years to find something—anything—that would justify its $7 million cost so far, and yet they have not issued a report despite taking longer than the Watergate investigation.  Popular opinion is that they are waiting until the Democratic convention or the election to release something embarrassing to Hillary Clinton, but I’m beginning to believe they’re stalling because they have nothing and they know if they release a report it will knock the props out from under their favorite hobbyhorse.  As long as they keep mum, then they can continue to insinuate that Clinton is History’s Greatest Monster™ without having the media call them the liars they are.

update (6/27): Called it.

As for refugees: Nope. Nope.  And nope.  And benefits?  Here you go, straight from the horse’s mouth.  (As for Social Security benefits, nope.)

So, both presumptions are lies.³

Even if we believed that both presumptions were true, however, the argument is still specious. The events of presumption #1 were essentially an act of war, as in “fog of” and all that.  Events on the ground were fast, furious, unknowable, and unstoppable.  Much hay has been made of the fact that the first official statements on the attack said they were triggered by some YouTube video, but the only stone I would cast would be to advise government officials against saying anything definite while events are unfolding.  You know, like “Donald Trump is possibly bankrupt.  ALLEGEDLY.”

Meanwhile, even if we were preparing to flood our fair nation with 200,000 terrorists, the process there is an excruciatingly deliberate 2-year process.  Plenty of time to send in rescue helicopters.  Or something.  These people aren’t good at thinking their parallel situations through.

In other words, presuming the incompetence of the State Department in handling a terrorist attack does not lead to the same presumption about a process which is part of their daily job description and which has been for a very long time.

Come on, people, peek out from behind your amygdalas a little bit and see if you can find better, more logical reasons to overthrow the government.

(And of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t examine the little attribution in the lower right corner: “Outlaw Liberalism In America.”  Honey, please.  Grammar note: it’s usual not to capitalize prepositions.)

—————

¹ You know, “those people.”  The ones who get all the free stuff, and not just the pitiable amount given to our deserving (white) poor people. “Those people” get the good welfare that allows you to buy crab legs, iPhones, and new cars.

² Where State Department = Hillary Clinton. Let’s be honest here.

³ I know, but pretend you’re shocked.

Today on the FaceTubes:

The jaw drops, does it not?

The Lyles Rule of Interwebs F***ery¹ states that if it’s too outrageous to be true, THEN IT’S NOT.²

One second of googling was enough to reveal that this thing was a lie.  Look at this:

Google didn’t even wait for me to space before giving me a heads up.  And then of course the results themselves were immediate.

So I have some questions.

• Who is the liar who made this up?
• If you posted this without checking to see if it were true,³ why did you think it was true?
  • Why do you think you need it to be true?
  • Because wouldn’t you rather live in a world where it was not true?
  • Why do you think the liar who made this up wants you to believe it’s true?

This kind of thing drives me crazy.  I know we’re dealing with half a nation of stampeded amygdalas, but this would seem to me to be a defining moment for anyone.  What kind of fear and anger are you living with that leads you to believe this outrageous lie and to post it without checking to see whether—somehow—incredibly—the National Football League would make such a self-evidently stupid own goal?⁴

And more importantly: who is making up these lies?  Even Snopes doesn’t seem to give much credence to their half-hearted explanation.  This meme is not an honest mistake; it’s an outright lie.⁵  I want this person found.  I want this person named.  I want this person’s photograph plastered all over the FaceTubes like the rapist Brock Turner.  I want him exposed as a liar to all the world.  I want everyone who believed him to start asking themselves why they wanted to believe it was true.

I know, the conservatives are right: libtards live in a fantasy universe.

—————

¹ That word is Flowery.  I’m pretty sure.

² Unless it’s something Donald T. Trump said.  Then it’s probably true.  But verify anyway before reposting stupid shit, people!

³ BECAUSE IT’S NOT TRUE, KENNETH!

⁴ Or whatever they call it in that particular sportsball.

⁵ Or if it is some idiot’s misinterpretation of the facts as outlined by Snopes, why the hell would they jump to that conclusion?  We’re back in Lyles Rule territory.

