Our Deadly Love Affair With Guns

by Cliston Brown | Dec 3, 2012 | Political Commentary

In the wake of the highly publicized gun deaths brought about by a Kansas City Chiefs football player who killed the mother of his child and then committed suicide, I’ve been thinking seriously about the issue of gun violence in America.

I’ll be honest: I don’t know what the right answer is on this issue. I am not a gun owner myself, but many of my male relatives are avid hunters and own plenty of guns. None of them have ever used any of their guns improperly, and I have no doubt that the same is true of the vast majority of gun owners.

That said, the statistics clearly demonstrate that this country has a serious problem with gun violence and gun-related deaths as compared to almost every other country on earth, and certainly as compared to other modern, advanced democracies. There are only a handful of countries that average more gun deaths, per 100,000 inhabitants, than the United States, and most of these are countries that have severe drug violence (such as Mexico and Colombia) or persistent civil unrest.

I’ve done some research online, and in recent years, U.S. gun homicides and accidental gun deaths average more than 4 out of every 100,000 Americans in a year’s time. This is compared to less than one-tenth of a person per 100,000 in England; slightly more than two-tenths of a person per 100,000 in Scotland; slightly more than half a person per 100,000 in Australia and about half that rate in nearby New Zealand; about 1 person per 100,000 in Canada; and just slightly more than that in Ireland.

I’ve often heard it said that “Guns don’t kill people; people do,” and that you can’t blame guns for the actions of bad people or those who are mentally ill. However, on a per-capita basis, we have anywhere from four to 40 times more gun deaths per year than other socially and educationally advanced countries that are very similar to us historically and culturally. Does that mean we have four to 40 times as many bad people or crazy people as our contemporaries? I don’t think so.

While banning guns is not the answer (and clearly unconstitutional), other post-industrial democracies are having much more success avoiding gun deaths than we are. We need to be having some discussions as a country as to why this is and what we can do. Can we make it harder for the wrong people (those with criminal backgrounds or a history of mental illness) to get guns? Can we at least regulate guns that have an exclusively military purpose? Let’s face it, folks, you don’t need an Uzi to shoot Bambi—unless you’ve got a taste for some Bambi McNuggets. And a shooter who needs to reload occasionally will be able to shoot a lot fewer people before he is stopped than he could shoot with an automatic weapon.

Unfortunately, because of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and its skillful lobbying and public relations efforts, we as a country are now afraid to even broach the subject of gun violence. Our politicians, both on the right and on much of the left, have been so cowed by the NRA (and its vast reserves of campaign cash) that even suggesting we might have a gun problem in this country has become politically problematic. As a result, we have closed our collective eyes to the fact that, statistically speaking, we clearly do have a problem. So the problem persists, and every time we have a highly publicized gun tragedy, we move on without even talking about how we can avoid similar tragedies in the future. This is shameful, cowardly—and bordering on criminal neglect.

America isn’t the only place where there are gun massacres. There have recently been mass shootings in Germany and Norway, for example, but those were notable because they happen so rarely. Here, we’ve gotten to a point where we barely even notice whenever we have a new Virginia Tech or Northern Illinois or Columbine or Tucson.

We’ve got a problem. I’m not entirely sure how we should deal with it, but we at least need to start by admitting a problem exists. We can’t just continue to bury our heads in the sand and hope that if we ignore it, it will go away. America has a problem with gun violence. What are we going to do about it?

Why I Voted For President Obama

by Cliston Brown | Oct 14, 2012 | Political Commentary

Last week, I cast my absentee ballot for President Barack Obama.

I have Republican friends, and I have Democratic friends. I have friends who don’t like either party, and I have friends who think politics is a waste of time. I’m sure I have some friends who are still conflicted about their choice in this year’s election.

I know some of my friends disagree with my politics, and they will disagree with what I have to say here. But I hope those of you who know me believe that I am a thoughtful person, and that I don’t make important choices without giving them a lot of consideration. And I hope that I can convince you to join me in voting to give Barack Obama a second term as our president.

I am going to take a few minutes here to tell you some of the most important reasons why I believe President Obama has earned a second term.

