Marching Orders

Charles Pierce: on Romney's missing tax returns; the venom of "journalists" against Harry Reid for mentioning the subject; and how—as the media swallowed the bait of Vince Foster's "murder" and all that followed—"the bizarre attacks on Barack Obama were rehearsed by the entire political world between the years 1992 and 2000."

Sadly, the only surprise about this was that investigators immediately deemed the massacre domestic terrorism.

But the terrorist, it turns out, was well-known to the FBI, the SPLC, and others following the activities of white supremacists. That list includes criminologist Pete Simi, who interviewed Page while researching the hate music scene. Simi notes Page's connection with the military; that's one likely reason the "domestic terrorism" designation should soon be dropped.

Digby notes who is being allowed to decide the national etiquette toward mass murders.

Athenae, on What It's Time To Talk About—

No, it is not time to talk about gun control. It is time to talk about Chick-fil-A, and whether the president is secretly a communist, socialist, or Kenyan Muslim Marxist.

...

It is not time to talk about how we can be a less fearful society, a less aggressive society, a less fucking STUPID society, because that seems to require a reach and an ambition so critically lacking in those who task themselves with leading those conversations that we might as well pray for the EASTER BUNNY to save us. It makes about as much sense.

It's not time to talk about gun control. It's time to talk about what fried chicken you should eat to honor America's freedom. It is time to talk about that.

The Olympics continue offering public distraction—and there's NBC's cheesy filler, whenever not enough Americans are in the spotlight.

And, please, let's not have to hear about the socialistic National Health Service that so oppresses the British.

Charles Pierce caught the (non-American) human interest story bumped so NBC could "lard up their coverage"

with paeans to the moment in 1983 when Ronald Reagan arranged to liberate Grenada from the clutches of Cuban construction workers. This preposterous episode was treated by the NBC crew as though it were D-Day, and, yes, I'm aware that it is now a national holiday in Grenada, but I suspect, if they'd looked hard enough, they might have found some people there who are still dubious about our glorious triumph. Perhaps the relatives of the people in the mental hospital that we accidentally bombed. We'd all have been proud of it at the time, except that the administration clamped down on any independent coverage whatsoever, including that of, you know, NBC News.

(And that is not even to mention the possibility that St. Ronnie needed a successful distraction from the fact that, two days earlier, 241 of the Marines he'd sent to Lebanon on an ill-defined mission, and housed in a base with not much of a security perimeter, had been blown up in their barracks by terrorists sponsored by Iran, a state to which he was covertly selling missiles at the time.)