Thanks to Ian Tuttle for filling in last week. Everyone on the cruise ship who could get a wireless signal raved about his work; I'm diving right in, just in case anyone starts comparing me to Wally Pipp. The Selective National Media Interest in Shooters' Motivations The country spent two weeks dissecting the motivations and root causes of the Charleston shooter. Of course, a crime so heinous warranted that sort of media-led national discussion -- as did the extraordinary reaction of the victims' families and the city's response as a whole. But the media-led national discussion ended up focusing on some strange scapegoats as root causes -- i.e., the Confederate flag flying on state grounds and the image of the stars and bars on the General Lee car in The Dukes of Hazard. Or maybe the true root case was comedienne Amy Schumer -- at least, that's what one Washington Post contributor concluded, although she later admitted she had never actually seen the comedienne's material. Earlier this month, a gunman killed five U.S. servicemen as they did their jobs at a Navy and Marine reserve center. Is it still in the news? We spent a lot of time dissecting what could possibly have driven the Charleston shooter to commit his heinous act; how about Mohammod Youssef Abdulazeez? Abdulazeez, 24, was a Kuwait-born, Chattanooga-raised Jordanian whose parents were of Palestinian descent. On Wednesday, the FBI called him a "homegrown violent extremist," but said it is too early to say whether he was "radicalized" before the attacks. Meanwhile the shooter's uncle in Jordan, with whom he recently spent several months, had been detained for questioning since the day after the attacks on July 16. I've been gone a little more than a week. A few national columnists are at least still writing about the potential of additional "lone wolf" attacks, such as David Ignatius, Sunday: The new lone-wolf era will test America's ability to balance security and civil liberties, hopefully more wisely than was the case in the overreaction after Sept. 11, 2001. It's a delicate task. More attacks will drive new calls to crack down through surveillance and more aggressive policing – creating more jihadists. Really? Surveillance and aggressive policing create jihadists? Why does this sort of "don't look into their lives too hard or intervene too quickly, you'll only provoke more aggression" philosophy never apply to, say, IRS audits? Pardon my cynicism, but we spent nearly two weeks talking about all of the emanating-penumbra "root causes" of the Charleston shooter because the media found it easy to tie the shooter to their favorite scapegoats -- Southern culture, Republicans, etc. Remember, allegedly intelligent people in our chattering class insisted that a paranoid schizophrenic who believed that language itself was a form of oppression, was truly motivated by a map on Sarah Palin's Facebook page. A detailed national discussion of Abdulazeez's motivations and triggers is just too uncomfortable for the national media. It would mean asking whether the call of violent jihad holds some appeal even for seemingly well-assimilated Muslim immigrants. This shooter was on his high-school wrestling team, had an engineering degree, was hired by a nuclear power plant until he failed a drug test. He had a job with a cable company. The usual explanations of poverty, desperation, encounters with xenophobia, or an unfair rejection from American society simply won't suffice here. Some speculate Abdulazeez wanted martyrdom to atone for his past drug use and other un-Muslim behavior. If that's the case, looking too hard at Chattanooga would spur a national conversation on whether a free society can tolerate a faith that teaches that murder of non-believers is the best way to get God's forgiveness. Senate Candidate Kamala Harris and San Francisco's 'Sanctuary City' Policy I was reminded by a cruise-goer that California attorney general Kamala Harris -- currently running for U.S. Senate in California -- has some experience with an illegal immigrant committing murders on the streets of San Francisco. Edwin Ramos entered the country illegally as a teenager. He was convicted of assault in 2003 and robbery in 2004. In 2006, an FBI informant told the bureau Ramos had killed a rival gang member. He could have been deported, if not for San Francisco's "Sanctuary City" policy: In neither instance did officials with the city's Juvenile Probation Department alert federal immigration authorities, because it was the city agency's policy not to consider immigration status when deciding how to deal with an offender. Had city officials investigated, they would have found that Ramos lacked legal status to remain in the United States. Federal authorities, however, also missed an opportunity to take Ramos into custody just this past March -- after they had learned of his immigration status and started deportation proceedings, and after Ramos was arrested in San Francisco on a gun charge. For reasons the federal agents cannot explain, they did not put an immigration hold on Ramos. In 2008, Ramos gunned down Anthony Bologna and his young sons, Michael and Matthew, as they returned from a family barbecue. The then–district attorney, Kamala Harris, declined to seek the death penalty. Ramos was sentenced to life without parole. (Harris also