On the Dilemma of House Bill 719

Politicians are, in general, an unsavory lot.  They’re more about winning than about doing the right thing, and winning is often defined not by accomplishing something good, but by embarrassing the opposition.  This applies to those on both sides of the aisle, of course, but, at least recently, the GOP has dominated the field.

Charlie Kirk was, of course, a master of the form: “debating” (i.e., arguing with) college kids, interrupting them, and releasing deceptively edited videos designed to make himself look smart but especially to make the other side look stupid.  Most of his stuff was straight out of the James O’Keefe playbook.  However much his acolytes (and MAGAs who’d never heard of him until he was shot) might choose to lionize him as a champion of respectful disagreement, free speech, and Christian virtues, he was none of those things. 

True, he was longer on smarminess than on Trumpian reckless vituperation (Gentle Reader, can you believe what 47 said about hating those who disagree with him politically?), but that doesn’t change the fact that if you weren’t a white cishet Christian (preferably evangelical) male, he had no respect for you.  He pretended to care about Constitutional values, but, for example, openly despised Muslims (so much for freedom of religion).

Now, in addition to the rest of the multiple hagiographic indulgences, we get House Bill 719, introduced by the creepiest and most sycophantic of GOP Congresscritters, Mike Johnson himself.  It is, of course, a trap.  The string of “whereases” includes a series of descriptions that bear little resemblance to reality: “respectful, civil discourse,” “respect for his fellow Americans,” “commitment to civil discussion and debate,” “worked tirelessly to promote unity,” and so on. 

Of course, equally if not more importantly, there were no such encomia to, say, Melissa Hortman, and certainly no recognition that literally every study of political violence, including the report of the Cato Institute (!) shows the preponderance of such attacks come from the right.

Still, the average person could stomach most if not all of this out of respect for the dead.  The real problem is the resolution:

Resolved, That the House of Representatives—

(1) condemns in the strongest possible terms the assassination of Charles “Charlie” James Kirk, and all forms of political violence;

(2) commends and honors the dedicated law enforcement and emergency personnel for their tireless efforts in finding the suspect responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk and urges the administration of swift justice to the suspect;

(3) extends its deepest condolences and sympathies to Charlie Kirk’s family, including his wife, Erika, and their two young children, and prays for comfort, peace, and healing in this time of unspeakable loss;

(4) honors the life, leadership, and legacy of Charlie Kirk, whose steadfast dedication to the Constitution, civil discourse, and Biblical truth inspired a generation to cherish and defend the blessings of liberty; and

(5) calls upon all Americans—regardless of race, party affiliation, or creed—to reject political violence, recommit to respectful debate, uphold American values, and respect one another as fellow Americans.

Yeah, no.  Curmie doesn’t want to know anyone who doesn’t support the odd-numbered parts, at least assuming a secularized definition of “prays” in #3.  #2 is a little more problematic, as Kash Patel’s FBI bungled the case enormously, detained two innocent people, and only got around to Tyler Robinson when his family turned him in.  If they hadn’t narked on him (Curmie does not mean to suggest that they were wrong in doing so), the killer might well still be at large.  Still, this is the kind of generic praise that often accompanies this kind of resolution.  Curmie would still vote for the bill except for #4.

Ah, #4.  Curmie, and he suspects that he is not alone in this, does not “[honor] the life, leadership, and legacy of Charlie Kirk,” who was, in Curmie’s opinion, one of the most reprehensible human beings on the planet.  He did not have a “steadfast dedication” to any of the three items listed: “the Constitution, civil discourse, and Biblical truth.”  This statement goes beyond the pro forma fluffing of the deceased and enters into the realm of outright prevarication.

Moreover, the unmodified phrase “Biblical truth” should never appear in a resolution in the House of Representatives.  Never.  Ever.  Use it on the floor if you must, but not in a bill.  Of course, if “Biblical truth” is defined to be the actual teachings of the Bible—you know, Gentle Reader, welcoming the stranger, feeding the poor, stuff like that—then it would indeed be welcome.  Fat chance of any of that happening in Trumpistan, of course.

But the bill forces those who have not quaffed the neo-Fascist Kool-Aid either to vote for a resolution that specifically and mendaciously idolizes a despicable person, or to be seen voting against a measure condemning political violence.  Even a number of otherwise intelligent conservatives are pretending that this dilemma doesn’t really exist, and are therefore hurling metaphorical brickbats at anyone who didn’t vote for the resolution.

