“This essay draws upon Chris Mooney’s forthcoming book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality (due out in April from Wiley), as well as his interviews with George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt and Dan Kahan on the Point of Inquiry podcast,” AlterNet is reporting.
“If you’re a liberal or a progressive these days, you could be forgiven for being baffled and frustrated by conservatives. Their views and actions seem completely alien to us—or worse. From cheering at executions, to wanting to ‘throw up’ over church-state separation, to seeking to ‘drown’ government ‘in the bathtub’ (except when it is cracking down on porn, apparently) conservatives not only seem very different, but also very inconsistent.
“Even the most well-read liberals and progressives can be forgiven for being confused, because the experts themselves—George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt and others–have different ways of explaining what they call conservatives’ ‘morality’ or ‘moral systems.’
“Are we dealing with a bunch of die-hard anti-government types in their bunkers, or the strict father family? Are our intellectual adversaries free-market libertarians, or right-wing authoritarians—and do they even know the difference?
“But to all you liberals I say, have hope: It’s not nearly so baffling as it may at first appear. Having interviewed many of these experts over the course of the last year, my sense is that despite coming from different fields and using different terminologies, they are saying many of the same things.
“Most important, their work suggests that there really is a science of conservative morality, and it really is very different from liberal morality. And there are key lessons to be drawn from this research about how to interact (and not interact) with our intellectual opponents.
“That’s what I’m going to show—but first, let me first emphasize that morality isn’t the only way in which liberals and conservatives differ. They differ on a wide variety of traits–and it is not necessarily clear, as Jonathan Haidt recently put it to me, what’s the root of the flower, what’s the stem and what’s the leaves.”
The article is here.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Paul Krugman has another take on it-
“a lie wrapped in an absurdity swaddled in paranoia.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/opinion/krugman-paranoia-strikes-deeper.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120323
I mentioned this to John Stoos once and he agreed. At the basic core the difference between conservatives and liberals is conservatives believe in original sin thus that all people are inherently bad. Liberals believe that people are inherently good. One promotes fear of the other and the other promotes cooperation. So our worldview differ greatly on how to achieve common goals. Conservatives believe in the individual because they do not want to support another persons bad behavior and possibly take responsibility for their own towards others. Liberals believe that the vast majority will behave good and we are all in this boat together.
Ben,
I get where you are coming from, but I think this is an over-simplification of the views of Lakoff, Stoos, et al. A better way to describe it is that there is an inherent tension between communitarianism, and libertarianism. Or to go back to the research described in the article, there are tensions between the ethics of helping the poor, respect for authority, preservation of the sacred, etc. Liberals and conservatives tend to prefer different mixes of these values.
One point that is coming out of this research is that liberals have a tougher time recognizing how conservatives value authority and the sacred. Conservatives though tend to acknowledge that we as a group have a responsibility to the poor (though not at the expense of the other values).
Either way, this type of research is interesting!
Tony
Tony,
I agree with you that my explanation is definitely reduced down. The terms communitarian and libertarianism are too broad and they need to be explained as well. That is where the fear of others vs trust in each other comes into play. This is where the authoritarian personalities factor in for the hard core right wingers. I have posted this many times before but it was such a good read I promote the book whenever I can.
“Conservatives Without Conscience”
In the end Mooney suggests that we don’t compromise our values but instead stick together as a “team”.
And thus he becomes another pundit describing what must be done, when it all boils down to herding cats.
Pointing out we don’t march like the other army, but we should and we would be more successful, is what
isn’t going to happen as well, because so much money in politics changes all fundamental dynamics-
The Occupy Movement ( in 6 months) is much more cohesive, and American Liberals haven’t had to many other places to go for 50 years, except the Democratic Party.
“but in their ability to act as a team with one purpose and one goal that cannot be compromised or weakened.”
Ben, Chris, and Chip:
Good points. I’m travelling this weekend, and will have a look at these links when I return.
Tony
Chris Mooney’s first book. http://www.waronscience.com/home.php
I just linked this the other day.
David Roberts, who writes for Grist and others, has a lot of good articles on this, but they can all be boiled down to his assertion that voters pick a candidate, a cause, a proposal that agrees with their own worldview at the most basic level, and then choose to pay attention only to the “facts” (yes, in double quotes) that back up their worldview and ignore or actively deny or denegrate any “facts” (and those who would espouse them) that do not directly back up their own worldview. Leftys do it too – though it seems like more conservatives do it than liberals, because the whole ‘fear of being told that my world is about to change’ leads to anger and active denial. It’s a scared animal instinct – backed into a corner – fight or flight or freeze.