Today on the FaceTubes:

Here’s the proposition:

TRUMP IS A RACIST WHEN HE SAYS CURIEL’S HERITAGE COLORS HIS OUTLOOK ON LIFE = SOTOMAYOR IS NOT A RACIST WHEN SHE SAYS HER HERITAGE COLORS HER OUTLOOK ON LIFE

But of course that’s not what the truth is even close to, is it?

Trump is not having a serious discussion about how our cultural backgrounds influence our worldview, is he?  He’s claiming outright that Curiel will rule prejudicially against him (Trump) because Curiel is “Mexican” and hates Trump’s guts because he (Trump) is going to build a wall to keep those damned Mexicans out of here.  That, and deport 11 million “illegals.”

Don’t believe me?  Go find the recent Trump interview in which Jake Tapper asks Trump 23 times if his statements are racist and Trump just keeps saying he’s building a wall, as if it should be self-evident that because of his position anyone of “Mexican” heritage would automatically hate his guts.  (And then go on to claim that the Hispanics love him, or will love him, or something.)

Meanwhile, Sotomayor said during her confirmation hearings that her “wise Latina” remarks —which even at the time drove the howler monkeys to fling poo—simply meant that her experiences as a Latina and a woman had made her more empathetic and more understanding of more facets of life than someone who did not have those experiences.  If one needed proof of the concept, one might look no further than those Republican lawmakers whose opposition to gay rights evaporated the moment they learned their son was gay.  She also semi-apologized for the remarks during her hearing, saying they were “a rhetorical flourish that fell flat,” but I don’t think she needed to.  I understood what she meant, because I’m not a bigoted asshat like Jeff Sessions.

To recap: Donald Trump disparages a federal judge’s impartiality based solely on the man’s heritage, while Sonia Sotomayor says that her life experience broadens her understanding of the humans who bring their cases into her court.

So yeah.  Trump gets called a racist.  Sotomayor does not.¹  Weird.

—————

¹ Except by the “I know you are but what am I” howler monkeys.²

² Which of course invalidates the meme even from their own perspective, never mind the actual truth.

Remember this?

It was one of several outrageous lies that I picked up in a very short time one day on the FaceTubes.  As is my wont, I futzed with it and posted it back on this one person’s feed:

…with the comment that what interested me most was what said individual was going to do with the post, i.e., was he going to leave a demonstrable, documented  lie up on his feed?  Was his hatred of Michelle Obama so strong that he was willing to be exposed as a liar?

You will remember that this individual posted this on the same day:

He finally responded yesterday.

One has to decide which one is true. I believe the first one to be true . That is my opinion and Mine is the only one I have the right to voice. And I don’t have to justify to you or anyone else why I feel this way.

What are we to do? He believes that Michelle Obama said that “white folks are what’s wrong with America.”¹  If I pushed him, he would be utterly unable to document her doing so; it has been documented that she didn’t say it.²  But he believes she did, and he doesn’t have to “justify” why he feels this way.

I imagine I can guess, though.

What are we to do? A third of our nation is unshakeable in their “belief” about how reality is structured, and they are wrong.

I’m not responding to this individual.  It would be pointless.  There is literally nothing I could do that would allow him to step back and reassess his stance.  Nothing: not reason, not shame, not suasion of any kind.  He has the freedom of making up whatever suits his very narrow understanding of what our nation is about, and he’s not giving that up just because it’s not true.

He is, of course, voting for Donald J. Trump.

—————

¹ And in his case, I am inclined to agree.

² Sidebar: I remember thinking shortly after Snopes.com began its debunking career that it would not take long before the crowd being debunked would start screeching that it was a liberal front, funded by George Soros, and generally fake.  That is exactly what has happened; I encountered it on another person’s feed last week.  When I asked how he would determine what was true, he blathered about using his experience, finding sources, etc.—exactly what Snopes.com does.  Oy.