That’s because they cannot (or choose not to) believe that it is possible to hold two thoughts simultaneously.  But one really can believe that illegal immigration is a legitimate issue (it would be less of one if Trump hadn’t scuttled a bi-partisan bill that would have at least somewhat stemmed the tide because he’d rather have a campaign issue than attempt to solve a problem) and still oppose ambushing people at apparently routine meetings to renew work permits or even to finalize the paperwork for citizenship.  Due process still matters, and ICE’s deliberate avoidance of confronting the real “worst of the worst” is craven, dishonest, and, alas, predictable.

It is possible to despise Hamas and everything they stand for and still think that innocent Palestinians shouldn’t be intentionally starved to death by an authoritarian bigot like Bibi Netanyahu.

It is possible to regard Charlie Kirk as a horrible person and still condemn his murder and his murderer.

How does Curmie know these things?  Because he’s describing himself.

Of course, Curmie also saw a meme shortly after Kirk’s assassination urging Democrats in Congress to introduce the “Charlie Kirk Gun Control Bill,” just so the Republicans would have to vote against it.  The difference is that the suggestion was intended to be ironic if not humorous, and no Democratic pol did anything more than indulge in a sardonic smile.

"Lola" and the Week's Headlines

Curmie was 14 when the Kinks released their classic song, “Lola.”  It was the perfect age at which to revel in the delicious naughtiness, certainly for the time, of a title character who “walked like a woman and talked like a man.”  The most quoted lyric from the song, no doubt, is “Well, I’m not the world's most masculine man / But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man / And so is Lola.”  There’s a hint of ambiguity there: is Lola a man, or is Lola also glad that the narrator is a man?  Not that those ideas are mutually exclusive, of course.  Any way you look at it, that sequence had a considerable impact on a rather sheltered lad in the throes of puberty.

The sequence that sticks in Curmie’s mind the most, though, comes a little earlier in the song: “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls / It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world / Except for Lola.”  That word “except” has continued to intrigue for well over a half century.  Lola, whatever terms of sexual identity might be used to describe her, becomes the narrator’s bulwark against the confusions of the world.  There’s a lot to unpack there.

Curmie has always liked the song, and he’s pretty sure he owned it on 45 back in the day, but it has seldom crossed his mind for decades except when it comes around on Spotify or the local classic rock radio station.  But it has risen to the top of his consciousness of late when encountering two Facebook posts.

The first was this one, by Aaron Terr, the Director of Public Advocacy at FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression.  His excoriation of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s boast that “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech”  is impressive:

The Attorney General is just flat wrong here…. She’s not the first politician to say that hate speech isn’t free speech, but this is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.  She really should know better, and this is the type of thing that’s going to chill public debate.  It’s going to make people afraid to say things that the current administration might consider hateful, lest they actually be prosecuted for it.

Curmie notes that a representative of FIRE (accurately) calls Bondi a politician rather than a lawyer and makes the obvious point that the Attorney General, of all people, ought to know the freaking laws she’s supposedly upholding.  Bondi is either profoundly ignorant or too big of a political hack to care that she’s advocating the evisceration of Constitutional protections.  Or both, of course.

But it’s what Terr says next that intrigues Curmie:

What’s also incredible about this video is that usually the argument that hate speech isn’t protected speech is something that you would hear from the left side of the political aisle.  But now we hear a top Republican official saying it.  And I think that just goes to show that censorship rationales, once they’re on the table, they’re a loaded gun just waiting to be used by any political party that takes power.

Terr is right about this, too.  Curmie has made the point repeatedly (most explicitly here and to a lesser extent here) that neither of the two principal political parties in this country are much interested in upholding First Amendment protections.  But whereas the right was more likely to engage in political censorship (books in libraries or in school curricula, for example), it was generally the left that sought to deny constitutional protections to hate speech.

Now, we’re living in a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, with the GOP, and especially the MAGA wing thereof, bellowing from the proverbial rooftops about how hate speech should be prosecuted.  Bondi is worse than most—hardly surprising, that—but even she isn’t the most insane right-winger out there.  Remember this guy, an actual Congresscritter Curmie mentioned a few days ago?

Right now, the same people who cheerfully described moderate Democrats as “communists” for arguing that someone who works a 40-hour week ought to be able to afford to pay for essentials, or that programs that help the general population (FEMA, Medicaid, the CDC, the FAA, etc.) ought not to be sacrificed so those poor destitute billionaires can get a tax cut that balloons the national debt—these people are getting righteously indignant that anyone would dare call a racist, sexist, jackass like Charlie Kirk, well, a racist, sexist, jackass.  And they want people fired or even arrested for speaking their truth.  Most of what they’re objecting to isn’t even hate speech by any reasonable definition, but we’ll antiphrastically let that pass for now.

