monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

You didn't imply Simon is a sissy, Finn did. He is the penultimate of a no-nothing. He's basically blah blah blah, huff puff loud snorts of outrage, and more blah blah blah.. I am so sick of listening to these real snowflakes who have never had to deal with a murder or rape or suicide postulating about the RIGHT way to react. A pox on his house...but not on his kids....

I have the same response to bold and ignorant assertions regarding schools and teaching anytime they are made but particularly right now.

I’ve been a conservative my entire life. I fell hard for William F. Buckley as a teenager and my first job was as editorial assistant at Buckley’s National Review, followed by stints writing speeches for first lady Nancy Reagan and then working for the Gipper himself. Looking toward the 1988 race, Vice President George H.W. Bush wasn’t conservative enough for me. I went to work as a speechwriter for Representative Jack Kemp in 1986.

So you’d think that the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, would be a natural fit. It once was. But on Saturday, after speaking to this year’s gathering, I had to be escorted from the premises by several guards who seemed genuinely concerned for my safety.

What happened to me at CPAC is the perfect illustration of the collective experience of a whole swath of conservatives since Donald Trump became the Republican nominee. We built and organized this party — but now we’re made to feel like interlopers.

I was surprised that I was even asked to speak at CPAC. My views on Trump, Roy Moore and Steve Bannon are no secret. I knew the crowd would be hostile, and so I was tempted to pass.

But too many of us have given up the fight. We’ve let disgust and dismay lead us to withdraw while bad actors take control of the direction of our movement. I know how encouraged I feel whenever someone simply states the truth, and so I decided to accept CPAC’s invitation.
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Like the Republican Party, CPAC has become heavily Trumpified. Last year, they invited alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (and withdrew the invitation only after lewd tapes surfaced). This year, in addition to the president and vice president, CPAC invited Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and niece of National Front leader Marine Le Pen.

Matt Schlapp, CPAC’s chairman, described her as a “classical liberal” on Twitter. This is utter nonsense. Ms. Maréchal-Le Pen is a member of the National Front party, and far from distancing herself from her Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic and racist grandfather, she has offered him a more full-throated endorsement than her aunt has. “I am the political heir of Jean-Marie Le Pen,” Maréchal-Le Pen told the Washington Post last year. “He was a visionary. He was right about a lot of things.”

So it has come to this: a conservative group whose worst fault in years past may have been excessive flat tax enthusiasm now opens its doors to the blood and soil nationalists of Europe.

While there were reasonable, mainstream Republican speakers at CPAC, the lineup also featured demagogues like Sheriff David Clarke Jr. While he oversaw the Milwaukee County jail, one pregnant prisoner was repeatedly raped, and several prisoners died in the space of just six months. One was a mentally ill man who was denied water for seven days. No matter. The sheriff was cheered by the CPAC crowd.

My panel was about the #MeToo movement, which was a natural for me since my new book coming out in June, “Sex Matters,” grapples with the movement and other aspects of our fraught sexual ecosystem.

After every woman on the panel had a chance to speak and with 10 minutes remaining on the clock, the moderator threw a slow pitch right over the plate. She asked us about feminist hypocrisy. Ask me that at a cocktail party and I will talk your ear off about how the very people who had lectured us about the utter venality of workplace sexual harassment throughout the 1980s became suddenly quiescent when the malefactor was Bill Clinton.

But this time, and particularly in front of this crowd, it felt far more urgent to point out the hypocrisy of our side. How can conservative women hope to have any credibility on the subject of sexual harassment or relations between the sexes when they excuse the behavior of President Trump? And how can we participate in any conversation about sexual ethics when the Republican president and the Republican Party backed a man credibly accused of child molestation for the United States Senate?

I watched my fellow panelists’ eyes widen. And then the booing began.

I’d been dreading it for days, but when it came, I almost welcomed it. There is nothing more freeing than telling the truth. And it must be done, again and again, by those of us who refuse to be absorbed into this brainless, sinister, clownish thing called Trumpism, by those of us who refuse to overlook the fools, frauds and fascists attempting to glide along in his slipstream into respectability.

I spoke to a hostile audience for the sake of every person who has watched this spectacle of mendacity in disbelief and misery for the past two years. Just hearing the words you know are true can serve as ballast, steadying your mind when so much seems unreal.

