…and the Dimocrats’ deliberate dumbing-down of America’s education system has been a rousing success. Were we the judge, we’d have answered, “Today, with very few exceptions, certainly not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.”
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, in a must-read commentary at NRO, David French suggests…
“We now know how the Texas church shooter was able to so easily obtain the weapons he used to slaughter 26 innocent men, women, and children in the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs: The Air Force made a mistake. In 2012, the shooter was convicted in military court of “beating his wife and breaking his young stepson’s skull.” Let’s put aside for the moment his ridiculously light sentence(See, “Bergdahl, Bo“) — twelve months’ confinement and a bad-conduct discharge — and focus on the salient fact that the Air Force failed to transmit information about his crime to the National Criminal Information Center database. If the Air Force had done it’s job, the shooter wouldn’t have passed his background check.
Moreover, it looks like this mistake may not be isolated. As the New York Times reported this morning, “An online repository of active records maintained by the F.B.I.’s Criminal Justice Information Services shows that the Department of Defense had reported just one case of domestic violence as of Dec. 31, 2016.”And the reporting problem may not be confined to domestic violence, either. The Times also notes that all but a “tiny handful” of reported cases from the military were in one category only, dishonorable discharges.There are multiple other criteria that are supposed to prevent a person from passing his background check. Where are those reports?
This is not the only apparent systematic military breakdown. On Sunday night, the Washington Post reported that the Navy’s so-called Fat Leonard corruption investigation had expanded to cover the actions of a stunning 440 active-duty and retired personnel, including 60 admirals. The scandal has been called by some the worst case of corruption in Navy history, and its outlines are simple: In exchange for bribes, booze, fine food, and prostitutes, Navy officers allowed Leonard Glenn “Fat Leonard” Francis to overcharge the Navy by $35 million when ships docked at his ports, and allegedly gave him access to classified information regarding ship and submarine movements. As one retired officer told the Post, “At one time he had infiltrated the entire leadership line. The KGB could not have done what he did.”
And let’s not forget the Navy’s probe into the deadly collisions at sea involving the USS Fitzgerald and the USS John S. McCain. The results were outlined last Wednesday, and the picture it paints is devastating.A total of 17 sailors died as a result of a cascade of human errors that are collectively difficult to believe.
I’m a former major in the Army, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and I believe the decision to serve my country in uniform is among the best one’s of my life. But I’ve got a confession to make: I’m getting very worried about our nation’s military-worship. (Our nation’s military “leaders” having long ago passed the point of mere worry.)
As I’ve told anyone who asks, the men I served with in Iraq are extraordinary people. Their courage would take your breath away. Our military is full of such heroes, and they’re worth every bit of honor and respect our nation can provide. But not everyone in the military is a hero.
The mere act of donning a uniform does not make you any better than any other American.Though I’ve seen heroism in the military, I’ve also seen craven corruption, cynical exploitation of the public, and grotesque incompetence.
If there is an iron law of human nature it’s this: Absent accountability and oversight, all human institutions grow increasingly corrupt and incompetent…”
Reasonable people can reasonably disagree; but no one can reasonably characterize the U.S. Military these six clowns bequeathed the nation as anything but an utter and abject…
By the way, just to show you the depths of our Military’s dysfunction, unlike Bradley and Bo, who were at least dishonorably discharged (despite both deserving to be shot!), LT David Nartker, (USNA Class of 2011)…
…despite having surrendered his vessels and apologized to the enemy after only hours of confinement, was permitted to remain in the service. John Paul Jones, James Lawrence and Oliver Hazard Perry, to name but a few…
…must be rolling over in their graves!!!
In a related item forwarded by Bill Meisen, The New York Times, for once accurately, reports how an…
“A day after a gunman massacred parishioners in a small Texas church, the Air Force admitted on Monday that it had failed to enter the man’s domestic violence court-martial into a federal database that could have blocked him from buying the rifle he used to kill 26 people.
Under federal law, the conviction of the gunman, Devin P. Kelley, for domestic assault on his wife and toddler stepson — he had cracked the child’s skull —shouldhave stopped Mr. Kelley from legally purchasing the military-style rifle and three other guns he acquired in the last four years.
…The Air Force also said it was looking into whether other convictions had been improperly left unreported to the federal database for firearms background checks.
