Department of "If Only"

"If we lived in a sane country," writes Digby, we would have the budget proposed by the Progressive Caucus.

Oh, a "sane country"; merely a never-to-be-overcome catch.

Rutland Fair, Vermont. 1941
Photographer: Jack Delano
Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Archive

And if we had a sane country, we wouldn't have the NRA writing the gun laws behind atrocities like the murder of Trayvon Martin.

Southern Beale covers much to be said about the connection between trigger-happy paranoia and the easy availabiity of lethal firepower to any random nut.

Of the historical connection to be made, there's this:

On Sept. 23, 1955, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam fired up stogies and smooched their wives. About an hour earlier, a Mississippi jury had mulled their fates.

The men had stood trial for abducting a 14-year-old black boy. They pounded his face into ground chuck. Shot him in the head. And tossed his broken body — weighted with a large fan used for cleaning raw cotton that they'd hitched with barbed wire around his neck — in the Tallahatchie River.

Emmett Till was dead. And despite damning evidence, Bryant and Milam were acquitted — after the all-white jury deliberated a mere 67 minutes. (Later, they'd cash in by selling Look magazine the blow-by-blow of how they lynched Till for allegedly whistling at a white woman).

Nearly 57 years later, and some 800 miles from the delta town where Emmett Till met his doom, another young black kid's death has revived the suspicion that a black life doesn't have all that much value.

There is the predictably despicable Republican Base reaction.

Charlie Pierce, on our predictable politicians and media—

I am sick to death of people who celebrate "the family" making excuses about why other people's children are expendable. I am sick to death of politicians who are more concerned about protecting zygotes than about the teenagers on whom they seek to balance their budgets and advance their careers. (Barney Frank's line about conservatives's believing that life "begins at conception and ends at birth" was not entirely a joke, although it's always been treated as one.) I am sick to death of opportunistic yahoos who can look at this country's unhealthy attachment to firearms and declare that the actions of George Zimmerman, while unfortunate, were pretty much what the Founders had in mind. I am sick to death of the steady drip-drip-drip of all the topical anesthetics we mix up whenever something like this happens. Had Emmett Till been killed in 2012, there'd be at least three people sitting in the CNN Green Room right now — and probably 15 of them sitting offstage at Fox — waiting to explain how unfortunate it was that the lad so transgressed against local custom that circumstances dictated that he be beaten to a pulp and tossed into the river tied to a cotton-gin fan. I am sick to death about how we can argue about anything simply to argue about it, and then move along to the next argument, as though anything at all has been settled.

The only possible positives since this tragedy: the justified outrage sparking protests; a Justice Department investigation; a Florida grand jury to be convened.