The other Facebook post Curmie wants to mention was this one, which Curmie reposted on his page a couple days ago.  It reads, “Reminder: Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said homeless people should be put to death by lethal injection and they didn’t even take away his morning donut.”  The obvious context was the propinquity of Kilmeade’s comment and the firing of Jimmy Kimmel by ABC for his on-air comments about the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

What Kimmel actually said, of course, wouldn’t as much as raise an eyebrow on a reasonable observer.  There were some jabs at both President Trump and Vice President Vance, but the killer, apparently was this: “The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”  That, Gentle Reader, is simply a statement of fact.  Trump blamed “radical left political violence” long before there was any evidence either way, and there remains little if any evidence from a credible source that Tyler Robinson was indeed influenced by leftist politics.

Was Robinson a leftie ideologue?  We still don’t know, and for these purposes it doesn’t matter.  There was, at the time Kimmel was on the air, some evidence emerging that perhaps Robinson was a Groyper, and the fact that his grandmother says his politics were shifting to the left could simply be deflection (“we’re a Trump-loving family, so the assassin in our midst obviously wasn’t like us”).  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition (perish the thought!), he might even suggest the possibility that Robinson was pretty much a Nancy Reagan Republican: dismissing the concerns of others until, in his case, he entered into a same-sex relationship, and Kirk’s homophobia was placed in a different perspective.

The point is that for these purposes, none of this matters.  (Nor does it matter that Curmie has never found Kimmel even moderately amusing.)  Did the MAGA world make a concerted effort to place the blame on someone other than themselves?  Of course, they did!  It doesn’t matter if they were “right” about Robinson’s motivations; they just didn’t want him to be one of theirs.  (To be fair, the left was spinning just as hard in the other direction, but that doesn’t change the fact that Kimmel was absolutely accurate.)

It’s also worth mentioning that Kimmel, like a host of leading Democrats, expressed shock and horror at the news of Kirk’s death, calling it a “senseless murder” and condemning those who seemed to be celebrating it.  Contrast that with the deafening silence (well, there was that one bit of sneering from Mike Lee) of every Republican you can name about the murders of Melissa Hortman and her husband by a right-wing nut job.

Note: the key words here are “nut job,” not “right-wing.”  What MAGA in general is attempting to do is to define the entire group—liberals—as guilty in Kirk’s murder because Robinson might have been a leftist with respect to one particular aspect of his politics.  This is the scam JD Vance is trying to pull off, with outright lies about the relative frequency of political violence perpetrated by the left and the right.  C’mon, JD, only the stupidest MAGA believes that “While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the Far Left.”  Even the report of the hard-right Cato Institute calls that claim bullshit.  Well, that’s not exactly a direct quote, but you see the point, Gentle Reader.

But Curmie reverts to his inner Confucian.  Even if there is some correlation between affiliation X and action Y, we can’t assume that one implies the other.  Curmie quotes himself from a post in 2013 about that gunman in Aurora, Co, at the opening of the new Batman movie.  Just substitute “Robinson” for “Holmes” in the following:

The fact is, Gentle Reader, this guy Holmes doesn’t represent me even if we’d vote for the same person or worship at the same church. If he turns out to be an atheist, that doesn’t mean that atheists are the problem, any more (or less) than Baptists are the problem if that’s what he is. His politics can be from the left, right, or center, and he doesn’t represent any of the good people some of whose views he shares. Even if he had help, he’s a lone wolf. Our society lives on, saddened but intrepid.

OK, one more point, since Curmie knows there are people out there ready to rant about how corporations have a right to hire and fire whomever they choose.  Yes, that’s true, even when Nexstar and Sinclair, the two distributors who refused to air Kimmel’s show in the future, are notoriously and rather proudly right-wing.  It’s the intervention of FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr that’s the real problem.  Carr, appointed in the first Trump administration, has apparently now gone full sycophant, as anyone who wants to stay employed in that administration is likely to do.  Oh, and an administration so openly venal is going to be a lot more amenable to proposed mergers and such-like if you, ABC, suck up appropriately.  Not all bribes are monetary; some just censor alternative voices.  As the singer in “Lola” says, “I got down on my knees…”

Anyway, Bobby Schroeder, a valued longtime reader of Curmie’s page (and a conservative, by the way), responded to Curmie’s post of the meme about Kilmeade, with this: “ABC comedy is more conservative than Fox News?  What in the hell is happening in this world?”

And that prompted Curmie to respond with the line about the “mixed up, muddled up,  shook up world.”  And here we are, Gentle Reader.