New details of the killings also emerged on Monday, including a possible motive. Law enforcement officials said Mr. Kelley may have been driven by anger toward his estranged wife’s family, the final chapter in a life full of domestic rage…The mother of Mr. Kelley’s most recent wife, Danielle, was a member of the First Baptist Church here, the target of Mr. Kelley’s rage on Sunday…”
“…The report emerged the same day that a Pentagon official told Fox News that Kelley escaped from a mental institution in New Mexico near Holloman Air Force Base in June 2012.
The official said that Kelley had been sent to the institution while he was awaiting a military trial for an assault on his ex-wife in which he choked her and struck her son hard enough to fracture his skull.The reason Kelley was sent to the mental institution was not immediately clear.
After his escape, Kelley was found by police at a bus station in downtown El Paso. He was eventually discharged for the assault and served a year of confinement after a court-martial.
Kelley, who was 21 at the time, was also caught trying to bring guns onto the base when he was stationed there and had made death threats against superior officers, according to an El Paso police report obtained by several media outlets.“
Here’s the juice: just as garbage in equals garbage out, laws are only as effective as those entrusted with enforcing them. And they do little good if their effectiveness is based upon the gross inefficiency of an increasingly bloated federal bureaucracy.
We won’t hold our breath waiting for anyone to be punished, let alone fired, for their failure to forward the terms of Kelley’s discharge.
Meanwhile, writing at NRO, Ramesh Ponnuru relates, Las Vegas and Southland Springs notwithstanding,…
“…Consider the last time the Senate voted on assault weapons. It was in 2013, after the Sandy Hook massacre, when Democrats controlled the chamber. A bill to reinstate the ban that had been in place from 1994 to 2004 got only 40 votes. Two of the noes came from the Democratic senators of Colorado, a state that has a lower-than-average rural population and is not notorious for its shuttered factories. It wasn’t “gridlock,” in any normal sense of the word, that beat this legislation, and it would not take gridlock to defeat the stronger version Max Boot favors. It wasn’t the filibuster or gerrymandering, either.
What none of these explanations grapples with is a fact that politicians in both parties know well: There are many more intense, relatively single-minded supporters of gun rights than opponents of it.An elected official is much more likely to lose office because he voted for regulating guns than because he voted against it.
…What the commentators generally don’t even try to explain is why so few voters share their own passion for restricting guns.Why don’t they act as though they believe our gun laws are “literally killing us”?
…Here then is another theory. Over the last 60 years public confidence in government has declined. Most people do not believe that it would be sensible for the government to try to disarm the population, no doubt in part because of the immensity of the task and the resistance it would spark. (The number of guns in circulation in the U.S. is generally estimated to top 300 million.)
They favor a lot of less sweeping measures to regulate guns, but they do not attach great urgency to these measures because they doubt they would do much good. That view, incidentally, lines up with the data about the effects of gun regulations, as even some of their advocates admit. Boot, for example, concedes that any positive effect of the assault-weapons ban on homicides was undetectable.
And because they have a rational basis for not seeing the gun regulations as important, these ambivalent voters let other issues determine which candidates to back. Pro-gun voters thus have political influence over gun policy disproportionate to their numbers.
The evidence we have from polls and politicians’ behavior does not, admittedly, prove this theory. But it is at leastcompatible with that evidence, unlike the prevailing punditry.
The theory also leaves open a question about the thinking of a third group, besides the gun-rights enthusiasts and the ambivalent general public. What motivates the passionate gun-controllers? If saving lives is the goal, then directing more police resources to high-crime areas might have a bigger impact than any push for gun control…
Liberals pride themselves these days on their empiricism, yet policies such as these do not seem to excite their interest as much as a campaign against guns. Sykes wrote that the “N.R.A. has successfully taken the issue of rational gun regulation out of the policy realm and made it a central feature of the culture wars.” Perhaps this has not been the achievement of the NRA alone.“
It’s worth noting, as long-time contributor Bill Meisen observed, how the NRA is constantly blamed for mass shootings; this despite the fact none of the killers have been members of the NRA!
To the complete contrary, the guy who ran out of his home barefootto shoot and chase this latest kook was a former NRA instructor. When a government’s become so big and bloated it can’t keep up with the laws currently on the books, how can more legislation possibly solve a thing?!?
Talk about Einstein’s definition of insanity personified!