Anyway – a few of David Roberts’ more relevant articles (titles are part of the URL):
http://grist.org/media/media-produces-laments-public-ignorance-on-gas-prices/
http://grist.org/politics/stearns-accidentally-exposes-gop-energy-agenda/
http://grist.org/politics/2012-01-09-caving-on-keystone-still-a-dumb-idea/
and especially:
http://grist.org/politics/2011-11-03-gop-brain-explained-cliff-stearns-wants-to-subsidize-companies/
“This essay draws upon Chris Mooney’s forthcoming book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality (due out in April from Wiley).” I can only speak for myself, but the problem is not real science, but political science…claiming to be science.
Yes, conservative political science claiming to be science.
I strongly recommend that readers here watch Up with Chris Hayes this morning. His panel discussion on religion, science atheism and the public policy implications of our divide is excellent. Up is becoming one of the most thoughtful, well researched, relevant and in depth discussion programs available today.
http://UpwithChrisHayes.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/24/10841786-sundays-guests-march-25
If the discussion is not up yet go back to it later today.
Just a theory here, but the great divide in human nature may have occurred when earth’s earliest human populations migrated out of Africa, then split off North and South into two main migratory groups.
The implications of how those people fed and survived in completely different hemispheres and ecosystems may be more evident with further studies of how our brains work.
FROM:Leslie Fredrickson Message flagged Sunday, March 25, 2012 8:32 AM
I rec’d this essay from my friend and the man who guided me through my student teaching of U.S. History and Government at Chico H.S. I thought it worthy of sharing with this group. This blogging form of communication is new to me, and perhaps, not for me. You all probably know all too well the uselessness of any discussion with any of those forming the RJS trio of hard right, irrational, condescending manipulaters of the Constitution. Mistakenly–probably due to a bit of liberal empathy–I commented on Steele’s blog as there were 0 comments and it appeared that Russ was posting multiple posts to himself. Taking my clue from reading their past dialogue–but in my defence, in serious pain, in bed under lots of meds folloeing yet another tooth extraction with extensive spread of infection–I called them Yahoos for their twisted interpretation of the 2nd amendment. I was then ready to resume this discussion with Mr. Steele, when, I think Juvinall jumped in with snide, condescending remarks. I responded, then tried to explain my point and asked him questions re. his position. But it made no difference, no answers were forth coming; ideologues to the end and I was a simpleton. Then some dude named White jumped in after a post of mine meant to find some common ground so a discussion could take place–afterall, the nation, thus the Constitution–were forged only with the tools of compromise. White’s post was more condenscension and subtle insult. Since I am a guy from both sides of the tracks, I let him have it–but no swearing or threats; just called him a coward and maybe a wimo, too. And, that now I understood the popularity of this form of communication–occassionally I’ll read the gutter exchanges after stories on Yahoo–is that people say things knowing there are no consequences; things they wouldn’t say to one’s face. And those people know knothing about me except what I told them. And theyre not nearly as smart as they think they are. But I don’t think I’m revealing any secrets here.
Hope you enjoy the essay. I guess its best I stick with my reading.
Ciao,
The Outsourced Party
By KEVIN BAKER
Who speaks for the Republican party? The answer is that everyone does — and therefore, no one does.
Much air time and many trees have been wasted trying to explain the division, rancor and lethargy that have beset the Republican nominating campaign, now into its second year and threatening to run all the way to the party’s national convention in late August. But it’s no great mystery. Republicans have fallen prey to one of the favorite tactics of just the sort of heedless, improvident, twenty-first century capitalism they revere. Their party has been outsourced.
Mark Pernice
CLICK TO ENLARGEFor decades, Republicans have recruited outside groups and individuals to amplify their party’s message and its influence. This is a legitimate democratic tactic that they have carried off brilliantly, helping to shift the political spectrum in the United States significantly to the right.
When Republicans came to believe in the 1960s that they were up against a “liberal biased” media that would never give them a fair shake, they began the long march to build their own, alternative information establishment. As chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Mark Fowler, led the fight to abolish the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987, further empowering what was already a legion of right-wing talk radio programs.