For traditional conservatives, the past two years have felt like a Twilight Zone episode. Politicians, activists and intellectuals have succumbed with numbing regularity, betraying every principle they once claimed to uphold. But there remains a vigorous remnant of dissenters. I hear from them. There were even some at CPAC.

A substantial number of people applauded. And as I was hustled out of the building by security, various supporters gave me the thumbs up sign.

Just before I reached the exit, a woman approached me and called my name. “That was so brave!” she told me.

She was one of my fellow panelists. I hope she’s encouraged. I am.

I’d been dreading it for days, but when it came, I almost welcomed it. There is nothing more freeing than telling the truth. And it must be done, again and again, by those of us who refuse to be absorbed into this brainless, sinister, clownish thing called Trumpism, by those of us who refuse to overlook the fools, frauds and fascists attempting to glide along in his slipstream into respectability

Which is to say a response that promotes turmoil and division rather than people coming together to rationally deal with a serious problem?

I am suggesting that you don't possess the honesty necessary to deal with these issues on an adult rational basis.

I have seen you deny total reality. Numerous times.

There is nothing more freeing than telling the truth. And it must be done, again and again, by those of us who refuse to be absorbed into this brainless, sinister, clownish thing called supporting the lies of 9/11 by those of us who refuse to overlook the fools, frauds and fascists attempting to glide along in the US's slipstream into respectability.

And, what kind. We already know you can't carry a Thompson submachine gun, a switchblade or a concealed long knife, even a sword openly in many states. We already know that there. Are limits on weapon possession in public within reason. Because "I am me" is not legal reasoning. You also can't carry guns, open or concealed, into Federal Buildings or Starbucks.

They sure did a shitty job of protecting the dead Parkland students' and teachers' rights. And Vegas concert-goers' rights. And Newtown students' rights.

If these gun ownership issues were merely a matter of differences in opinion relatively available for reflection, I'd agree. But there are billions of dollars involved in weapons production, weapons sales, weapons promotion, lobbying, and electoral donations. And much of that is built upon a very purposeful campaign by the NRA to resist any regulations on ownership or on when/where such weapons can be brought into civic environments.

Failing to oppose the NRA will not, I think, get you anything of what you or I would like to see come about. Polarization is in place and the present economic and political dynamics push towards the continuation of what is going on. Level heads and compromise are not presently available. And I think the only way out is robust activism.

To use an obvious if trite example, the civil rights movement changed America not through avoiding polarization and fixed ideas.

You are exaggerating, however, when you refer to "vets who cannot balance their checkbooks". If their affairs are managed by appointed fiduciary trustees, their problems exceed the inability to balance a checkbook,

and the provisions of the Brady Bill prohibit them from buying a gun. It's the law.

It would seem that a better way of dealing with those who feel they have to competence to handle a weapon and not endanger themselves or others would be through some sort of appeal process. (Which I think was the idea behind Burr's bill.) Dealing with individual cases is better than a wholesale repeal of the provision because some of those people truly are incompetent.

The posts from Lash and me were obviously referring to troubled individuals and weren't suggesting that a whole class of citizens should be prohibited from owning weapons.

The NRA does pay bribes. All lobbyists finesse this corruption through dubious barely-legal processes.
I agree with your comment that only corrupt politicians make lobbyists and their rich benefactors powerful.

You falsely accuse everyone of dishonesty as soon they don't buy into your conspiracy nonsense about alien spaceships causing 9/11.

No, you've seen me deny your 9/11 conspiracy nonsense.

As Eric Boehlert just tweeted
"it's like, teens: 21, NRA:0"

Bright, eloquent young man from Majory Stoneman Douglas High in Floriday, just tweeted to NRA supporters attacking him...
"We will outlive you"

Quite so. A shrug would do the trick on these shootings.
And as a spokeswoman for the NRA, her sympathy for the black community brings a tear to my eye.

They sell tools for murder and want unlimited access to the market... They are your kids' real murderers. And it's all for the money, your children's lives for a dime.

Addiction to violence and tools for mass murder.

Arming teachers would be too expensive and would not make children safer, Ms Klinger said.
"It's just not a good solution. I can't find anyone [in the field of education] who thinks it's a good idea."