We Awaken in a Different, Worse Country, One We No Longer Recognize

July 08, 2016

Turning on the news this morning, it feels like we've awoken in some other country, someplace worse. Someplace where no matter how bad a situation is, somebody driven by blinding, self-righteous fury will step in and make it worse.

The summer of 2016, the time America lost its collective mind.

Two snipers shot and killed four Dallas police officers and a DART officer Thursday night during a protest downtown.

Six other officers were wounded in a coordinated attack during the demonstration against recent shootings of black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota.

A man who exchanged gunfire with police in the El Centro College garage was reported dead shortly before 3 a.m.

The shooting was the deadliest day for law officers since Sept. 11, 2001, when 72 officers died, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.

Dallas Police Chief David Brown said snipers with rifles shot 11 officers and one bystander from elevated positions about 9 p.m..

At 1:42 a.m., the Dallas Police Association tweeted that a fifth officer had died . . .

At a 12:30 a.m. news conference, Brown said officers had been exchanging gunfire for 45 minutes with a man in the El Centro garage.

"He has told our negotiators that the end is coming and he's going to hurt and kill more of us --meaning law enforcement -- and that there are bombs all over the place in this garage and in downtown," Brown said.

Dallas police Maj. Max Geron said officials were conducting "extensive sweeps" of downtown for explosives. About 5 a.m., Geron said primary and secondary sweeps turned up none.

People were encouraged to stay away from downtown. Downtown workers were asked to check dallascitynews.net to see whether their buildings would be open Friday.

Shortly before this newsletter "went to press," Dallas Police Chief David Brown said that one of the shooters was killed in a bomb explosion; police had sent in a robot to deal with the device. He added the suspect told hostage negotiators he was upset about Black Lives Matter movement and recent police shootings.

How Do We Make Sense of a Senseless Moment Like This?

There are already calls to hold back from the usual bickering and finger-pointing that have grown so common after events like this.

Donald Trump's first statement today was remarkably brief and appropriate: "Prayers and condolences to all of the families who are so thoroughly devastated by the horrors we are all watching take place in our country."

Salena Zito:

Shock and offers of prayers were soon over shadowed.

In fact, reaction was brutally swift and callous by hardliners on both sides of the aisle on social media, in the race to blame their political opponents policies, values and personalities for the senseless deaths of officers in charge of keeping a peaceful protest just that: peaceful.

We need to stop doing this to each other.

Their deaths were not the fault of the NRA, or Barack Obama, or the protestors in downtown Dallas.

Still, when the time is right, we will return to the question of chants like this and this.

For a lot of folks on the right, those chants -- particularly the one caught on video, marching through the streets of New York City -- affirm their worst suspicions of the real philosophy behind recent protests of police and the Black Lives Matter movement. Whatever debate there may be about militarization of police forces, the circumstances in which officers use deadly force, and police training, some portion of protesters appear driven not by a desire for justice but by an anarchic wholesale rejection of the police's authority and violent animosity against the forces of law and order.

It may not be fair to connect the horror in Dallas -- or the killing of police in Brooklyn, or the ambush on police in Ferguson -- to the Black Lives Matter movement. But unfair connections have become the bread-and-butter of our politics in recent years. It was less than a month ago that the New York Daily News' first headline about the Orlando terrorist attack was "Thanks, NRA."

When you're a conservative, you know that if there's any nut job out there claiming to act in the name of a cause you support -- from opposing government overreach to opposition to abortion -- you'll have that figure thrown at you for the rest of time. There are liberals who still rotely insist that Timothy McVeigh is an example of "Christian terrorism" even though he was a self-described agnostic and his agenda had nothing to do with Jesus Christ.

Never mind that you're the kind of law-abiding citizen who always uses turn signals and doesn't remove the mattress tag; the very fact that you disagree with a liberal is their ispo-facto evidence that you're a dangerous extremist at heart. Liberals clearly are unprepared for this, and thus are stunned when they face the guilt-by-association charge that their rhetoric denouncing big corporations, the military, police, and so on could fuel the fires of violent anti–World Bank protests, violent Occupy protests, and so on.

Former FBI Assistant Director: Hillary Can't Get Classified Briefings Now

Is Hillary Clinton now disqualified from receiving classified intelligence briefings? An FBI assistant director says yes!

Ron Hosko, a decorated agent for 29 years who served as the FBI assistant director for the criminal division under President Obama from 2012 to 2014, told Circa that any government official he investigated for similar lapses would have been "referred to the security division, your clearance would be pulled and you'd be walked out of your job."

"And that should happen here," Hosko said in an interview Thursday. "Can you trust them to safeguard sensitive information? The answer is no. And the adjudication is the suspension of revocation of the security clearance."

Specifically asked whether Clinton, who as the presumptive Democratic nominee should be getting regular security briefings, should have her own clearance pulled, Hosko was unequivocal.

"Absolutely. This is somebody who has demonstrated an inability to protect highly sensitive information in the appropriate manner. You don't need to be convicted of it. The FBI pulls those clearances all the time when these failures occur. I totally agree they should be subject to security reviews that say no. They cannot be trusted and they have proven it."

ADDENDA: If you ever needed to step away from horrible news, today might be the day. This week on the pop-culture podcast, a look at beach vacation trends, like condominium-size canopies; the simple turn-off-your-brain-and-root-for-the-animals joy of CBS's summer series, Zoo; what to do when your family surname matches that of an infamous European dictator; "Swiddleton", the Jamaican bobsled team of celebrity couples, a pair so unlikely and inherently discordant and doomed to failure that you can't help but watch, and finally, our listeners on what they considered their most important rite of passage.

If for some reason you find this newsletter just too darn manly, Ericka Andersen at National Review and some other big names like Mary Katharine Ham, Lisa de Pasquale, Gracy Olmstead and Heather Wilhelm have launched Bright, a political and pop culture e-mail newsletter. It's already easily the second or third-best morning newsletter out there.