Oy.  From the FaceTubes, a comment on a friend’s posting about Donald Drumpf’s call for violence from the podium:

So, the fact of the matter is that the leftwing (primarily blacks and hispanics) violently attack impoverished whites tens of millions of times each year in america. We are a very violenced, crushed people and the oppression is building against us, and people act offended if we mention it and then commit violence against us some more to make themselves feel better. I’m exactly sure how empowered white libs are able to sweep this under the rug: they want poor, unempowered whites eliminated from society due to the violent cut-throat competitive ideology of the left. Look into how non-white poverty is tended to versus white poverty, and it’s shocking that this nation is committing a genocide against multi-generationally impoverished whites in front of everybody’s face, and everybody’s mad at the impoverished whites enduring it and still trying to silence and slaughter them. it’s happening in Britain as well. Trump is the first time we as whites have had something like representation in this country. He’s not ideal, but at least he gets it and is brave enough to face black/brown violence and do the right thing. Remember, rightwing whites aren’t the ones calling for violence. The left is just implementing some sort of Opposite Day brainwash as they pull this genocide off. The bible talks all about it.

I mean to say, what??

It’s a solid wall of paranoia, a veritable Plato’s Cave of alternate reality, and I don’t really know how to approach it.  For one thing, there’s not a single verifiable fact in the whole post.

• blacks and hispanics violently attack impoverished whites tens of millions of times each year in america
• [impoverished whites] are a very violenced, crushed people
• oppression is building against us
• “people” act offended if we mention it
• commit violence against us to make themselves feel beter
• white libs want poor whites eliminated from society
• violent cut-throat competitive ideology of the Left [what??]
• non-white poverty vs. white poverty
• this nation is committing a genocide against multi-generationally impoverished whites
• trying to silence and slaughter them
• It’s happening in Britain
• Trump is the first time whites have had something like representation in this country [what??]
• [Trump] gets it and is brave enough to face black/brown violence
• rightwing whites aren’t the ones calling for violence
• the bible talks all about it.

Mercy. I can’t mock this because it’s so sad.  The author is stuck in a fever-swamp of resentment, and I’m willing to believe that from where he sits there’s a lot to resent.  For a good long read, far better written and more qualified to say so than I, see “I Know Why Poor Whites Chant Trump, Trump, Trump,” by Jonna Ivin.

It would be easy to dismiss this posting by saying that the author is mentally unstable in some way, but I think we need to be careful in ascribing our opponents’ political views to insanity (or stupidity).  Certainly, if this man truly believes what he has written—although indeed my first reaction was to re-read it as satirical (cf. Poe’s Law)—then we must ask ourselves how we can deal with him and those like him.

Attacking him won’t work, of course; it would just confirm his worldview, not to mention being unkind.

If he were a personal friend, I might ask him to explain his concerns in a personal narrative, i.e., what has happened to you to convince you of these truths?  Sometimes that allows the narrator to begin to realize that those Others might have the same story and in fact might be the victims of the same system as he.

Sidebar: I do think that unempowered poor whites are victimized. Their jobs have vanished, their neighborhoods decayed, their healthcare nonexistent.  Their death and suicide rates are rising.  But I can’t see that the “Left” (by which our author seems to mean “Stalin” or something) has done this.  On the contrary, it’s the conservative business class who have created the economic situation that oppresses the poor.  I don’t think that the overlords have done this “to” the poor whites, however; they don’t actually give a shit about whom their transactions might harm.  But asking our author here to pick through any kind of Marxist dialectic is expecting Plato’s cave dwellers to break their own chains.

The friend on whose feed this was posted is a kinder, gentler hippie than I, and she asked him if he had any links to the “tens of millions” of acts of violence against poor whites, or to the “genocide” being perpetrated in front of everybody’s face.  I’m not sure this will have any kind of effect since having data is not the kind of thing this type of speaker usually does, and I’m not sure he has a firm grasp of the technical meaning of “genocide.”  But kudos for her for trying the Socratic approach!

Mostly I find this man’s post depressing and disturbing, because he is not alone.  Donald Trump is clearly and deliberately appealing to this very attitude of victimization with every step of his campaign, and just as clearly there is nothing anyone can do to break that spell he has woven.  The very fact that there are no facts in the post—or in Donald Trump’s spewings from the campaign stump—means we are dealing with millions of stampeded amygdalas, and there is no way to stop that stampede with rational measures.  All we can do is hope that when they plummet off the cliff that they don’t drag us along with them.

But it’s not looking good.