Polls indicate that Democrats are about to suffer a shellacking in the 2022 midterm elections. Voters are unhappy about inflation, supply chain problems and other issues, but Republicans should be careful what they want — once they are in charge of Congress, they will catch much of the blame for the issues that allowed them to win in the first place.
The muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens pointed out that a half-measure in politics can actually make a problem worse. Media and voters believe that a problem has been addressed or that Congress has done as much as it is able or willing to do about it. That reduces the chance of a real, complete solution. Congress appears to be moving to a possible 1% solution on mass shootings with assault weapons.
The government takes a dim view of the mass murder of children – when it’s by a freelancer here in the United States. When one of its own soldiers does it overseas in a US-declared conflict zone, on the other hand, it’s highly condoned.
“The great replacement theory” is a conspiracy theory that looks at the shrinking proportion of white Americans and explains it as the result of a left-leaning plot to replace whites with people of color who are more likely to vote to the left. It has gained mainstream currency within the Republican Party and on Fox News.
Police unions are angry at calls to defund the police. Never mind that the police haven’t actually been defunded anywhere. The threat alone is enough to cause them to sit on their hands while crime is soaring.
Whenever there is a foreign-policy crisis, liberals and conservatives alike decry isolationist tendencies and say that we must get involved. They are willing to go anywhere on the planet to help other people but when you ask them to help fellow Americans who are homeless and sick, they are nowhere to be found.
The epidemic of mass shootings has prompted some lawmakers to call for “red flag laws” that would allow people to report those who seem to be getting unhinged before they have the possibility to become a mass shooter. It’s hard to think of a law that could be more easily abused.
It shouldn’t be that surprising to President Biden and other Americans that guns are so popular in the United States. After all, the United States is the biggest arms dealer in the world by far. The U.S. recently sent $40 billion in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. After the war ends, you can be sure that random violence and terrorism will escalate in a country awash in proxy-supplied weaponry in the same way that it has in places like Afghanistan.
Many activists in the pro-choice movement rely on the fiction that human beings aren’t really alive until they are fully viable, whatever that means based on the medical science at the time. They are not willing to commit, as I am, to the idea that women need to have the right to murder their unborn babies.
President Joe Biden says he’s willing to go to war militarily against China in order to defend Taiwan if China invades. But that’s hard to square with the fact that the United States doesn’t recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country in the first place.
