Chris Powell: Democrats' hysteria distracts from the central Trump crisis

Affixed to the tailgate of a Nissan Rogue SUV driving around Manchester, Conn., is a bumper sticker reading, "Health care, not warfare." Amen to that. But the bumper sticker was issued by the Progressive Democrats of America even as most "progressive" -- that is, liberal -- Democrats in Congress seem perfectly happy with U.S. involvement in civil wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Indeed, the more President Trump grouses about "ridiculous endless wars," the more "progressive" Democrats in Congress support them. This is Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Connecticut's junior U.S. senator, Chris Murphy, may be suffering the country's worst case of TDS. Murphy bemoans the president's withdrawal of a thousand soldiers from Syria as if a mere thousand soldiers ever could have accomplished much in the civil war there and as if the United States has a vital interest in the war.

Of course if the United States did have a vital interest in the war, it would have to dispatch at least a half million soldiers and hundreds of warplanes to have a chance of defeating all the contestants: the Syrian regime, the Syrian insurgents, the Kurdish insurgents, and Turkey, Iran and Russia, among others. Then those U.S. soldiers would have to occupy Syria indefinitely during "nation building," as if many years of U.S. "nation building" accomplished much in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam.

Maybe advocating such a full deployment to Syria and nation building there will be the next stage of Senator Murphy's disease. Or maybe he could be cured of it if news organizations and his constituents pressed him to explain what he considers the vital interest in Syria apart from the Democratic Party's interest in generating political hysteria by opposing whatever our erratic president says or does.

Trump is impeachable and even seems to be trying to provoke impeachment, but none of the reasons being contrived by the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives resembles "high crimes and misdemeanors," least of all the president's using U.S. military aid as leverage to induce Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden's influence-peddling son, Hunter.

The Democrats shriek that Trump, a Republican, used the government to advance his re-election campaign and hinder the campaign of a Democratic challenger. Yet in 2016 Trump's predecessor, Democrat Barack Obama, used the government to undermine Trump's campaign and assist the campaign of his Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton, by minimizing her misconduct as secretary of state.

Most politics everywhere is a matter of using government to improve the prospects of the incumbents. Sometimes it descends to criminality, as when President Richard Nixon concealed his 1972 re-election campaign's burglary of the Democratic National Committee in what became the Watergate scandal. But most of this stuff is not illegal at all, as when, during the 1940 presidential campaign, President Franklin Roosevelt used the government to spread rumors about the extramarital affair of his Republican challenger, Wendell Willkie. There is a recording of one of Roosevelt's own phone calls.

As a matter of law "high crimes and misdemeanors" are in the eye of the beholder. But the compelling case for Trump's removal from office has nothing to do with them and everything to do with his character -- his frightening intemperance, instability, dishonesty, recklessness, and ignorance, his unfitness to have authority over anyone.

The hysteria and contrivances of the Democrats just distract from that.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: In Conn., on the nanny state and big wars

An old wet nurse symbolizing France as nanny-state and public health provider (color photomechanical reproduction of a lithograph by N. Dorville, 1901).

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Almost any issue will do when Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal craves attention, so the other day he joined some pediatricians at the state Capitol to warn the world about computer games that contain advertising aimed at young children. Blumenthal said such games are against federal law and he asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate them.

The senator's complaint implied a belief that parents and guardians are incapable of protecting their kids against mere advertising and that, as a result, the federal government must do it, as if kids who are not yet even 10 can buy much if anything on their own. That's a good definition of the nanny state.

Meanwhile Connecticut's other U.S. senator, Chris Murphy, is pushing through the Senate a resolution to withdraw U.S. support for Saudi Arabia's intervention in the civil war in Yemen on account of the suffering there.

But Murphy acknowledges that the other side in that war is awful too, and the war in Yemen is not as much the United States's war as are the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Those wars have caused even more suffering and the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq have been continuing without victory and without even an idea of victory far longer than the war in Yemen. Unlike the war in Yemen, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have killed or injured nearly 60,000 U.S. soldiers, while their civilian casualties and refugees are in the millions.

So where is Murphy's resolution to terminate the stupid, futile, imperial wars for which the United States bears primary responsibility? Opposing the war in Yemen while letting the bigger wars pass, Murphy is just striking a humanitarian pose on the cheap.

