Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

Let there be snark.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / Lindsey Graham's Fee Fees / Love that Dirty Water

Love that Dirty Water

by | 88 Comments

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Obligatory sound track here.

A couple of things:  I want to shout amen and amen to a couple of post here earlier today.  DougJ nailed it with his quote from Ron Brownstein — and even more so with his last line: “This is Jackie Robinson’s country, not Pam Geller’s.” Fuck yeah.*

Bernard reminds us that the political reflex simply gets it wrong in the face of the immediate emotional pressure of tragedy.  We’re fighting folks who are fucked up already. If we transform ourselves into the defensive doppelganger to that offensive failure, we don’t get safer; we get fucked up in our turn.  (And yes, though it doesn’t quite track in terms of sense, the sensibility of this poem is in my head as I write that line.)

And mistermix picks up on what I was going to write about in this post in re Lindsay Graham.  I’ll add just one thought. Speaking as a Boston guy, let me say that the last thing I want to do is honor this guy with anything like combatant status.  He’s not a warrior; he’s got no soldier ethos or ethics.  He’s fucking murderer who takes down kids for … I don’t know what.  Soldiers fight folks who can fight back, at the orders of authority constructed in a legitimate chain of command.  And yeah, I know that oversimplifies, and if the Brits had caught Adams and Jefferson and Washington they’d have dangled at the end of a rope as simple vandals and killers, but you get my drift.  This murderous child is no more a soldier than is my cat, and has less moral capacity.  He’s a criminal, and I want him to face the full material and ceremonial weight of the law.  Anything else in some measure validates a claim to some greater significance.

Dr_Deijman’s_Anatomy_Lesson_(fragment),_by_Rembrandt

That was the bedrock of my loathing for the “War on Terror” and its apotheosis in the Iraq War, the first feeling experienced before any consideration of what a dumb idea it was or anything else.  You don’t elevate murderers to your level; they’re criminals, and should be represented, pursued, and, when caught, treated as such.  That Lindsay Graham hasn’t figured this out yet shows nothing more than that he is hopelessly overmatched by the job he holds.

And now to the tone I want to bring to all this.  I’ve been enjoying — no, revelling — in the face my town is putting on right now.  Here’s one example, via Boston.com:

It was clear amidst the chaos Friday which was the hometown coffee chain.
On block after block of the Boston’s Financial District and Downtown Crossing, Starbucks shops went dark as the city locked down, spurred by a manhunt for the second marathon bombing suspect. Dunkin’ Donuts stayed open.

Law enforcement asked the chain to keep some restaurants open in locked-down communities to provide hot coffee and food to police and other emergency workers, including in Watertown, the focus of the search for the bombing suspect. Dunkin’ is providing its products to them for free.

“At the direction of authorities, select Dunkin’ Donuts restaurants in the Boston area are open to take care of needs of law enforcement and first responders,” spokeswoman Lindsay Harrington explained via email.

And here’s another, from a brilliant blog post by Jim Dowd

Oh man, you screwed up, didn’t you?

Yes, your little RadioShack experiment for evil hurt and killed some people and got you the attention you were obviously so desperately seeking. Point for you there, asshole. But I get the sense you really don’t know what you’ve done here, do you? Are you from out of town? I have the strong sense that you are.

If that is the case, allow me tell you a little something about the city you screwed with. This town is not your run-of-the mill medium sized regional capital…

Do you have any idea what I’m talking about? This small city produced both Stephen J Gould and Whitey Bulger.  This place gave us Leonard Nimoy and Mark Wahlberg.  Southie and Cambridge. Brookline and Brockton. This place will kick the screaming piss out of you, come up with a cure for having the screaming piss kicked out of you, give it to you for free, then win a Nobel prize for it and then use the medallion to break your knuckles. See what I’m talking about?

Read the whole thing. Delicious. Righteous.

One more thing.  I’m still thinking about my friends in my old place, trying to comfort their kids in the basement while bombs and guns were going off in earshot.  I’m thinking about them while trying to figure out how to write something, anything even vaguely printable (a low bar in this day and age, I’ll admit) in reaction to the deep thoughts of one Nate Bell, a Republican Arkansas state rep, who tweeted:

I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR 15 with a hi-capacity magazine.

Yo, Nate, you pathetic waste of carbon! Hey Nate, possessed of all the wit of my old pet rock!

MSKG - De idioot bij de vijver - Frits Van den Berghe (1926)

Hey, Asshole! Call on me. I can answer…

And I do:  None.  No one.  In Boston, we actually have enough sense to realize that all the armed men and women along the marathon route couldn’t — and couldn’t have been expected — to stop a murderer with a pressure cooker in a bag.

