Buffalo

I waited a couple of days to comment on the Buffalo massacre at the Tops supermarket (below) in order to find the right words.  They never came.  So the following will have to do.

I still don't understand how so many bigoted white people think that Democrats and Jews are out to "replace" white people with native-born blacks and with immigrants.  As I understand it,. immigrants don't replace anyone.  The supplement us by contributing to the national culture and the nation's economic well-being.  If anything, white people have historically been replaced whenever they leave a city or town owing to too many black and brown people.  East Orange, New Jersey, near where I live, is one of the most heavily black towns in the state, but it was once so predominantly German it could have been called East Berlin.  No one told the white people there that they had to move out when black people began moving in.  They just did.  Because they didn't want to live with them.  And white people in other cities and towns left to get away from those same brown people, but with brown people expected to become the majority, it's suddenly become important to kill them to prevent that from happening?

This is sick.  I don't normally support capital punishment, but the shooter in Buffalo is so evil that perhaps we should make an exception here.  Oh yeah, he also admitted to torturing a cat to death and not feeling bad about it!        

Shame on media personalities like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity for promoting such racist attitudes, shame on the white nationalists who perpetrate such acts, and shame on the Republican Party for failing to condemn white nationalism outright.  Ans shame on the voters if they reward the Republicans with both houses of Congress in the midterms because they think inflation is more important than domestic terrorism . . . which the Buffalo massacre was. 

Package Bombs Away

Twelve package bombs sent to CNN, retired intelligence officers and Democratic politicians - and Robert DeNiro - have been intercepted by federal authorities before they exploded.  All of the intended recipients have been among Donald Trump's biggest detractors, and Trump has bashed them personally of late.  Trump isn't responsible for these bombs, but someone out there has been inspired and emboldened enough to terrorize Democrats and other Trump critics on Trump's behalf.

I thought this would be a game changer for a suddenly emboldened Republican Party hoping to capitalize on the very anger that led some bomber to act.  Maybe it will be.  But there's no indication that Trump himself is going to back down from his hateful rhetoric, and he and his most ardent supporters have even suggested that the bombs were sent by a renegade Democrat to make the GOP in general and Trump in particular look bad.  Some Trump fans have even suggested that there are no bombs - that the whole story is faked.  And Democrats, who have been down in the dumps all month despite polls in their favor mostly holding steady, don't seem - yet - to have found a proper way to respond.

Perhaps it's better that the Democrats don't go overboard in response.  The bomb story is enough to get people to see what's happening.  There are all of these incendiary devices out there, and Trump keeps trying to focus on a phony migrant caravan story by sending active troops to the border with Mexico.  The public should demand more of a focus on this bomb investigation and should say they they've had enough of this insane political hate-mongering.  Also, the Democrats still have the health care issue in their favor, as if that alone weren't enough.  Joe Biden - who, at the moment at least, isn't running for anything - has struck the best tone and delivered the best message.  Don't be afraid of terrorists, he says. Don't be afraid of Trump. Vote.

I'm going to.

Terror In Austin

Benjamin Franklin famously declared that death and taxes are the only two certainties and life, but no single event in recent memory has welded these two things together more graphically and more shockingly than the 9/11-inspired domestic terror attack yesterday. Joseph Stack, a disaffected software entrepreneur who had been forced to give up two businesses in California after tax regulators intervened and who continued to have trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, flew a plane into an office building in Austin, Texas housing 190 IRS employees.

Stack published a long rambling manifesto on the Internet explaining his tax problems and his desire to strike back. After setting fire to his own house, he did just that, taking off in a Piper plane at a local airport and striking the IRS office, killing himself and one other person.

I would be remiss if I did not comment on this story, as it apparently wasn't important enough to get on the front page of my local paper this morning. (It was on page three.) While some people are likely to blame the tea party movement for this attack, I won't. Stack was apparently a frustrated businessman whose problems with the IRS went back years before the tea party movement was even a gleam in the eyes of the Fox News commentators who encouraged it. While the tea party movement has produced scary rhetoric, it hasn't produced any killers. To blame conservatives for the Stack suicide attack on Austin's Echelon Building would be as unfair as blaming liberals for the Weathermen would have been.

Nevertheless, the heated rhetoric from the tea party crowd looks quite embarrassing in light of this story, so I would advise anyone involved in the anti-tax movement to simmer down and take a breather. Stack may have had nothing to do with this, but all it takes is one nut to draw inspiration from the movement and do something horrendous, just as heated left-wing rhetoric inspired the Unabomber.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Americans need to chill out right now. The federal government has enough problems without someone attacking its bureaucrats.