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MISSING THE REAL RACISM: Some people in New Haven are purporting to be shocked -- shocked! -- that the city's school system imposes serious discipline disproportionately on black students and especially black boys. The implication of the shock is that New Haven's school administration is racist.

But New Haven's school superintendent is black, as is the city's mayor, and New Haven may be the most politically correct city in the country. While racism can be found nearly everywhere, school discipline falls more heavily on black boys nearly everywhere for the same reason criminal justice does, including in Connecticut's criminal-justice system, which strives to keep people out of jail even when they are chronic and incorrigible offenders.

That is, black boys and young men misbehave more.

This results from their coming disproportionately from an environment of disadvantage -- poverty, child neglect and abuse, and fatherlessness, an environment increasingly perpetuated by the welfare system. All children need fathers but boys especially do to tame their natural aggression.

But the racial disproportion in child neglect and fatherlessness still cannot be discussed in polite company even in supposedly sophisticated Connecticut. So people who know better are left to suggest that the big problem in racially disproportionate punishment is the prejudice of those in charge of keeping order in school and on the street.

Child neglect and fatherlessness do far more damage than guns. Coming out of anarchic homes, neglected boys suddenly collide with authority, end up suspended or expelled from school or imprisoned, and never understand what hit them. The racism isn't in their collision with authority but in the indifference to their upbringing.


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: Political sanctimony won't solve gun-violence challenge

An AR-15, which was easily bought by Nikolas Cruz at a gun store and then used to murder 17 people at a Florida school.

Estimates are that 300 million guns are in private possession in the United States, 55 million Americans own guns, and that at any particular moment about 20 percent of the population is suffering some form of mental illness.

So the remarkable thing may be not that the country has mass shootings every week but that there aren't several every hour and that anyone lives beyond age 40, especially as the political atmosphere has become stifling with sanctimony about guns.

The country sure does have a gun violence problem. But the rhetoric about it often lacks much relevance.

The bodies hadn't even been hauled away from the high school massacre in Florida last week before Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy was pacing the Senate floor denouncing Congress for having done nothing about guns. Gov. Dannel Malloy, whose administration gave early release to convict Frankie "The Razor" Resto, who quickly went on to murder a store owner in Meriden, angrily accused Republican congressmen of having blood on their hands. 

As is often the case, the problem with the quick denunciations arising from the Florida massacre is that none of the common prescriptions for diminishing gun violence would have made any difference.

More background checks? Desirable as they are, the perpetrator in Florida had no criminal record and his rifle was legally purchased at a gun shop. No "gun show sales loophole" was involved.

More mental-health appropriations? These would be helpful. But while many of the perpetrator's acquaintances regarded him as troubled and he had been expelled from high school because of misconduct, he rejected treatment.

Limit the capacity of gun magazines? This is trivial, since plenty of damage can be done whatever the magazine size and empty magazines are quickly replaced with loaded ones. 

Outlaw "assault weapons"? This usually means any rifle that just looks scary. But the only thing that matters about a gun is not its appearance but its mode of firing, and there are only three kinds of guns. 

There are fully automatic guns, semi-automatic guns and single-shot or double-shot guns The first kind reloads automatically and permits multiple rounds to be fired with a single squeeze of the trigger. The second kind also reloads automatically but requires individual trigger pulls for the discharge of each bullet. The third kind requires reloading for every one or two discharges.

Fully automatic guns are tightly regulated by the federal government and are not widely in public possession. Most modern guns are semi-automatic, as the Florida perpetrator's was. Outlawing them means outlawing most modern rifles and pistols -- that is, outlawing most of the guns held by the public -- and limiting public ownership to shotguns, bolt-loading guns, and derringers. 

If outlawing most guns is what the advocates of more restrictions want, they should be honest about it -- and they will need luck with confiscation. After all, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns -- along with President Trump, that paragon of mental stability who also controls the country’s nuclear arsenal.

So unless the country chooses gun confiscation, it may be stuck with the public identification and preventive detention of the mentally ill and more armed security for its many soft targets like schools, theaters, and nightclubs.

Where 20 percent of the population is armed and another 20 percent is psychotic, inevitably there will be some overlap, against which the usual political sanctimony will be no defense.


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.,  and a frequent contributor.