declined to pursue the death penalty for the murderer of San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza, married father of a young daughter, back in 2004 when she was the San Francisco district attorney. It was considered exceptionally rare, or nearly unprecedented, to not pursue the death penalty in cases of murdering a police officer.) Harris, July 10, discussing the murder of Kate Steinle and sanctuary cities: I think that what we have to say is that there is work that we have to do around prosecution of this case. There's work that we have to do around making sure we have comprehensive immigration reform. There's work we have to do around to not allow immigration policy in this country to be crafted in a way that offers false choice. We have to do it in a way that doesn't offer a kind of Willie Horton discussion around what should be national immigration policy. Yeah, that's the real menace, isn't it, ma'am? The "kind of Willie Horton discussion," not violent criminals who don't belong in this country, left free to walk the streets, protected from deportation by "sanctuary city" policies. Our Political Inmates Run the Asylum, So Normal People Tune Out We political geeks roll our eyes and shake our heads at the low-information voters, but perhaps being a low-information voter -- think of the self-identified Iowa caucus-goer who insisted he last caucused for "Johnson, from Iowa," meaning Tim Pawlenty, who dropped out six months before the caucuses -- is a rational, reasonable choice. In the political world, we spend a lot of time trying to convince insane people to not be insane, or at the very least, pointing out to extremely inconsistent thinkers that they're being inconsistent. For example, we've been told for seven years that most criticism of President Obama is beyond the pale of acceptable discourse, that it is rooted in hatred, and that it is representative of a malevolent intolerance deep in the hearts of his critics. And then the Iranian leader tweets out this: 
And everybody who supports the President's Iran deal acts like it's no big deal. Screw you, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei. I don't even like Obama, and that image offends me, because he's the American president. But everybody who claims to support the president averts their eyes. Now, I would argue that the Supreme Leader of Iran sending out this image is an indicator of bad faith. They're not behaving as if they want to earn our trust, earn our respect, or assure us not to see them as a major threat. They continue to chant "death to America," even after the alleged deal: In an address at a Tehran mosque punctuated by chants of "Death to America" and "Death to Israel", the hardliner said the deal was only about nuclear issues, pledging: "We won't let foreigners interfere with our affairs." "American interests and politics in the region are 180 degrees different to ours," he said in the televised speech, four days after the Vienna accord in which crippling sanctions against Iran would gradually be lifted in exchange for long-term nuclear curbs. "Whether the deal is approved or disapproved, we will never stop supporting our friends in the region and the people of Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Lebanon. Even after this deal our policy toward the arrogant U.S. will not change," he said. Someone will inevitably argue, "This sort of rhetoric is just for domestic political consumption." Except the Tweet is in English, and was sent out on the international medium of Twitter. They want us to see this. They want us to know this is what they really think. (By the way, why does the average Iranian get this sort of incendiary rhetoric to placate his anger and pride, but there's no rhetoric from our officials, to the families of the Americans unjustly imprisoned by Iran, or the families killed by past Iranian aggression and sponsorship of terrorists, or Iran's assistance to anti-American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the families of the U.S. soldiers killed by the Iranian-sponsored terror attack on Khobar Towers?) To be an MSNBC-watching loyal Obama supporter, you have to still be fuming about signs at Tea Party rallies that appear to threaten the president, but not the least bit upset about this sort of image from Iran. A rodeo clown wearing an Obama mask is some sort of national outrage and symbol of racial hatred, but it's not a big deal for Iran to hang President Obama in effigy. It's these crazy leaps in logic that a lot of Americans find incomprehensible, so they tune out the political news. Life is full of much more fulfilling passions. It's not surprising that people tune out Washington's cacophony and turn their attentions to good food, making money on the side from indulging their creative passions, fantasy sports, extreme fitness and adventure races, and building cool stuff. It's hard to begrudge them their lack of interest in the insanity of our political elites – but it's even harder to imagine the circumstances getting better so long as so many people choose to tune out. ADDENDA: For those of you who asked, yes, that was me doing the voice of "Gru" from Despicable Me on the previous week's pop-culture podcast. Here's Steve Carrell in a giant Gru suit to compare. | 
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