We recognize that when thugs take down a cop (armed) sitting in his car, that gun didn’t help.  And we know damn well, and are grateful, that we had some damn well trained and equipped first responders taking great personal risk to keep us safe from those thugs — and the last thing they needed was some idiot(s) with a rifle running around playing cowboy while they were on the job.

Oh — and we know too that the people most at risk from such a gun in the house are the folks who live in the house; that acts of vicious and inexplicable murder of strangers are rare — horrible, but uncommon — but suicides and accidents and domestic violence are much less so, and we’d like to keep the body count down in our neighborhoods thank you very much.  And, by the way, that’s what we do — as you’d know  if you’d check out any gun violence map that correlates to states with even remotely reasonable gun control, you fatuous simulacrum of  sentience.

In other words, you can hang on to your  projected feelings of inadequacy in Arkansas.  In Boston, we’ve got business to take care of.

Hell — I guess I’m rambling again.  Time to stop.  Night all.  Thanks again for a great day on the threads.

*Y’all know that I have this habit of bowdlerizing my profanity.  Take that as the measure of general pissed off-edness.

Images: Rembrandt van Rijn, Dr. Deijmans Anatomy Lesson (fragment), 1656

Frits van den Berghe,The Idiot by the Pond, 1926

Reader Interactions

88Comments

  1. 1.

    Orpho

    “and use it to break your knuckles”: Amen, brother.

    Also, suspect 2 possibly cornered in a boat. He’s on a boat (it’s in a backyard).

  2. 2.

    Ben Franklin

    This murderous child is no more a soldier than is my cat, and has less moral capacity.

    Who is suggesting that?

  3. 3.

    Violet

    Someone in a previous thread said boat cover is mostly off and no movement by person on boat? Confirmation of that?

  5. 5.

    rikyrah

    I was listening to the radio this morning, about 4 am, and I was like…they already got one..huh?

    My coworkers and I think that law enforcement ran their faces through face recognition at all the airports up and down the Eastern seabord. once they came up negative for them, it was like,

    ‘ they’re still here…and we’re gonna hunt them down’..and we’re gonna do it on tv for the rest of your buddies to see..’

    they do not want this to end in an arrest…..they’re waiting for any excuse to open the gates of hell on this animal.

  6. 6.

    lamh35

    The Boston Globe ‏@BostonGlobe 37s
    BREAKING NEWS: Police have taken the cover off the boat containing the man believed to be the Marathon bombing suspect. He’s not moving.

    If kid is dead, couldn’t he kill himself, or have been injured in the overnight shootout?

  9. 9.

    Keith G

    CBS says that a man was hiding in the boat. Shots fired. CBS is very careful but seem to be sayng it’s sources feel this is a real encounter and not a false alarm

  12. 12.

    JPL

    We love you and are so glad you are okay. It has definitely been surreal watching TV today when they were focused on the Cambridge house and seeing a friends daughters house nearby. In fact it was surreal watching them evac with baby and dogs in tow. It has been f..king crazy.

  14. 14.

    raven

    The North Hollywood Shootout saw the LAPD sued because they “let” one of the shooters bleed to death. The police didn’t lose the case.

  15. 15.

    Dolly Llama

    I know this makes me shallow as a teaspoon, but every time I hear “Watertown” I think of the Bruce Hornsby and the Range song about “When the day goes down on Watertown.”

  16. 16.

    JPL

    We love you and are so glad you are okay. It has definitely been surreal watching TV today when they were focused on the Cambridge house and seeing a friends daughters house nearby. In fact it was surreal watching them evac with baby and dogs in tow. It has been f..king crazy.

  19. 19.

    pacem appellant

    To be completely unfair, Bell wasn’t tweeting to piss of the liberals (though he succeeded anyway), but to rile his base who think we’ll all cowering libtards. Play to the base, and we aren’t it. Still, fcku him. If his base is that dumb, they’re the ones cowering the in basement coddling their precious cold metal rod instead.

  20. 20.

    Comrade Mary

    Sounds as if they found him in a boat (on a trailer, in a back yard) because:

    a) A neighbour noticed a ladder up against the boat trailer, and

    b) A helicopter flew overhead to confirm and thermal imaging confirmed it.

  21. 21.

    Keith G

    Friends and I were just discussing that ending the lock down would be a good thing as it would get citizens to move about and get more of a chance to see that face they have been looking at for 14+ hours.

  24. 24.