In 1949, drawing on a long history of court decisions; on public hearings; and on legislation mandating “equal time” for political candidates, the F.C.C. ruled that holders of radio and television broadcast licenses must “devote a reasonable percentage of their broadcast time to the presentation of news and programs devoted to the consideration and discussion of public issues of interest in the community,” and that this must include “different attitudes and viewpoints concerning these vital and often controversial issues.”
The Supreme Court repeatedly upheld the F.C.C.’s power to make such a rule — but never gave it the power of law. In 1986, a pair of Ronald Reagan’s judicial appointees on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, ruled that the Fairness Doctrine was not “a binding statutory obligation.”
Armed with this verdict, Fowler, who insisted on viewing television, in particular, as not a finite and supremely influential broadcast medium but “just another appliance — it’s a toaster with pictures,” persuaded his fellow commissioners to abolish the Fairness Doctrine. Furious Democrats in Congress passed legislation to codify the doctrine into law in 1987 and 1991, but these attempts were vetoed by Reagan and George Bush, respectively; Democrats have gone on trying to make the Fairness Doctrine law to this day, but have always been stymied by adamant Republican opposition.
Right-wing radio was dominant on the airwaves before the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. But now it had the field of public discourse virtually all to itself. It provided conservatives with a direct outreach to the public, free of any intercession by the “elites” Newt Gingrich is still denouncing in this season’s debates. Right-leaning media networks such as Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcast Network and especially Clear Channel Communications soon became major media conglomerates, with no obligation to broadcast any conflicting views.
The biggest media coup of all for the Republican party, though, was the advent of nakedly partisan Fox News, created by Roger Ailes, former media advisor to the Nixon, Reagan and George Bush administrations. It was Ailes who thereby managed to throw the entire weight of Rupert Murdoch’s worldwide media empire behind the party — and it was Ailes, reportedly, who kept it on the conservative straight-and-narrow when Mr. Murdoch toyed with the idea of putting the empire behind Barack Obama, the new Democrat, in 2008, much as it had backed Tony Blair’s New Labour for a time in Great Britain. Instead, thanks to Ailes, conservative politicians and advocates saw both their ideas amplified and their wallets fattened by a dizzying array of Murdoch television shows, books and newspapers.
But it wasn’t just in the media where the Republican party proved ingenious in outsourcing its rhetoric and shifting the national dialogue. In 1971, during Richard M. Nixon’s first term in office, Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Republican corporate lawyer from Virginia, summoned the resources of the business community to the cause with his famous memorandum to the National Chamber of Commerce, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.”
Powell wanted “American business” to fight back everywhere it could against what he saw as the many enemies of free enterprise. Tactics would include demanding “equal time” on the nation’s college campuses and — ironically enough — on the nation’s airwaves, by appealing to the fairness standards of the F.C.C. Yet more importantly, Powell’s memorandum inspired the founding of the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and other conservative think tanks. Wealthy businessmen and other individuals from Richard Mellon Scaife to the Koch brothers stepped up, pouring millions of dollars into right-wing magazines, books and political campaigns.
Powell won himself an appointment to the Supreme Court — and the nation’s capital won itself a major new industry. It may seem as if lobbyists in Washington have always been more numerous than locusts, but in fact when Powell wrote his memo just over 40 years ago, there were at most only a few hundred. Today, there are tens of thousands — leaders of a multi-billion dollar industry in its own right, and one mostly interested in “freeing” business from regulation and taxes.
The Republican effort to rally every conceivable outside entity to the party’s cause was wildly successful. Again and again over the years, conservative policy institutes have armed the party’s candidates with intellectual arguments, while the conservative media barrage has blasted a way through to high office for even the most lackluster Republican nominees.
Yet increasingly this meant that the Republican Party was outsourcing both body and soul. Both what the party believed in and its ability to do the heavy lifting necessary to win elections was handed over to outside interests — outside interests that did not necessarily share the party’s goals or have any stake in ameliorating its tactics.
This has become suddenly and painfully evident this year. Party leaders may not have liked Rush Limbaugh’s disgusting attacks on a Georgetown law student — calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute” for advocating that insurance companies provide affordable birth control — but what does he care?
