"You can't outsmart crazy"

By Edward Copeland

With those words, Jon Stewart gave another eloquent speech at the beginning of Monday night's Daily Show, dispensing with humor to address Saturday's horrific events in Tucson.

With each passing hour and day since alleged gunman Jared Lee Loughner opened fire on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, critically injuring her, killing six and wounding 14 others, it becomes clearer that this 22-year-old man was not a political partisan but someone who was severely mentally ill. With Arizona government offices finally open Monday, The Washington Post finally was able to answer one simple question that's not open to debate: his voter registration. The answer turns out to be that he was a registered independent but was considered inactive because he hadn't bothered to vote in such a long time, including in November. Hardly indicative of a Tea Party participant.

I am guilty of jumping to conclusions. With the precursors without body counts such as smashed windows, threats, cut gas lines, it was an easy assumption to make. However, in my horror of the moment I forgot the old line about what happens when you assume: it makes an ass out of u and me. Subconsciously, there probably was part of me as there consciously was in many others who wanted this tragedy to turn out to be that way for political advantage. I may disagree with the Tea Party, believe them to be terribly misinformed and inflamed by the likes of Glenn Beck, but they aren't all homicidal lunatics.

When so many on the left criticized Jon Stewart's rally, claiming he was trying to make both sides equivalent, in the wake of Saturday's events, now he seems more right than ever. Keith Olbermann's Saturday special comment didn't say so explicitly, but if you read between the lines, it was a bit of a mea culpa for his own role. As Sarah Palin rushed to delete her graphic with the gunsight over Giffords' district, Daily Kos also had to delete a post where one of Giffords' constituents said that Giffords was "dead to me" because she voted against Nancy Pelosi for House minority leader.

Already, both sides are starting to revert to old habits. Because we on the left rushed to link the act of a madman to the politics of those we oppose, now those on the right revert to defensive mode and attack us. Hopefully, someone can stop this quickly. This is an opportunity for everyone to step back, take a breath and restore civility to the political process. I'm not saying compromise your principles, but it's long past time where both sides stop treating political opponents as the enemy. As it's been said many times, you can disagree without being disagreeable. The political climate probably didn't set Loughner off, but both parties need to look at themselves critically and seriously.

I hope that people take Pima County, Ariz., Sheriff Clarence Gupnik to heart and start rejecting the Becks and Limbaughs, but the only way that happens is when they get hit where it really hurts: the wallet. Beck has shown those signs with the loss of lots of sponsors, being taken off a big New York radio station and even dropping numbers on Fox News. I wish their listeners realized they were in it for the money, but oh well.

What really needs to be addressed seriously is the fact that this country has a gun problem and it's had a gun problem for a long time. A man rejected by the military, kicked out of college and who worried others around him was still allowed to legally purchase his Glock and, more importantly, his high-volume ammunition clips. He had three clips which had 33 rounds each. These sorts of clips were illegal under the assault weapons ban which was allowed to expire during the Bush Administration. If that law were still in place, he could only have purchased clips that held 10 rounds, meaning he would have to reload more frequently and the bloodshed would have been less. I hope the NRA and their friends in Congress are proud. Right now, Arizona is considering allowing faculty and college students to carry concealed weapons without a permit.

We also have to improve our ability to treat the mentally ill. In a rare moment of a television newsperson saying something profound, Lester Holt did the other day when he said that in the end, the motive doesn't matter. Six people are still dead, including a 9-year-old student council president born on 9/11.

Tarryl Clark post to the Daily Kos: Michele Bachmann "sound bites"

Clark is "headed out to the Kos," that's where a lot of the national netroots support for her challenge will come from (she hopes.) Excerpts:

For the past few years, Representative Michele Bachmann has been a hot topic on DailyKos and across the blogosphere.

I'm hoping that, with your help, we can put an end to that in November, 2010...

...I'll be coming to Netroots Nation this week, to talk to all of you about how I plan to win this campaign, and how you can join me. I'll be posting another diary during my time there, talking more about the campaign ahead and the issues at stake for the residents of Minnesota's 6th District.

Because as much as everyone has enjoyed talking about Michele Bachmann, I'm looking forward to talking about something else come November, 2010.

What's Netroots Nation, you ask? Well, that's kind of like the national convention for liberal and progressive bloggers. Clark is almost sure to go over well there. All she has to do is go to the podium, open up her mouth and say "Hello, I'm Tarryl Clark and I'm the Democrat running to defeat Michele Bachmann--" That's all she has to say, to get an ovation from that crowd. That's it.

Read the full post to the Kos, here.

More strangeness at the Kos/Tinklenberg makes it official

Every so often I check the Google news search for Michele Bachmann stories. I did so just now, and one of the links that came up is this one:

What Tinklenberg Isn't Telling You, & Why He Doesn't Deserve ...
Daily Kos - ‎5 hours ago‎
Right now, Bachmann - despite her insane statements - holds the advantage. That's because the anti-Bachmann vote is split between the Democrats and the ...