    Comrade Mary

    Scanner reports — GRAIN OF SALT — flashbang grenades thrown by cops. Nothing on CBS to confirm this.

  26. 26.

    Hill Dweller

    MSNBC just played the audio of the gunfire exchange. The way the police unloaded, they had no interest in taking him alive.

  27. 27.

    Keith G

    Assuming this plays out as the end of the manhunt…what’s the resale value of the boat?

  30. 30.

    raven

    @Hill Dweller: If he showed ANY sign of resistance whatsoever that is it.

    Andrea Mitchell just said the scanner says the dude is sitting up. If that is so they were not trying to shoot him.

  32. 32.

    JPL

    Although the brother do not appear to be connected with international terrorists, they might achieve the same goal and I am sickened. How does the Dream Act look now. It does not matter if they are losers and never trained with terrorists, they are terrorists. Immigrants will suffer because of their actions for years. I’m sickened by there actions.

  33. 33.

    Mary G

    Righteous rant, Brother Tom! Glad you are all OK. So sorry about Officer Collier. He sounds like a great guy and a real loss to the MIT community.

    I follow 19 people on Twitter (maybe 6 or 7 are BJ front pagers.) I have never tweeted before, but I sent one today to Senator Graham, calling him a miserable jerk who violated his oath to support and defend the Constitution.

  34. 34.

    Elizabelle

    I wish they could take this young man alive and find out why he and brother did this, and who is the bomb maker.

    What he did is monstrous, but I hate to see more killing. Including his execution.

    I am an idiot in this respect. I would not have executed John Muhammad, the Beltway Sniper, either. Life without parole for him — yes.

    The coverage humanizes this bomber. A kid who took a really wrong turn and is in terrible trouble.

    A kid who killed an even better kid, little Martin Richard, and two young adults and an MIT officer and maimed dozens.

    I plead to idiocy.

  39. 39.

    Elizabelle

    @Hill Dweller:

    The gunfire was chilling.

    And — Senate of fools — only a fraction of that turned against young children in their classrooms.

  46. 46.

    mclaren

    The most disturbing part of the Boston bombing by far is the hysterical overreaction by the law enforcement people.

    Shutting the whole city down? Total lockdown? OMEGA MAN empty streets? To catch one asshole?

    Please. People, get a grip. That’s wayyyyyyyyyy over the top.

    Boston’s crazy over-reaction proves that the biggest supporters of the terrorists, the people who are really giving material aid and support to the violent extremists, are the law enforcement community in all its forms: DHS, police, FBI, all of ’em.

    It’s one person, guys.

    One. Person.

    Chill.

  48. 48.

    CaseyL

    They’re showing the shoot-out in the backyard. Wonder if the police were able to evacuate whoever lives in the house…?

  50. 50.

    Keith G

    Scott Pelly is being so measured and low key. He even corrected himself when he caught himself saying something speculative. Bravo.

  51. 51.

    aimai

    @Elizabelle: I feel the same way. He was a kid–he did something terrible but just executing him doesn’t make that pain and terror go away. And torturing him to get “information” which he almost surely never had wouldn’t do that either. I would far prefer that he’d been captured alive, stood trial, and gone to jail for life. I think its pretty clear that he formerly had a conscience and I think that’s the most terrible punishment of all–to face every day the horror of what you have done. I don’t feel that way about the brother and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the BPD/FBI not taking him alive. But if he could have been talked out and imprisoned for life I would ahve preferred that.

  52. 52.

    Joel

    Uncle Ruslan is the only fucking pundit you ever need:

    “Why did they do this? Because they’re losers”

  55. 55.

    Another Halocene Human

    Can anybody tell me how mclaren managed to jailbreak cleek’s pie filter?

    I do not need to read her mentally ill ravings, especially not now.

  56. 56.

    aimai

    @mclaren:

    You are really an idiot. Time was of the essence in capturig someone who had committed a major terrorist act. Putting the city on shutdown prevented lots of confusion and potential friendly fire like the kind LA indulged in. Here in Boston I think we regard it as a snow day/day of mourning. It really wasn’t that big a deal.

  57. 57.

    MattR

    @mclaren: AFAIK, the authorities haven’t shot any innocent bystanders yet so that is an improvement over Los Angeles’s response during the search for Christopeher Dormer.

  59. 59.

    Joel

    @Elizabelle: Frankly, I’d accept a lifetime without parole without hesitation. Maybe they can put him in the cell between Eric Rudolph and Ramzi Yousef. But doing him like Tim McVeigh wouldn’t cause me to lose a moment’s sleep, either.

    You become an adult someday.

