Pondering the Pundits

“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

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Glenn Greenwald: The FBI was right not to arrest Omar Mateen before the shooting

The massacre at an Orlando LGBT club has predictably provoked the same reaction as past terror attacks: recriminations that authorities should have done more to stop it in advance, accompanied by demands for new police powers to prevent future ones. Blame-assigners immediately pointed to the FBI’s investigation of the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen. “The FBI closed this file because the Obama administration treats radical Islamic threats as common crimes,” GOP Sen. Lindsey O. Graham argued on Fox News. “If we kept the file open and we saw what he was up to, I think we could have stopped it.” Others cited core fundamental rights, demanding they be eroded. “Due process is what’s killing us right now,” proclaimed Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin about the FBI’s inability to act more aggressively against Mateen. [..]

Underlying this mind-set is an assumption that is both dubious and dangerous: that absolute security is desirable and attainable. None say that explicitly, but it’s the necessary implication of the argument. Once this framework is implicitly adopted, a successful attack becomes proof that something went wrong, law enforcement failed to act properly and more government authorities are needed. To wit: Hillary Clinton this week proposed an “intelligence surge” to halt “plots before they can be carried out.” And Donald Trump called for more intelligence activity to give “law enforcement and the military the tools they need to prevent terrorist attacks.”

This is wrong, and based on what we know, the FBI acted properly. Agents have the power they need, and they were right to close the case on Mateen. Just because someone successfully carried out a violent mass attack does not prove that police powers were inadequate or that existing powers were misapplied. No minimally free society can prevent all violence. In the United States, we do not hold suspects for crimes they have not committed.

Trevor Timm: The ‘solutions’ to the Orlando shooting that will only make things worse

As with many tragedies, a host of politicians are now trying to exploit the mass murder in Orlando to push all sorts of proposals that would have done little or nothing to stop the attack either, but could have a huge affect on our rights.

The first thing Republicans did on Monday was try to use the tragedy to call for expansive new surveillance powers for the FBI – despite the fact that the FBI had no problem surveilling the Orlando attacker while they were investigating him. As the New York Times noted on Monday: “FBI agents in Florida used multiple investigative tools, including an undercover informant who made contact with the suspect, wiretapping his conversations, and pulling personal and financial records” when they first investigated him in 2013.

But Republicans didn’t let the facts get in the way. They want to massively broaden the use of national security letters, controversial and unconstitutional tools that the FBI would be able to use to get people’s email records and internet history without involving a judge or courts at all. Of course, they can already get this with a court order, but Republicans (and the Obama administration) want as little judicial scrutiny over these activities as possible. [..]

Of course the best way to stop murderers from killing large numbers of people would be to categorically ban the sale of weapons that make mass murder so easy. That, however, seems to be the one thing that everyone understands is the least likely thing to happen.

Raúl M Grijalva: The Republican crusade against public land must end

A new congressional bill would hand federal land over to states. That might please the militants who occupied a national park last year. What about the rest of us?

Since taking over the majority in 2011, House Republicans have intensified their efforts to give away natural resources owned by the American people to a few special interests. From threatened and endangered wildlife to mineral resources to fisheries, Republicans have attempted to shift control and decision-making authority from federal agency stewards to states and localities – even those with a track record of short-sighted or irresponsible management. [..]

The most recent development in the ongoing battle for our public lands is the recent introduction of the badly misnamed Local Enforcement for Local Lands Act. The brainchild of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, a Republican congressman from Utah, and House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop, also a representative from Utah, this radical bill would abolish the law enforcement divisions of the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and cede their authority to states and localities. [..]

The bill’s supporters claim it’s necessary to relieve tension and resolve conflicts over US public lands management in the West. This is absolutely the wrong way to address a very real problem. Instead of relieving tension, the bill legitimizes anti-government conspiracy theories, dumps fuel on a smoldering fire and makes law enforcement more difficult.

Congressional Republicans should show their support for hardworking federal law enforcement officers and work with Democrats to ensure that US public land managers have the tools and resources they need to ensure these lands are managed for safe, sustainable, multiple use. Offering farfetched alternatives only makes things worse.

Bill Moyers: Trump, His Virus and the Dark Age of Unreason

There’s a virus infecting our politics and right now it’s flourishing with a scarlet heat. It feeds on fear, paranoia and bigotry. All that was required for it to spread was a timely opportunity — and an opportunist with no scruples.

There have been stretches of history when this virus lay dormant. Sometimes it would flare up here and there, then fade away after a brief but fierce burst of fever. At other moments, it has spread with the speed of a firestorm, a pandemic consuming everything in its path, sucking away the oxygen of democracy and freedom.

Today its carrier is Donald Trump, but others came before him: narcissistic demagogues who lie and distort in pursuit of power and self-promotion. Bullies all, swaggering across the landscape with fistfuls of false promises, smears, innuendo and hatred for others, spite and spittle for anyone of a different race, faith, gender or nationality. [..]

So the ghost of Joseph McCarthy lives on in Donald Trump as he accuses President Obama of treason, slanders women, mocks people with disabilities, and impugns every politician or journalist who dares call him out for the liar and bamboozler he is. The ghosts of all the past American demagogues live on in him as well, although none of them have ever been so dangerous — none have come as close to the grand prize of the White House.

Because even a pathological liar occasionally speaks the truth, Trump has given voice to many who feel they’ve gotten a raw deal from establishment politics, who see both parties as corporate pawns, who believe they have been cheated by a system that produces enormous profits from the labor of working men and women that are gobbled up by the 1 percent at the top. But again, Trump’s brand of populism comes with venomous race-baiting that spews forth the red-hot lies of a forked and wicked tongue.

Amanda Marcotte: The AR-15 has to go: Sorry, Jon Stokes, but your toy isn’t more important than people’s lives

Meet Jon Stokes: Former editor at Wired, founder of Ars Technica, and a man who really, really loves his AR-15. It’s a gun he hastens to explain is “technically a Sig Sauer MCX,” in case you were worried that his piece at Medium defending his beloved weapon would be anything but a tone-deaf temper tantrum by a man who appears to love things more than people. [..]

Adrenaline-fueled humans, being, as Stokes notes, hard to kill, so many of them did escape. But only a third made it all the way out without being hit with bullets. One of those was Demetrice Naulings’s friend, Eddie Justice, who died, despite Naulings’s efforts to save him.

Stokes goes on and on and on in this vein, and even included a follow-up, which is even more outrage that people don’t show enough respect for his favorite toy.  But you get the picture. He loves his semi-automatic assault rifle very much, not just despite its power to mow down a room full of people at a moment’s notice, but quite clearly because of it. That is an awesome power and Stokes likes having it. As he notes, another “a few million other non-crazy Americans” also like it, though it is up for debate whether or not it’s “crazy” to desire that kind of killing power so fiercely.

God knows the NRA is well aware that the customer base for these guns are people like Stokes, whose power fantasies overwhelm not just their common sense but sense of decorum and sensitivity. [..]

It speaks volumes about how all sense of reason has escaped the pro-gun lobby that they think that “capable of destroying a room full of people in minutes” is a defense of a gun, instead of an obvious reason why the damn thing should be banned immediately.