And that's all that appears, but it's a link to the entire diary on the Kos. The funny thing is, when I press on that link and go to the Kos site...the Kos site tells me that it can find this post--which Google says went up today, about five hours ago. (There is no Internet "cache" version of the post to access.) The tags to the post appear. I did a search of these and can't find the writer's story that way, either.

It looks like some Kos diarist is trying to explain the weird political dynamics in the Sixth. I don't know who it is, but I'd love to read what they have to say to the community that raised so much money for a "dump Bachmann" effort, last time around. The "post that the Kos can't seem to find" also seems to have 146 reader comments attached to it. That indicates a significant degree of interest in this post; I hope the Kos can find it soon. I'll keep looking.

In other news: The Star Tribune reports that Tinklenberg made his candidacy official today. Strib reporter Bob von Sternberg informs readers:

Bachmann, who routinely attracts media attention for her conservative pronouncements, became one of the Democrats' prime targets in 2008, but even a late influx of contributions for Tinklenberg weren't enough to beat her.

"Conservative pronouncements?" If all she did was make "conservative pronouncements" she wouldn't attract any kind of "media attention." Von Sternberg should have written "wacky lies," those are the Bachmann pronouncements that have been attracting media attention.

Elwyn Tinklenberg makes his pitch to the Daily Kos

...and gets a very positive reaction, for the most part. I'm writing this shortly after midnight, Minnesota time. In the "Recommended Diaries" section of the Kos (one of the most widely read political blogs in the United States) is piece by Elwyn himself, announcing his run against Bachmann.

It's generated 225 comments so far; a respectable total. And diaries don't get elevated to the coveted "Recommended Diaries" list without the intervention of Kos staffers, so they are paying attention, too. (Wrong, according to Karl in our comments thread.)

Tinklenberg aide Dana Houle is in the comments thread to the Tinklenberg announcement, fielding the occasional question from commenters. Most of the comments are quite supportive, some Kos readers are even donating money to Elwyn on the strength his announcement on the blog. As you may know, the Kos readership and other liberal/progressive blogs did an outstanding job raising funds for Tinklenberg in the final weeks of his last contest with Bachmann. Donations were received in small amounts from regular folks who hailed from every state in the union.

The incident that triggered the donations was not something Tinklenberg did. It was something Michele Bachmann did: her appearance on Chris Matthew's Hardball news show. When she called for a media investigation of her fellow congressmen and senators to check for anti-Americanism, the outrage at the Kos and other blogs was palpable--and readers reached for their checkbooks and credit cards.

Tinklenberg is an intelligent politician. So his diary in the Kos does not contain his other announcement: that he does not intend to abide by the decision of the DFL in the primary, if they do not select him to run against Bachmann. Pointing *that* out, would cause some people on the Kos to put away their checkbooks and credit cards--and generate quite a bit of hate mail in the comment thread, I suppose.

I doubt that very many of the commenters on the Kos tonight are from Minnesota. Their contempt for Bachmann and kooky lies is obvious, but so is their lack of knowledge about the strange election dynamics we have here in the Sixth District. A few commenters are critical of Tinklenberg, but that seems to be because he's a Blue Dog or because he failed to beat an obvious kook, despite all the help he received last time.

None of the Tinklenberg criticisms so far cite his "I'm going to ignore the Dem decision on the nominee, unless it's me" stand. None of the more than two hundred comments so far explain the possible consequences of that decision or the effect of the independence voters on the election.

Neither Tinklenberg nor Dana Houle seem inclined to mention those unpleasant realities to Kos readers tonight. I'm not wading into that comment thread to explain those issues either, because it's entirely possible that ET may end up being the Dem nominee again and I'm certainly not going to be the one to try to discredit a likely Dem candidate.

Tinklenberg and his managers have obviously decided to go after the netroots support now, before Clark officially announces. That's probably wise, from the ET camp's point of view. Though Clark has filed, she hasn't "rolled out" yet--and a strong show of financial and moral support from the netroots is going to be critical for any Dem candidate hoping to defeat Bachmann.

We can't blame Kos readers and editors for being naive or ill-informed about the election dynamics of the Sixth District of Minnesota. Bachmann's craziness makes headlines around the country, the election dynamics of the Sixth District don't. I would wager that most Minnesotans who live in and outside the Sixth District don't understand why a Bachmann victory is the statistical way to bet. Most of the Minnesota political press doesn't bother to explain how the different political interests in the district can generate a Bachmann plurality despite the awful state of her district. If most of the local reporters don't know or report, how could people outside the state understand?

I have explained election dynamics on the Kos before, but I'm just another diarist there--one of thousands. A *very* good day for one of my articles on the Kos generates only from ninety to a hundred comments, nothing like the attention that Tinklenberg is receiving tonight. Even if the Kos community doesn't have all the information it needs to make a good decision about which candidate to support, its heart is in the right place: they know what Bachmann is, and they want to help us get rid of her.