Gutless Politicians Blocked a Bipartisan Gun Bill. But Who's Surprised?

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

26 June 16

 

Out on the weekend, where we'll be reading quite a lot of Michael Herr's work.

don't like to say I Told You So–Oh, hell, yes, I do–but I Told You So. The March of Cowardice went on in the United States Senate on Friday as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell chloroformed the Extra Special Bipartisan Compromise gun-restrictions bill proposed by Senators Susan Collins and Heidi Heitkamp, two nonentities, in favor of a completely useless bill proposed by future one-term Senator Ron (Shreds of Freedom) Johnson of Wisconsin, who happens to be as dumb as a bag of rocks. The 411 on this latest maneuver can be found, among other places, over at The Hill:

McConnell had promised a vote this week to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) on her bipartisan measure barring people on two terrorist watchlists from buying guns or explosives. But what he scheduled was not what she had in mind. Instead of setting up a vote to add the Collins legislation to the pending appropriations bill on the Senate floor, McConnell scheduled a vote to discard it. The Collins bill survived that test in a 46-52 vote, but it fell far short of winning 60 votes, the threshold necessary to overcome procedural hurdles. The result allows Republicans to argue that no other action is necessary. "It didn't have sixty votes. That's what a motion to table does. It demonstrates where the votes are," said Don Stewart, McConnell's spokesman.

Clever dick, that Mitch, equal emphasis on both words. He gives his vulnerable members–like, say, Ron Johnson–cover whereby they could "support" sensible gun-restrictions but still not be seen as getting crossways with the armaments industry and its primary sales force, the NRA. Of course, Senator Collins, who must have about 30 tons of aluminum siding in her backyard and who must own half the python-ridden swampland in Florida, pronounced herself shocked (SHOCKED!) at how this could have happened. Wasn't this bill a Compromise? Wasn't this bill bipartisan? Somebody send the EMT's to Ron Fournier's house. Again, from The Hill:

Collins lamented that the way McConnell set up the votes made it tough to know how much support her proposal could have garnered had it been offered cleanly. "That'll be a question I'll never know the answer to," she said when asked how her amendment would have done had the Johnson amendment not been there to provide political cover. When asked if she wanted to have another vote on the proposal, Collins said, "Of course," just before taking an elevator down to the Capitol basement.

Where she drank herself into a stupor.

I made that last part up.

See, all throughout the week, when Republicans were showing the white feather on this issue in the wake of the Orlando massacre, we heard an awful lot from constitutional conservatives about due process, and the Fifth Amendment, and so on and so forth. I agree that these are serious concerns. I wish they would bring a bill to the floor and actually debate them in earnest. Might be a helluva civics lesson. But that never will happen under the current congressional majorities because, collectively, they don't have the guts God gave the common ficus. It is of no little historical interest that the guys who actually wrote the Bill of Rights weren't afraid of debating anything in public. Our present constitutional conservatives wouldn't have lasted five minutes in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787, or in any of the state legislatures during the brawling, two-year process of ratifying the Constitution. George Mason wouldn't even deign to send them out for snacks.

One of the great things about working at this shebeen is knowing that, at Esquire, you've got a massive tradition of incredible journalism to uphold. Part of that tradition unquestionably was created by Michael Herr, who went out into the field in Vietnam and brought back the stories of the grunts caught up in the faceless grinder of an idiotic war. (Any journalism school that doesn't include them in its curriculum should be torn down immediately and turned into a public park.) These he later fashioned into Dispatches, which I believe is still the greatest book about being inside a war that I've ever read. Later, Herr worked those same memories into the incredible prologue to Apocalypse Now, and into the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket that he wrote for Stanley Kubrick. (All most people remember from that film is the long boot camp section, but the long segment about the siege of Hue is pure Herr.) 

I once had a Vietnam vet friend who told me that The Deer Hunter was about the war in Vietnam, but that Apocalypse Now was about the Vietnam War. He later walked into a closet with his M1 and shot himself to death. I wept that day, but I understood and found solace, partly because I'd read the work of Michael Herr—who died Friday at the age of 76, and who ended his masterpiece of a book with this final truth—as inescapable as a prayer:

I saw a picture of a North Vietnamese soldier sitting in the same spot on the Danang River where the press center had been, where we'd sat smoking and joking and going "Too much!" and "Far out!" and "Oh my God it gets so freaky out there!" He looked so unbelievably peaceful, I knew that somewhere that night and every night there'd be people sitting together over there talking about the bad old days of jubilee and that one of them would remember and say, Yes, never mind, there were some nice ones, too. And no moves left for me at all but to write down some few last words and make the dispersion, Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there.

And, as long as we're saying farewell to folks, we should wish godspeed to Ralph Stanley, an authentic child of what Greil Marcus referred to as "the old, weird America." Stanley picked up his banjo, put together the Clinch Mountain Boys, and followed his muse into the heart of American gothic horror, in almost every real sense, as the Washington City Paper explains. Most of us remember him for his stunning rendition of "O, Death" in the Coens' O, Brother, Where Art Thou? But, for me, his most deeply chilling performance remains the ancient murder ballad, "Pretty Polly." (Dock Boggs, remarkably, took the song even deeper into hell.) I'm sure that Blog Official Music Archivist Bill Osment and Blog Official Guitar Picker Gary Popovich can check in with more details. For me, well, the other night, somebody suggested that, as far as music is concerned, we should unplug 2016, wait 30 seconds, and then plug it in again to see it it reboots. I'm good with that.

