Recent events show us that America is a nation of frightened people. But we are frightened of the wrong things.

For example, some of you pointed out a problem with “open carry” revealed by the recent shootings in Colorado Springs. Someone spots an apparently unhinged person walking around a residential neighborhood with a firearm, and sensibly calls police. But the police can’t do anything, and won’t respond to 911 calls, until the gunman actually starts killing people. Because in Colorado, open carry is legal.

So, because there are wusses who can’t so much as drive to a suburban Home Depot without being armed for self-defense, we’re all in more danger.

Here’s another one for you:

You all know how it is. You’re in a Sanford, Florida, Cracker Barrel on Sunday morning with the after-church crowd. A patron carrying a legally registered firearm is getting up to pay when his gun slips out of its holster, hits the floor, and “discharges” one round into your lower leg, requiring you to seek medical care for “non-life threatening injuries” before you can so much as finish your gravy-covered meal of gravy-fried gravy.

Yum, gravy-fried gravy. I hope that comes with biscuits. And the best part, which makes this just all-American perfect, is that because police decided this was an accident, it’s unlikely charges will be filed.

So, because this wuss and others like him are terrified that criminal elements are hiding along the Interstate somewhere between the Econo Lodge and the KFC, going out for biscuits and gravy can send you to the ER, and not because of e coli.

Chalk this one up to Teh Stupid — Houston voters rejected an equal-rights law, by all accounts because it would allow trans women to use women’s bathrooms. Opponents even were calling it the Bathroom Ordinance. Those of us d’un cer·tain âge might remember how the ghastly specter of unisex bathrooms helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. We Americans care deeply about keeping people using restrooms properly sorted by genitalia type.

Opponents of the bill shrieked that it would allow pedophiles and other perverts to molest women in restrooms. From the Dallas Morning News:

Apparently, when you take a routine civil-protections measure and feed it through the big anti-LGBT scarification machine what you get is the possibility that men might pee in the ladies room.

And not just any men, either. We’re talking about scary demented sex predator perverts, sharing the very same stalls with sweet little pig-tailed girls in their little plaid schoolgirl uniforms, or with modest elderly grandmas who use their lavender-scented hankies to avoid touching germy toilet handles with bare hands.  …

… “No Men In Women’s Bathrooms”! is the overwrought rallying cry around which opponents have gathered, like frightened cavemen huddled around the safety of the campfire.

The bill was about equal protection in matters like employment and housing, of course. I don’t know what the wusses think they’re accomplishing with barricading the restrooms, because frankly there ain’t nothin’ sexual predators could do in a restroom that they aren’t already doing elsewhere.

Anyway, the real issue is women in men’s restrooms. We are tired of perpetually standing in line while the menfolk breeze in and out of men’s rooms and don’t miss any of the game or movie.  We should just go where the line is shortest. Or make all restrooms unisex, and when the menfolk get tired of standing in line maybe they’ll see the wisdom in building more public restrooms.

Kentucky, one of the two southern high-poverty states that has visibly benefited from Obamacare — the other being Arkansas — just elected a governor who pledged to end Obamacare and shut down the state health insurance exchange.  Getting health care is scary. Apparently the election also was decided by issues such as “school choice,” meaning the dismantling of the public school system, to be replaced by corporate for-profit McSchools; against the federal government and its dastardly safety and environmental regulations that cut into coal mining profits; against secularism that demands public employees actually abide by the law; and against President Obama and his nefarious blackness.

In other words, Kentuckians just shot themselves in the foot, big time. Good luck, you poor fool wusses.

This. Is. Not. Acceptable.

As you may have heard, the police officer assaulting a South Carolina high school student in this video has been fired.

And, predictably, the wingnuts are sad. Yes, that’s right. The teen-age girl being assaulted in this video had it coming, they tell us, because the nice Officer Man had asked her nicely to leave the classroom, and she refused. So the Officer Man had no choice but to make her hurt.  Because a great big man couldn’t possibly have taken a 90-pound girl into hand and escorted her from the classroom otherwise.  (sarcasm off)

Some vile excrement named David French actually wrote:

This is what happens when a person resists a lawful order from a police officer to move (UPDATE: CNN is now reporting that a third video shows the student hitting the officer in the face when he initially put his hands on her). Unless the school is willing to have one student commandeer the classroom indefinitely, the officer has few options beyond physical force — and the use of physical force is rarely pretty to see. In this instance, the use of force was decisive, brief, and did not physically harm the student.

If in fact this assault did not harm the student, then the student, the policeman and the school are lucky. Because he could have snapped her neck or twisted her spine.