1) We are better off than we were four years ago. In the year before President Obama took office, 5 million U.S. workers lost their jobs, and in just the last month of the Bush administration, 839,000 Americans became unemployed. After President Obama and the Democratic Congress took over in January 2009 and implemented their stimulus program, the job losses began to dramatically reverse, and by April 2010, the economy began adding jobs, as it has done every month for the last two-and-a-half years. Since that time, the economy has added about 5 million jobs. Don’t take my word for it; if you want to see the statistics for yourself, go to the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Statistics report at www.bls.gov/web/empsit/ceshighlights.pdf. When President Obama ran for office in 2008, he promised he would take action to get Americans working again. President Obama is fulfilling that promise.

2) We are safer today than we were four years ago. President Obama saw that the large, costly invasions of other countries that took place before he came into office were not working. He shifted to a policy of targeted, special-forces strikes that ultimately culminated in the killing of dozens of leading Al Qaeda operatives, including Osama bin Laden. (Again, do not take my word for it; a fuller accounting can be found at http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/the-terrorist-notches-on-obamas-belt/). When President Obama first ran in 2008, he promised that if he had reliable intelligence that bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, he would send in a strike force to take him out. President Obama fulfilled that promise. 

3) More Americans now have access to health insurance than at any time in our history. Although polling clearly demonstrated that the health care bill now known as Obamacare would cost the president and his party politically, they pushed it through. Two key benefits: nobody can be denied health care coverage anymore due to preexisting conditions, and the adult children of policyholders can stay on those policies until they are 26. (Want more information? Go to http://visual.ly/two-years-under-obamacare-look-whats-changed.) When he ran in 2008, President Obama promised to provide more access to health care coverage. President Obama has fulfilled that promise.

4) President Obama and the Democrats in Congress saved the U.S. auto industry (and 1.5 million jobs). According to the a Center for Automotive Research report quoted in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/a-million-jobs.html), the bailout—half of which General Motors and Chrysler have already repaid to taxpayers, according to politifact.com—directly contributed to the employment of a million-and-a-half Americans. President Obama promised not to let this industry die. President Obama has fulfilled that promise.

5) President Obama and the Democrats in Congress cut taxes for the middle class. We hear over and over again how the president and the Democrats have raised taxes. It just isn’t true. President Obama and the Democrats cut taxes for working Americans. (See the rundown at http://www.republicansforobama.org/firstterm.) The president and Congressional Democrats do propose to raise taxes on individuals who make more than $250,000 in order to help balance the budget and bring down the deficit. That’s a fact. But anybody who tells you the Democrats have raised taxes under President Obama is lying to you.

Is everything perfect or back to normal? No it isn’t. But it took eight years of extremely unwise economic and foreign policies to get us into the mess that President Obama inherited. How can we possibly expect him to fully repair eight years of damage in only four years?

The president has made a good start. We need to give him time to finish the job. That’s why I have already cast my vote for President Obama, and I ask you to join me in doing the same.

The Real "Dirty Harry"

by Cliston Brown | Sep 15, 2012 | Political Commentary

The Romney campaign committed a huge error when it attacked the Obama administration as “weak” in the wake of the killing of four Americans, including our ambassador, Christopher Stevens, in Libya. But the biggest error Romney made wasn’t an error of fact (although it was, indeed, a factually challenged statement).

The biggest error was a tactical one: attacking the commander-in-chief in the wake of a tragedy for our nation. When we are attacked, most Americans rally around the president, whomever that may be. It happened after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

It is generally expected, at such a time, that politicians on either side of the aisle will refrain from attacking or blaming the leader of the nation. If the Democrats had attacked George W. Bush in 2001 for being caught flatfooted on 9-11, they almost certainly would have paid a horrendous political price.

While it remains to be seen how the public will react to this knee-jerk reaction by the Romney team, one thing looks crystal clear: the Romney attacks on this issue appear to be out of sheer desperation. The polling data has been breaking in President Obama’s favor ever since the Democratic National Convention kicked off in Charlotte nearly two weeks ago, and none of the Romney attacks seem to be taking hold.