Have we tried unplugging 2016 waiting ten seconds and plugging it back in?

— dongwon (@dongwon) June 24, 2016

Notes From My Favorite Machine: To Infinity And Beyond: The Hubble looks at Neptune and finds…gas mountains! Talk to us, Scientific American!

As reported by the investigative team, the icy clouds are a lot like the phenomenon of orographic clouds that we see here on Earth—pancake-like formations that happen over terrestrial mountains. This latest Hubble data helps confirm that bright Neptunian clouds are paired with dark vortices. Ground-based telescopes have been able to spot these bright features, but lack the resolution to probe the dark spots at bluer wavelengths. Now it seems that the evolution of these features can be traced with future Earth-based data. Because the dark spots, or vortices, of Neptune come and go much more rapidly than a feature like Jupiter's Great Red Spot (that's been seen for the past 400 years), this is an opportunity to learn much more about Neptune's chilly secrets.

I already copyrighted Neptune's Chilly Secrets as the title of my next bus-station porn novel, so y'all stay away.

On a fairly regular basis, we here at the shebeen have been concerned that one of the FBI's shrewd stings of a hapless loser who wants to become a terrorist might go sideways on the Bureau. I am constantly told it can't happen, safeguards and all, but this item from the TC Palm doesn't reassure me at all:

Mateen's background, however, was checked again by G4S in 2013 after the St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office requested he be removed from the St. Lucie County Courthouse patrol after he allegedly made derogatory comments to a deputy. A deputy at the courthouse mentioned the Middle East to Mateen, who reacted by threatening the deputy, said Sheriff Ken Mascara, who attended the Wednesday night meeting at the community's Island Club. "Omar became very agitated and made a comment that he could have al-Qaida kill my employee and his family," Mascara said Wednesday. "If that wasn't bad enough, he followed it up with very disturbing comments about women and followed it up with very disturbing comments about Jews and then went on to say that the Fort Hood shooter was justified in his actions." The FBI launched an investigation into Mateen after Sheriff's Office officials reported the incident to the agency. As part of its investigation, the FBI examined Mateen's travel history, phone records, acquaintances and even planted a confidential informant in the courthouse to "lure Omar into some kind of act and Omar did not bite," Mascara said. The FBI concluded Mateen was not a threat after that, Mascara said.

(Bolding my own.)

The fck? Seriously? Sounds like somebody in Washington ought to have a chat with Sheriff Mascara and find out some more about this before the InfoWars crowd goes completely insane.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Watch And Chain" (Honey Island Swamp Band): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's a U.S. teenager in 1933 who can really shoot a pistol. I sincerely hope she married a non-smoker. Her grandchild, little Wayne, has become quite an influential lobbyist, I hear.

From the essential Diane Ravitch's blog, we are tipped to a story in the Texas Tribune about how that state's mandatory, high-stakes testing program apparently was designed by fumble-brained orangutans:

New testing contractor Educational Testing Service, in the first year of a four-year, $280 million contract to administer the STAAR, has seemed overwhelmed by the task: It misdelivered tests, lost records of test answers, and took weeks longer than promised to deliver test scores.

That sounds bad. It can't get worse, right? Of course, it can.

At the last minute, ETS reportedly told one district that the high school English I test included a question with no right answer. Officials there were told that students should just leave the question blank, according to a letter from Houston-area superintendents complaining about widespread testing problems. As difficult as it must have been to get that message out to every English I classroom in the district, ETS reportedly never bothered, according to the school official who wrote that "Something of that magnitude should have been broadcast to the entire state."

Here is another question with no right answer: What's the best way to monetize public education?

Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

Kind of a light week. (The first result for "dinosaur news" on Google is the kid who got her head stuck in the Barney costume.) However, the Mashable crew brings us the story of some Australian ladies who are dedicated to making dinosaur news as clean as possible:

Like many towns in this region of Australia, Eromanga is in a state of almost perpetual drought, with a shrinking population as locals leave in search of better prospects. But the land is not done with those who remain—something unexpected is emerging. In this isolated place, the earth has a mind to turn itself inside out. Farmers recall fenceposts working their way out of the ground for no apparent reason, and then something else inching to the surface. They tell stories of feral pig hunters coming home with pockets bulging full of large, unfamiliar teeth and vertebrae. Dinosaurs.

Even in this lost and dusty place, the MacKenzies know the truth–dinosaurs lived then in order to make us happy now.

Top Commenter Of The Week: Tough week for the committee. Long sessions, lots of arguing. Good thing Senator Professor Warren stopped by with some munchkins and a big Box o' Joe. But, eventually, the consensus was reached that Top Commenter Lisa Deeley Smith is this week's Top Commenter of the Week for her erudite riposte to He, Trump's speculation on Hillary Rodham Clinton's religion, which combined her theological studies with her devotion to Galaxy Quest:

By Charles Wesley's songbook, by Francis Asbury's horse, you shall be avenged.

And, yeah, I've known LDS for almost 40 years. What's it to you?

I'll be back on Monday with what I am sure will be a metric fckton of Both Siderist drivel about the gun debate, and further hair-on-fire panic about the Brexit business. Until then, be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line or the good folks in Eromanga will be polishing your bones.