  60. 60.

    quannlace

    , I keep thinking of that almost baby face of the younger brother (not gonna even try to type out the name.) And at 19, it’s possible to gin yourself up to any kind of self-righteous belief.
    But shit, I also see those first released photos of him and his brother walking thru the marathon crowd. Looking right at the people, including children, who they had just arranged to blow up.

  61. 61.

    Keith G

    @mclaren: Maybe it was. But maybe it also gave the city a huge collective time out during a period when people, reporters and other might have just gotten in the way and caused multitudes of distractions and camouflage – or been better targets.

  63. 63.

    mclaren

    @SatanicPanic:

    Get some answers?

    Wha–??

    He’s an asshole. A punk loner with a shit-for-brains brother. A batshit crazy socipath. That’s the “answer.” There’s no giant conspiracy here, no Dr. No sitting in a volcano petting a cat and watching the Boston bombing on a giant screen and murmuring, “Soon the world will know my power!”

    It was a pair of jerks with serious emotional problems. World’s full of ’em. These guys were not part of any huge master plan, any more than a guy who beats his wife to death is part of some diabolical master plan, or any more than some tool who shoots his children and then himself is part of diabolical master plan.

    These incidents happen and that doesn’t change the fact that you are still 50 times more likely to die from a lightning strike than from one of these kinds of events. You are thousands of times more likely to die or be injured while driving home from work than from a terrorist bomb in America.

  65. 65.

    mclaren

    @aimai:

    “Major terrorist act”?

    Three people killed, and this is a “major terrorist act”?

    You really have lost your grip on reality, haven’t you?

  66. 66.

    arguingwithsignposts

    @mclaren: I know I shouldn’t feed you, but by “get some answers,” there are more options there than simply exposing some conspiracy.

  67. 67.

    SatanicPanic

    @mclaren: Yeah, but most of the sociopaths running around aren’t known to have already killed 4 adults and maimed dozens of others. And clearly still have guns and grenades in their possession. That tends to become a priority.

    But by all means, let’s arrange for great targets for them. Go about your business! Play ball!

  68. 68.

    Joel

    I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR 15 with a hi-capacity magazine.

    Better to be gunless in Boston, than dickless in Arkansas.

  69. 69.

    NotMax

    @efgoldman

    As the post mentioned Whitey Bulger (mob man and confessed killer, turned FBI informant 40 years ago) and Leonard Nimoy (best known for a role originated more than 40 years ago), I fail to see the point of your complaint about my bringing in something else from around the same time.

  70. 70.

    MattR

    @Ben Franklin: The high stakes are all the more reason I am surprised that someone didn’t get jumpy and fire at someone who was not actually a threat (not so much this afternoon, but more last night in the heat of the chase)

  71. 71.

    max

    @mclaren: He’s an asshole. A punk loner with a shit-for-brains brother. A batshit crazy socipath. That’s the “answer.” There’s no giant conspiracy here, no Dr. No sitting in a volcano petting a cat and watching the Boston bombing on a giant screen and murmuring, “Soon the world will know my power!”

    You’re half-right: Dzhokhar appears to have been a pretty good kid until he went bad, and at the end of the day, he’s still a dumb kid.

    Unfortunately for everyone, he’s a dumb kid that helped bombed some people, and then led police on a bezerk chase, lobbing bombs at all kinds of random targets.

    Nobody knows what weapons or equipment the dumb fucking kid has, or what the dumb fucking kid will do, but they know what he’s capable of, and they know he’s a dumb fucking kid, so there is no telling.

    They opted to minimize his ability to blow up or shoot innocent people. You don’t want to do it all the time, but sometimes that is the safest course.

    max
    [‘That is all.’]

  72. 72.

    Another Halocene Human

    I wonder if those idiots lobbying to BAN ALL DOMESTIC DRONES have stopped to think about the use of police robots to prevent human beings from being hurt, like using drones to investigate possible bombs or using them to get intelligence during a volatile scene?

    Drones can magically get a better picture of your backyard that US defense satellites, police helicopters, and aerial photography planes operated by hewmons?

    Why not dial back the paranoia and push for laws to actually protect our privacy effectively?

  74. 74.

    mclaren

    @efgoldman:

    Keep drooling and gibbering in mindless frenzied fear. The rest of us recognize that this incident is no more dangerous and no more important than the average SWAT raid on some meth head.

    I’d like to thank the fear-crazed among you for providing a valuable example of exactly how not to think about terrorism: your mindless hysterical panic offers a wonderful example of everything America should not do when faced with these kinds of tragic but ultimately insignificant incidents.