When it became clear that the struggling economy alone would not get Romney over the top, the Romney campaign began throwing everything it could at the wall and praying that something, anything, would stick. The result has been a disjointed, unfocused, scattershot approach that has not helped Romney move the needle at all. Unless you count moving the needle in the wrong direction, that is.

As each new attack fails, the Romney campaign has placed itself on a hair-trigger setting to jump on every opening that appears like an opportunity to hurt the president politically. The attack in Libya and the unrest in the Muslim world over the ridiculous anti-Islam movie produced by some whackadoodle religious nut gave the Romney team another perceived opening to return to a favorite Republican attack line: that the Democrats are “weak” on foreign policy.

The Republicans have trotted this tired old meme out in every election for nearly 40 years, and they have grown accustomed to this ridiculous attack bearing political fruit. Their messaging on this issue had been so effective that, after 9-11, I heard even Democrats expressing gratitude that we had a Republican in the White House at that moment. (For the record, I was not one of them.)

So they’re trotting out the “Democrats are weak, weak, weak” line because it’s always been their go-to attack line in the past. But there’s a problem: it’s not working anymore.

The Romney campaign has found a lot of things to lie about this election year, and some of those lies have been fairly effective. Team Romney has run advertising claiming that the president robbed Medicare of $700 billion to pay for Obamacare, and that he took the work requirement out of welfare. These ads were nearly as effective as they were false. Romney’s polling improved after launching both of these attacks, even though they were roundly attacked by the news media as completely and provably false. But when it comes to these issues, as well as the ridiculous lies about health care bill (death panels, anyone?), they are so complex and murky that few average Americans even really know the truth. (Even some of the members of Congress who voted for the health care bill didn’t know what was in the thing.) As a result, a lot of average Americans—having no clear and easy proof that these claims are untrue—are susceptible to the lies.

The problem, conversely, with the “Democrats are weak” argument is simple. It’s a hard argument to sell when it is widely known that the Democratic president ordered in the Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden. This would be the same bin Laden, as is also widely known, who eluded President Obama’s Republican predecessor for nearly eight years.

Yes, I know that the right goes apoplectic anytime anyone says “Obama Got Osama,” but it is a fact. He who makes the call gets the credit, as inevitably would have happened had President Bush succeeded in getting bin Laden. The SEAL team went in on the president’s orders, as a result of the intelligence that the president’s team gathered. The SEALs could not have carried out the operation without the president’s order. It was a highly risky operation that included violating the sovereignty of a supposed U.S. ally, Pakistan, and if it had failed, does anyone doubt that it would have destroyed Obama politically? (I think it is clear that same people who refuse to give him any credit for the mission’s success would not have waited half a second to blame him if it had failed.)

To order the mission, against the advice of his own vice president and some other key advisers, took real guts on the president’s part (and of course, it must be said, spectacular courage and great work by the SEALs, who obviously bore far greater risk than the commander-in-chief did).

The mission that killed bin Laden is emblematic of the calm, cool and effective overseas policies of the president. Does anyone remember how he sent in special forces, early in his term, to kill the Somali pirates who had hijacked an American vessel? Or how our quiet leadership in the Libyan civil war resulted in the overthrow of longtime terrorist supporter Moammar Qaddafi?

These three missions all had two very important things in common: 1) they all succeeded and 2) not a single American lost his or her life as a result of any of these operations. If these are the results of a president’s supposed weakness in his usage of American military might, what exactly does it take to be considered strong?

The fact is, the Obama approach to foreign policy and his wise usage of our military—pinpointed, targeted special forces strikes as opposed to massive, scattershot overreactions with heavy losses of life—demonstrates that a cool hand is more effective than a hot head. And people generally know the difference. A measured (one might even call it “conservative”) approach that accomplishes the mission and prevents needless deaths is the smart move. It might not be very satisfying to those who want to go in with guns blazing to make a point. But it’s safe to say that the SEAL team mission to Pakistan made a much greater—and certainly more final—impression on Osama bin Laden than our invasion of Iraq did.

You know, I found it really amusing that the Republicans turned to Clint Eastwood at their recent convention in Tampa. While Clint has always been a tremendous actor and now a spectacular director, the fact is that the composed, cool and deadly upholder of justice he played in the Dirty Harry movies was just a role.