If the Republicans lose the election, it will most likely mean all the more angry conservatives tuning in and driving up the ratings for Rush and his fellow radio ranters. Limbaugh is now facing a challenge from outraged liberals and others urging his sponsors to drop his show. But the most that the usually garrulous Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney would allow himself to say was that “it’s not the language I would have used.” Rick Santorum averred that Rush was “being absurd,” but implied that was O.K. — “an entertainer can be absurd. He’s in a very different business than I am.”
But of course, he’s not. Rush Limbaugh is in the very same business that Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are in — and guess who’s in charge? It’s not the radio calamity howlers who take their cues from the party leaders now, but the other way around.
This campaign season we’ve seen all the major Republican candidates for president adopt the bombastic, apocalyptic rhetoric of talk radio, insisting that we will “lose America” if they aren’t elected, and filling their speeches and debates with ugly personal insults, directed at each other and at President Obama. The results are in the poll numbers. Unlike the sharp but generally civil 2008 primary fight between Obama and Hillary Clinton, which galvanized the Democratic base, the Republican struggle this year has been steadily driving down the party’s appeal and driving up the candidates’ negative ratings.
Poll numbers for Republicans in Congress have taken a nosedive, too, as the party’s intransigence on Capitol Hill has allowed President Obama to appear reasonable by contrast. But what does that matter to the thousands of lobbyists who bring in more and more of the money for congressional campaigns? Sure, a Republican victory might afford them more closed-door sessions on rewriting federal regulations. But Democratic victories will serve their purpose just as well, making clear to the money men who send them to Washington that they are more needed than ever to resist “job-killing regulations.”
Meanwhile, Fox News has become a special impediment to Republican order — largely thanks to its own success. All the enticements of the Murdoch empire have produced a generation of reality show pols, at least as interested in landing their own TV series as winning office. Two of the most popular Republican candidates for president going into the race, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin, both declined to run rather than jeopardize their shows. Newt Gingrich turned much of his campaign into book tours for himself and his wife. Ask yourself which was most likely: that Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann really thought they could be elected president or that they were looking to improve their “brand.”
And after decades of trying to undo federal campaign-finance laws, Republicans at last succeeded — only to watch the party’s wealthy sponsors diversify their interests from think tanks to super PACs. Why bother with all the time and expense of hiring a bunch of intellectuals to occupy some expensive piece of Washington real estate and hammer out policy positions — when you can go out and make a straight cash exchange for a candidate?
Even as Rick Santorum was pleading that sometimes you have to “take one for the team” in the last Republican debate, his candidacy was being kept alive largely by money from a single donor, Foster Friess, the conservative Christian multimillionaire with the Batman villain name. Gingrich has his own sponsors, the casino billionaires Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, hawkish supporters of Israel. Does what these individuals care about most fit in with the Republican party’s election strategy? So what?
It’s not that these individual donors believe in things — conservative Christian stands on abortion, unmitigated support for Israel and so on — that are so different from what much of the party’s base believes in. But political campaigns, especially national campaigns in America, are all about nuance and finesse — about just how you say something and when and where you say it. Presidential candidates need to elide certain issues at times, either things they know that they cannot do, but are loath to tell their base; or things that they intend to try, but cannot tell the rest of the electorate until they have gained power and built up the necessary public support; or things that they have no idea how they will handle until certain events play out and force their hand.
The question of whether or not the United States or Israel should attack Iran to suppress its nuclear program is a good example of this last sort of issue. Just what Iran’s capabilities are of developing nuclear weapons, what its intentions are once it should have them, how successful any attack on them can be and what the consequences of such an attack might be are just some of the immensely complicated questions surrounding this debate.
Yet such complexities don’t seem to matter much to the ravenously egotistical Gingrich, so long as they don’t much matter to his sponsor. Money, it’s true, has always played a critical role in American politics. But in the past, presidential nominees did more than simply try to raise money. They tried to build consensus within their party. Fringe candidates like Gingrich and Santorum were generally eliminated from the start by their past defeats or by their extremist views — college is evil — but if they weren’t, our political system gave them the chance to take their arguments to the people in relatively small, manageable states and see if they caught on.
Now, none of that really matters so much. Forced to resign as speaker of the House by your own party? Handed the worst electoral defeat in your own state that anyone can remember? Way behind in the delegate count? In some circumstances, it might be good that even though you’ve failed previously you can still go out and make your case to the people. But now you can even fail at that, as well. It doesn’t matter. Just one billionaire can keep you on the campaign trail!