I don’t know if David French has children, but I suspect his tune would be very different if one of his offspring were manhandled like this, for any reason. And, for the record, I’m not accepting on face value anyone’s story of what this teenager was doing in the moments before the assault.

This is so obviously outrageous you’d have to be blind not to see the wrong here. But there are lots of blind people on this planet.  Indeed, the Dumbest Man on the Internet sees a double standard because a white principal was slammed to the floor by a black student (who was subsequently arrested and charged), and to him this is just the same thing as a large, and white, and male, police officer and Public Employee and Authority Figure violently assaulting a black teenage girl. And merely getting fired.

Yep, righties are whining that this is just the Liberal Media making a big Politically Correct deal out of nothing.

But this is not acceptable. There is no excuse for what the officer, Ben Fields, did in that video. I don’t care if she was not following directions. I don’t care if she punched him with her girlie little fist or spat at him or insulted his mother. He’s supposed to be an adult in charge. He’s supposed to be trained to handle situations like this in a professional and competent manner.

Oh, and the student who shot the video is still facing charges for shooting the video.

Lots of good commentary on the Benghazi! hearings, but this may be the best:

In the 21st century, we see the paranoid style honed to near-perfection among a significant cadre of Americans – predominantly male and Southern, and almost entirely white – who are ideologically and geographically exiled from their own society but who see themselves, paradoxically or otherwise, as its spiritual inheritors and most ardent defenders. They perceive themselves surrounded on all sides, at home as around the world, by murderous, treasonous and corrosive anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism (and in many cases also by anti-white racism and anti-Christian bigotry). They discern those forces at work in the Democratic Party and the big cities and multiculturalism and Planned Parenthood and “political correctness”; in the spread of mosques and taco trucks and ambiguous gender assignments; in Black Lives Matter and the still-baffling black president with the funny name, in the stagnant or declining real incomes of the last several decades and the fact that the mightiest military superpower in the history of the world has not conclusively won a war since 1945.

What Benghazi promised the paranoid faithful, or still promises – we can’t presume that one embarrassing hearing will bring an end to this charade – was a chance to turn the tide, to strip the scales from the eyes of their benighted and deluded fellow countrymen and reveal the scope of the hideous plot to destroy America. For the conspiratorial right-wing hive mind, Benghazi is the gate and the key to the gate, like H.P. Lovecraft’s ancient and indescribable entity Yog-Sothoth. But as with the One-in-All and All-in-One of the Lovecraftian universe, opening that gate leads only to madness and oblivion: What lies beyond is the “amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity,” otherwise known as the legislative agenda of the House Freedom Caucus.

Yet there’s more — here’s Krugman:

 As Rick Perlstein pointed out several years ago, the modern conservative movement is in large part a “strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers” with “a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.”

So goldbuggism, for example, is intimately tied to direct-marketing schemes for gold coins and gold certificates. I’ve been getting mail from the American Seniors Association, which bills itself as a conservative alternative to the AARP; sure enough, it’s a for-profit enterprise whose goal is to sell me insurance. And so on.

This is surely a much more important part of our political story than almost anyone acknowledges. I don’t think you can understand the depth of Obama- and Hillary-hatred without understanding just how much of it is generated by scammers out to make a buck off the racism and misogyny of some — sad to say, fairly many — older white men.

Avarice and paranoia, perfect together.

The eleven-hour Benghazi! marathon revealed that the wingnuts have a weird obsession about Sydney Blumenthal:

Time and time again, Republicans returned to Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Blumenthal, who has never been in Libya nor served in Clinton’s Department of State. On numerous times they brought up the emails that he sent her, the influence of his advice, where his missives were passed along and whether his communications were truly unsolicited.

Their justification for their focus on a side character in Clinton’s universe seemed Clinton emailed Blumenthal — a personal friend of the Clintons– more than she did Ambassador Christopher Stevens, one of the four Americans killed in the attack. The name Sidney Blumenthal has become something of a dog whistle in right-wing circles — for Clinton cronyism, rank politicization, and self-dealing — but it remained unclear after hours of testimony how his emails further implicated Clinton in the Benghazi tragedy.

Blumenthal sent HRC lots of witty and snarky emails about stuff going on in politics and international affairs. It appears to be mostly gossip. Blumenthal is a long-time friend of the Clintons going back to their Arkansas days. Clearly, anybody with such a long association with the Clintons must be the boogyman. As near as I can tell, the entire eleven hours was a probe into why HRC got so many emails from Blumenthal and none from the late Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. (Um, because ambassadors don’t contact the State Department via email?)

See also:

On the Frenzy Over Sidney Blumenthal by James Fallows and (from last May) The Fake Clinton Scandals Are Back by Joe Conason.