If you want to see a real-life Dirty Harry—the clear-headed enforcer who tracks down the bad guys and ensures they get what’s coming to them—you can find him most days at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.

People know the difference between an act and the real thing. Our president, Barack Obama, may be many things, but he is clearly not weak. His results speak for themselves. You could even say he’s got more Clint Eastwood in him than Clint himself.

So, Governor Romney, you’ve got to ask yourself one question:

“Do I feel lucky?”

Well, do ya, punk?

This Is A Gunfight. Leave The Water Pistols At Home, Please.

by Cliston Brown | Aug 26, 2012 | Political Commentary

There is something about the liberal character, as it seems to be defined these days, that shrinks away from open political combat, even when it is clearly called for and necessary. Take, for example, the unwillingness of too many on the left to call out Mitt Romney’s recent welfare claims for what they are: lies.

Today, watching the Melissa Harris Perry show on MSNBC, I became positively irate when the aforementioned Melissa—a wonderful host and incisive political commentator—referred to Romney’s claims as “inaccurate.”

No. No. No. A thousand times, NO.

I don’t mean to pick on Melissa here. She’s wonderful, one of my favorite political talk show hosts. And in all fairness, she is not the only person on the left shrinking away from the “L” word. In fact, aside from Jamelle Bouie of The American Prospect, who explicitly called Romney a liar on the welfare issue in the Washington Post on August 20th, I can’t remember anybody on the left actually calling Romney’s welfare claims lies, although they clearly are, and I’ll explain this point further in a later paragraph. (I apologize here to anybody on the left whose public statements to this effect I may have missed.)

Sure, it’s technically true that Romney’s claims are inaccurate, as lies are, indeed, a subset of inaccuracies. But “inaccurate” is the wrong word to use here, and so sickeningly typical of shrinking-violet liberals who are more concerned with being polite than actually winning a damn election.

Here’s why “inaccurate” is the wrong word to use:

If somebody says something that is inaccurate, there could be many reasons for it. It could be, for example, that Governor Romney just misread or misunderstood what President Obama actually did. Poor Mitt, he just blew it.

The problem here is that using the word “inaccurate,” rather than calling it the lie it is, lets Romney off the hook. It implies he might have just made a mistake and that, if he knew better, maybe he wouldn’t be saying it.

The fact is, there is NO WAY Romney could possibly not know better. There is no reading of the president’s actions on welfare that suggests the president ended the requirement, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, that welfare recipients work. Romney is deliberately misrepresenting what happened here. What he is claiming, in multiple campaign commercials, is not merely inaccurate; it is a LIE.

The reason I state this so bluntly is that there is no way Governor Romney could not know that what he claims is not true. In addition to Bouie’s spot-on column in the Post, the Tampa Bay Times, in its acclaimed “PolitiFact Truth-O-Meter” on August 7th, explicitly and painstakingly explained why Romney’s statements were completely false.

There is a wealth of information out there, over the last two-and-a-half weeks, debunking Romney’s welfare claims. It’s impossible that Romney and his team are unaware that their claims are inaccurate (if you’ll pardon, for the moment, my own use of the word).

When it is impossible that you don’t know your claims are inaccurate, and you keep making them, you’re lying. And when you’re lying, you are making an intentional choice to steer people wrong.

It’s not a mistake. It’s not a mere “inaccuracy.” It is a lie, and there is a huge difference between an inaccuracy and a lie that speaks very distinctly about Mitt Romney’s character. If we do not make that case, we on the left hand Romney a gift. It is the electoral equivalent of what is known in sports as a turnover.

I know that we on the left would like very much to be high-minded and polite, and to win through the strength of our ideas and our appeals to the better angels of our fellow citizens’ nature. But in so doing, we allow the other side to resort to tactics, such as Romney’s outright welfare lie, without any consequences.

And lies, if not called out and knocked down, tend to work. Remember the unconscionable Swift Boat attacks against John Kerry that Kerry and the Democrats failed to knock down (and which probably cost him the razor-close 2004 election)?

How many times do we on the left have to get bludgeoned before we finally muster the intestinal fortitude to fight back?

It starts with calling a deliberate untruth what it is: a lie.