Thanks to their inventiveness, Republicans have stumbled into the brave new world of American politics. From primaries to photo ops, from direct mail to voter suppression laws, the Republican party has almost always been the real innovator in electoral politics, usually leaving their slower brother, the Democrats, in the dust for at least a campaign season or two.
Now they’ve achieved the political equivalent of shuttering that foul old steel mill and shipping the hard work off for others to do while they dabble in these fascinating new derivatives. Now their candidates and their ideas are seen as so many junk bonds, and they don’t seem to have the wherewithal to make the party over from within.
The Republican party has been moving to the right for half-a-century now and generally carrying the country with it. But in the past, even under the right’s greatest hero, Ronald Reagan, this movement came in fits and starts, as Republican candidates and officeholders had to accommodate themselves to real-world situations and the qualms of their constituents. This is the chastening role that elections are supposed to play. Participating in a democracy means more than simply insisting, over and over again, in as loud and arrogant a voice as possible, in as many venues as your money will allow, what it is that you want. It means listening, it means convincing, it means compromising — all those things that political parties and their leaders used to be fairly good at.
At long last, Republicans seem to be finally coalescing around Mitt Romney’s candidacy, and he could still win the presidency if the economy slumps again. But the longer-term problem will remain: how to maintain a coherent, mass political party when so many individuals are empowered as never before to redirect it to their own, personal ends.
Kevin Baker is the author of the “City of Fire” series of historical novels, “Dreamland,” “Paradise Alley” and “Strivers Row.” A shortened version of this essay appears in the March 25 edition of Sunday Review
Ed, thanks.
You can also just post the link to the article you want to direct folks to. I think the link below is the correct one,
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/the-outsourced-party/
I was going to comment on that Steele “Reality Check” article but as I read who Steele copied it from, it was clear that was from just from another crackpot blogging on Western Rifle Shooters blog.
If you google a string of keywords like, Panetta, Congress, Constitution, Syria, or similar, you start to notice in the search results that all their talking points are just getting passed from one crackpot site to another.
I listened to the actual dialog between Sessions and Panetta and it was clear to me that Sessions was grandstanding for his base (as all politicians do), and that no new ground was being broken by Panetta, Constitutionally speaking.
The rest of the points from the Western Shooter blog, that Obama declared the first amendment null and void, went to war with Mexico, and looted the treasury, were idiotic as well.
If you want to see the conservative brain in action, just visit some of the local right wing blog sites.
Thanks, Brad, Like I’ve said, I’m a computer idiot. I’ll try to remember if I post again. Yes, I have visited the right-wing blog sites and am amazed. I don’t even talk to them anymore. I got home a little while ago and found four emails from Juvinall, all insulting, demeaning, but this time didn’t call me a simpleton. And Steele wouldn’t post my response to that guy White.
I get bombarded with anti Obama stuff, like the video on the health care bill from friends in TX, which is why I posted the name of who I thought might have made it. It was hard to trace, but usually I can track the source down, then destroy the argument. But why bother. This Supreme Court will probably overturn it anyway.
Well, it has been interesting, but I probably go on too long anyway.
Cheers,
When I think about the rights and their views of Christianity I think the following views is almost perfect:
Carlin nails it. As does Maher’s Religulous; Hitchinson’s, God Is Not Great; A familiarity with the Templar Kinghts, The Cathars, The Interference of the Pope in secular affairs throughout history; Bloody Mary; and the list goes on and on and on, following the yellow brick road as it winds its way through history to the present until even the forces driving it realizes their mistakes when they must endure the nearly illiterate, evangelical, hateful thoughts and words spewing forth from the sheep they’ve created upon reaching Nevada City. Meeting this bunch of Holy Rollers, the idea od End od Days hits them, and Rick Santorum pops into their spooky little brains.
When the hard right folks are all lathered up, like they are now,
it means they feel they are losing, and they are in a panic.
A little compassion is in order.
Hysteria is a painful condition.
Stuff the Right is trying to keep quiet: The son of divorced parents, he grew up in working-class neighborhoods north of Miami’s downtown. He and his father, a truck driver, were active in the Miramar Optimist Club, an organization that runs sports and academic programs for young people. Tracy Martin, the teen’s father, coached his son’s football team.