Charles Pierce explains it all:

Did she hand them their own asses? Of course she did. She was cool and she was poised and, by the end of the day, she was even out-arguing them about the role of the video in the attacks across the Muslim world, which was the ur-point of this fiasco in the first place.

This whole thing started because of a ginned-up controversy about what Susan Rice had said about the attacks on​ Meet The Press in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. (Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio is still howling about this.) Responding to a question from Cummings, HRC actually got to explain that the video at least was partly responsible for the rage that broke out from Indonesia to Tunisia. That, alas, was beside the point. So also was Congressman Adam Schiff’s boot in the ass in which he pretty much demonstrated that Blumenthal’s appearance before this committee—the transcript of which Gowdy refuses to release—​was a fishing expedition after material about the Clintons that could be used for future ratfcking purposes.And not even Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ability to stand up against the gales of innuendo and fakery will make it less so.​

This was a performance piece for the people residing within the conservative media bubble—​who already are hip to the lies of the lamestream media, and who already are too smart to be fooled by the Hildebeast and her alleged facts because Mark Levin has told them that they are too smart to be so fooled, and who watch their favorite TV news stars every night, where there is always Another Question, or Another E-Mail, or, for all I know, Another Witness who saw the ghost of Vince Foster wandering through the Mena Airport with Kathleen Willey’s cat in his mouth. The people out in the world are one problem, but now they’re pretty plainly electing each other to the national legislature. That makes it our problem.

I’m not watching Hillary Clinton’s testimony in front of the Benghazi! committee, but Josh Marshall is watching it closely and cataloging the derp. Apparently Rep. Susan Brooks (R-IN) pulled ” the most moronic thing I’ve seen in the long history of moronic congressional committee stunts,” according to J.M. What did she do?

According to the New York Times,

In the first demonstration of political theater, Representative Susan W. Brooks, Republican of Indiana, presented Mrs. Clinton with two giant stacks of her emails as she launched into a round of questions about her attention to the situation in Benghazi.

One pile, from 2011, had nearly 800 emails. The other, from the following year, had 67. Mrs. Brooks suggested that the difference represented a lack of interest in what was happening there at the time Ambassador Stevens was killed.

Mrs. Clinton responded by saying the job of secretary of state was not conducted entirely by email.

“I did not do the vast majority of my work by email,” she said, explaining that she had private meetings and secure phone calls with aides. “I don’t want you to have a mistaken impression about what I did and how I did it.”

Yes, I’d say that qualifies as derp. Now let’s go to the video —

In other news, it appears Paul Ryan may be running for the Speaker position after all.

Going through the reviews, most post-debate analysis gave the evening to Hillary Clinton. Her grades ranged from “pretty good” to “spectacular.”  The loser was –  um, the Democratic debates.  57 percent of voters didn’t know it was on. Oh, well.

Sanders had a good night, too, I am hearing, except for stumbling on gun control. Some columnists thought he had a better night than Clinton.

Consensus is that Martin O’Malley is running to be vice president, Jim Webb is a tad weird, and Lincoln Chafee is even weirder.

One of the most interesting analyses is from Ed Kilgore, who writes that in spite of Anderson Cooper’s best efforts to goad them, the candidates didn’t turn on each other as the Republicans did. “And as a result the event often turned into Democrats versus CNN.”

Any other thoughts?

Unrelated: The Cubs won the division? Forget the election; we’re heading for the apocalypse.

Foreign policy takes more than a few buzzwords.

A gunman killed at least thirteen people at a community college in Oregon today. So far we don’t know anything about the shooter.

What we do know: This afternoon the White House expressed frustration that nothing ever gets done about gun control. Naturally, the Federalist screamed that the White House had “politicized” the shootings. Because, you know, guns are not a political issue otherwise. And we’re not supposed to talk about gun control after a mass shooting, which happens frequently enough to keep us all permanently mute.

In another Adventure in Freedom, a woman who went public with her abortion story was forced into hiding after her address was published on line and the death threats began to pour in. Nothing says freedom like being able to terrorize people you don’t like into shutting up, I guess.

Update: Oh, please … already the rumors are starting that the shooter asked people if they were Christian, and shot them in the head when they said yes. This is based on a news report that the shooter asked people to state their religion, but the news report says he was shooting people randomly. In web forums this is turning into an account of people being shot in the head if they said they were Christian. Shades of Cassie Bernall, the so called “she said yes” martyr from Columbine, who actually didn’t say yes at all. That was something someone imagined.

By tomorrow the Christianists on Fox News will be absolutely wallowing in martyrdom, just in time for the “war on Christmas” season.