Since we’re on the subject of the reluctant hero who most possibly saved more lives than Kelley actually took, the WSJ describes him as…
“The world is trying to figure out what evil, or madness, caused Devin Kelley to kill 26 people and wound 20 more at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Sunday morning. But forgive us if we focus on Stephen Willeford, the local plumber who saved lives by grabbing his rifle and firing at Kelley.
…The harsh reality of mass murders is that often only the presence of someone with a legal weapon to shoot back can stop the rampage.
We saw this in Virginia this year when Capitol Hill police saved the lives of many Members of Congress. Security officers in Garland, Texas, prevented mass casualties by killing two jihadists in 2015 trying to shoot up a contest featuring cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
No one wants crowds of vigilantes looking for someone to shoot, but we’re sure glad Stephen Willeford had a rifle and knew how to use it. Like the passengers aboard Flight 93 on 9/11, or the Yanks who foiled a terror attack on a train in Belgium in 2015, he didn’t wait for orders to protect his fellow human beings.”
We wrap up today’s coverage of the federal bureaucracy’s latest failure with this item from The Daily Caller, as Geoffrey Ingersoll details how…
“In perhaps the most chilling instance of post-shooting hysteria, they viciously attacked thought and prayer. They attacked religion. They attacked our God-given right of self defense. The machine was in full spin. The NRA was covered in blood, they said. The church’s walls, their God did not protect them, they said.
Their scorched earth would accept nothing less than a complete mea culpa, on behalf of the Christian God, the Second Amendment, and supporters of both.
Here’s a mascot for cliche coastal twerpism, Lauren Duca, who exemplifies the multitudes hurling bile on the foundations of the free world:
Then, as typically happens with these things, the facts started to trickle out.They could not have possibly been worse for the gun control, anti-prayer, anti-thought proponents…”
There’s nothing worse than a narrative based on the death of innocents which turns out to be hopelessly overhyped.
Speaking of narratives which are hopelessly overhyped, in this forward from The Intercept via George Lawlor, Glenn Greenwald lists…
“There is ample talk, particularly of late, about the threats posed by social media to democracy and political discourse. Yet one of the primary ways that democracy is degraded by platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is, for obvious reasons, typically ignored in such discussions: the way they are used by American journalists to endorse factually false claims that quickly spread and become viral, entrenched into narratives, and thus, can never be adequately corrected.
The design of Twitter, where many political journalists spend their time, is in large part responsible for this damage. Its space constraints mean that tweeted headlines or tiny summaries of reporting are often assumed to be true with no critical analysis of their accuracy and are easily spread. Claims from journalists that people want to believe are shared like wildfire, while less popular subsequent corrections or nuanced debunking are easily ignored. Whatever one’s views are on the actual impact of Twitter Russian bots, surely the propensity of journalistic falsehoods to spread far and wide is at least as significant.
Just in the last week alone, there have been four major factually false claims that have gone viral because journalists on Twitter endorsed and spread them: three about the controversy involving Donna Brazile and the Democratic National Committee, and one about documents and emails published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign.It’s well worth examining them, both to document what the actual truth is, as well as to understand how often and easily this online journalistic misleading occurs.
…It can certainly be menacing for Russian bots to disseminate divisive messaging on Twitter. But it’s at least equally menacing if journalists with the loudest claim to authoritative credibility are using that platform constantly to entrench falsehoods in the public’s mind.“
“…This column understands that Mr. Skaggs and much of the media will not tolerate Mr. Paul’s lack of respect for the rules of his gated community, but perhaps there were other reasons for the assault. Mr. Boucher’s lawyer says it had nothing to do with politics.
The Washington Post reports:
Jim Bullington, a former member of the city commission, knows both men. He said Sunday that Boucher is divorced and lives alone. Bullington described Boucher as a socialist.“He’s pretty much the opposite of Rand Paul in every way,” Bullington said in an interview.
The neighbors had been known to have “heated discussions” about health care, Bullington said, adding that Boucher is an advocate of a national health system.
This was more than an attack on a neighbor.Now that his injuries are forcing Mr. Paul to miss votes, the assailant has temporarily prevented the people of Kentucky from enjoying their full constitutional representation in the U.S. Senate…”
More importantly, Conservatives lose a dependable vote on any issue coming before the Senate.
Well,…almostany; which makes one wonder if Boucher was irate over one of Paul’s other, less self-serving stances. Color us utterly unsurprised should more such assaults occur in the future.
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