The boy was a swift athlete, according to a friend, and played a range of positions up to about age 14. After he stopped playing, he remained active in the organization, volunteering six days a week from June through November of last year to help run the team’s concession stand.
Martin cooked hamburgers, hot dogs and chicken wings alongside his father at the stand. He loved talking to the kids, asking them what position they played and whether they were good, Horton recalled. He would call the mothers “Ma’am,” and if they had a stroller or an item they needed help with, Martin stepped in.
“Everyone out there loved him,” Horton said.
Martin was tall and lanky — only 140 pounds, according to the family’s attorney — and his nickname was “Slimm.”
The teen spent a big part of his week living with his father in a one-story, peach-colored home. Neighbor Fred Collins Jr. said he would see Trayvon Martin outside every week mowing the lawn and trimming the trees. The teen also helped Collins’ son learn how to ride a bike.
***************************************************************
I’ve found rtwing sites that claim the kid was anywhere from 180 to 200, and 6′ 2″ to 6′ 5″ He never even played high school football.
Doug,
The same old theme of be afraid of those who don’t look like us. That is why conservatives are largely older white males who advocate oppressive policies towards anyone that might work their way up into having equal power, equal pay, and equal justice. I cannot tell you how PO’d I am that this incident happened AGAIN. If it wasn’t for social networking/ media Trayvon Martin murder would have been another statistic and nothing else. We can only hope something positive will come from his death.
After returning from Nam in ’69, I found where my father was and visited him in Fla. where he had bought a restaurant/bar with my stepmother. He was highly conservative, highly decorativeWWII war hero and very authoritarian. In one conversation, he complained about the hippies who gathered in a small park close to the entrance to his bar and said to me, “If I could, I’d line them up against that stone wall and machine gun them”. Thus I’m quite familiar with the aging, male, conservative mind and when I was reading a lengthy exchange on one of the Three Blind Mices’ blogs between a regular from this blog–I forget who, but he lives in Truckee–and the ‘pile on group’ over there, and all the name calling they did; using the same names they used against me when I was singlehandedly trying to enlighten them on the 2nd Amendment and the fact that it was not written to protect individual rights to bear arms. But they all are just like Morton Downey Jr, of years past. Don’t bother to address the questions asked, instead call others, simpletons, out of their league, can’t take it, you’re not tough enough to compete on this blog, etc. And Steele allows their attacks, but not rebuttal attacks. Who ever said, “Don’t feed the pigs,” nailed it.
Now getting to the point with this latest murder and the Stand your Ground theory of self Defence, what the self-proclaimed genius of the bad lizard breath blog, didn’t know as he called me a simpleton, are these words–Stand your ground–have meaning in the history and development of legal theory.
I won’t go into evidence supporting the argument that the 2nd Amendment had nothing to do with protecting individual rights to bear arms for self defence, but surffice it to say, the founders’ thinking on this subject wasn’t spontaneous or particularly original. They looked back to precedent in English practice. And, this whole area was deemed an area covered by common law, not Constitutional law. In common law, the applicable phrase concerning self defence was, “Flee to the Wall”. This is an entirely different concept than Stand your ground. One was expected to make a run for it, which makes sense, since the populace–excepting nobility–in England and throughout Europe was generally w/o firearms or edged weaponry of any kind, unless of course it was owned illegally. And knowing when to skeedadle is the smartest defensive tactic I know of and a primary concept of successful guerilla warfare. But again, the Three Blind Mice wouldn’t know about these things, not even the one that was somewhere up in the sky, high above where the action was.
Strange that more information about this killing hasn’t been released. It would be interesting to know, and with advanced forensics I belive this is possible, at what distance Martin was shot. If it has been released, then I missed it. Or any type of testing of Zimmerman, just as is done if a driver is involved in a fatal accident.
Another sad chapter in our history. More to come with the Supreme court we have been saddled with who undoubtedly will find a way to overturn the health care law.
Communicating with the likes of the Three Blind Mice reminds me of my discussions with various communists officials I during my extensive travels through the U.S.S.R. in ’72. Usually, they knew nothing of their real history; could only regurgitate the Party line–no original thoughts or thinking. And these guys represent all that is wrong with America. Not a one of those meeces would have survived half the winter at Valley Forge, and that was a mild winter.