Having just woken up from a bizarre dream in which a masked Scott Walker is on a stage with a line of teachers of all sizes and ages who are apologizing to him for making trouble (and members of the huge audience looking disapproving but are mute), it's hardly surprising to read that Paul Krugman is bemoaning the serious problems this country has, "all of which demand that we engage in a lot of hard thinking."
"Yet," he continues, "what we have instead is a political culture in which one side sneers at knowledge and exalts ignorance, while the other side hunkers down and pretends to halfway agree."
Peter Bergen looks at the "terrorism" hearings and weighs in with a dose of reality.
There are more than 15,000 murders in the U.S. every year, and few congressmen are claiming that law enforcement isn’t doing enough about such crimes.
That said, the challenge law enforcement officials face is that according to a just-published study by the New America Foundation and Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Policy, the homegrown jihadist terrorists don’t fit any particular ethnic profile: Of the cases for which ethnicity could be determined, a quarter are of Arab descent, while 10 percent are African-American, 13 percent are Caucasian, 18 percent are South Asian, 20 percent are of Somali descent, and the rest are either mixed race or of other ethnicities.
Krugman, who is worried we aren't dealing with the real health crisis in America, might say we're putting all our energies into swatting at the exotic, disease-carrying tse-tse fly, even though it's hardly known on American soil, while we avoid all efforts to reduce the threats of cardiovascular disease.
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It looks like the King hearings on "terrorism" were a bust yesterday -- a farce.
The televised hearing, led by Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, was jarring and not just because of the politically delicate subject matter, namely, terrorist sympathies within the Muslim American community. These kinds of proceedings tend to be prosecutorial, but lawmakers in this case mostly pointed fingers at one another.
The McCarthy hearings and Watergate were extraordinary spectacles that changed politics and the way people watched television, but televised hearings are now so commonplace that most go unnoticed. Over the past few years in particular, viewers have grown accustomed to a crisis-timed ritual of rebuke and repentance.
... At Thursday’s hearing, there was no single institution summoned to the hot seat. The few outside witnesses who appeared were eager to combat radical extremism, not defend it. Mostly, it was the committee itself that seemed to be on trial.
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A challenge: watch "All The King's Men" again as I did yesterday for the first time in more than twenty years. It's still a riveting drama. But it resonates very differently now, post-Reagan and post-radicalization of the Republican party. The drama is hardly over. I dare you to watch it and not be chilled by the dedication of the right in its efforts to bring down democracy. Nothing has changed; it's just worse -- and more professional and monied -- than ever.