    As usual, I agree with security expert Bruce Schneier:

    What America should do about incidents like the Boston bombing: nothing.

    As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it’d be easy to be scared. It’d be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something — anything — to keep us safe.

    It’d be easy, but it’d be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators’ hands — and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don’t have to be scared, and we’re not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there’s one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

    It’s hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people — far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random — in this case involving an innocent child — senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.

    But our brains are fooling us. Even though this will be in the news for weeks, we should recognize this for what it is: a rare event. That’s the very definition of news: something that is unusual — in this case, something that almost never happens.

    Source: “The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On,” The Atlantic Monthly,, Bruce Schneier, 15 April 2013.

    I know my logic and common sense will be met with name-calling and demented insults, and guess what?

    I welcome your hatred. It proves my point. You people are unhinged with baseless fear, and you need to calm down.

  76. 76.

    NotMax

    @NotMax

    One more thing.

    So? That was forty years ago.

    Add ten years and you’ve prognosticated Scalia’s probable entire decision on the Voting Rights Act.

  78. 78.

    mclaren

    @efgoldman:

    Come on, The police are on the job and so is the FBI. The FBI has a 90-plus percent closure rate on these kinds of investigations. The guy has been identified. There’s no where for him to go. This is a standard manhunt, and he will be caught. It’s just a matter of time.

    According to your logic, we should shut down our major cities every time a couple of police get shot in a drug raid or at a traffic stop.

    Get a grip.

    The Boston bombing offers a perfect example of why we need to use a law enforcement response to terrorism — not a military response.

    Declaring a curfew and closing all the streets down is a military response. It’s pointless, counterproductive, stupid, and dangerous. (It endangers people who may happen to be out on the street alone because it encourages wild overreaction by law enforcement personnel when they see someone on the street. That is exactly what you don’t want to have happen in a manhunt.)

    And I’m not alone in saying this. All the terrorism and security experts are saying exactly the same thing.

    We don’t need extreme measures like shutting down our cities to combat violent crime. We don’t need to turn America in East Germany to deal with criminals like this. We don’t need to abolish trial by jury and we don’t need to start kidnapping and torturing suspects to deal with this problem. We have excellent police and federal law enforcement personnel in America, and they do their job well. Just stop panicking and let them do it.

  80. 80.

    SatanicPanic

    @mclaren: A guy who just carried out a terrorist act is not your average fugitive. How do you know he’s not going to commit another? His brother was found with a bomb strapped to his chest. But by all means, let’s just let people congregate and provide a nice target.

    All the terrorism and security experts are saying exactly the same thing.

    I suppose the Feds don’t employ any of those?

  85. 85.

    Emma

    @mclaren: I welcome your hatred? Listen, I know several men named Jesus and they have fewer delusions of grandeur than you do.

    Hint: a nail gun gets the stigmata done faster. Though you do need help for the last step.

  86. 86.

    Odin

    One of the crimes associated with these bombings is the prompting of gasbags to extol our pluckiness.

  88. 88.

    philadelphialawyer

    “…the Brits had caught Adams and Jefferson and Washington they’d have dangled at the end of a rope as simple vandals and killed….”

    Not true re the British and Washington, Jefferson and Adams…the British pretty much followed standard POW rules in dealing with American soldiers taken prisoner. They certainly did not string them up. Generals in particular, some of whom were taken captive, on both sides, were actually treated rather nicely (think, essentially, “house arrest,” in a nice isolated farm, or, even better, given the run of the surrounding area too). If Washington had been caught, that is how he would have been treated, if not better still. Indeed, officers in general were treated pretty well, including American officers taken by the British. Enlisted men were treated rather worse by the British (think overcrowded, nasty prison ships rotting in the harbor), but, still, were not executed. Basically, American prisoners of whatever rank were treated by the British no differently (no better, but no worse either) than prisoners of a recognized nation state enemy, like France, were treated. And prisoner exchanges (of generals and officers and enlisted men) were the rule.

    As for Adams and Jefferson, there is really no example whatsoever of the British executing patriot leaders simply for being patriot leaders. The British were extremely ambivalent about the whole affair, and were still looking to negotiate a peace short of independence as late as 1778. True, in the later, Southern campaigns, things tended to get out of hand, on both sides, with cases of surrendered troops and generals killed on the battlefield. Nevertheless, even there, the worst actions were taken by Americans on both sides of the fight (the war in the South was as much a civil war as a colonial one), not British regulars. And, even in the South, no one was coolly executed, away from a battlefield. simply for being a patriot.

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