There has been considerable talk since the Congressional shootings Wednesday about the need for compromise.

But there are more black and white issues (not about race) about which there can be no compromise. Robert Garago writes:

The day after the Congressional baseball shooting, NPR’s On Point tackled the issue of America’s political bifurcation, and the impact of the hot rhetoric surrounding it. There was a lot of talk about “finding the middle ground” and “compromise.” What wasn’t said: there isn’t any middle ground. Or room for compromise.

On guns — the issue sparking the debate — there are two sides. Those who want the Uncle Sam to live up to its constitutional obligation to not infringe on Americans’ right to keep and bear arms, and those who want to infringe on Americans’ right to keep and bear arms.

Supporting “reasonable regulations” on guns — as allowed by the Pyrrhic victory known as the Supreme Court’s Heller decision — isn’t “compromise.” It’s capitulation.

Universal background checks? Infringement. Magazine capacity limits? Infringement. Gun violence restraining orders? Infringement. “Assault weapons” ban? Infringement. Banning firearms purchases for people on the super-secret Terrorist Watch List? Infringement. It’s all “reasonable regulation” favored by people who support civilian disarmament.

There is no reconciling the pro- and anti-gun rights sides of the Second Amendment. Either you’re for the Constitution’s protection of firearms freedom or your against it.

On the wider “left-right” issues — health care, taxes, government programs of every sort — the devil isn’t in the details. It’s a matter of overarching philosophy. One side wants the government to take care of sh*t (e.g., “economic inequality”) and wants individuals to sacrifice civil rights for society’s benefit. The other side wants less government and individual liberty.

On Point’s commentators predicted a political realignment. Both parties would eventually create polticians representing the “middle ground,” where Americans on both sides could join hands and sing a rousing chorus of Kumbaya.

One guest claimed that the Republican-led federal government was “out of step” with the wishes of this mythical middle ground. Perhaps so. But her assertion that America hungers for an Abraham Lincoln-type politician to forge a utopian left-right coalition is ridiculous. The host quickly pointed out that Mr. Lincoln’s lauded coalition was soon embroiled in a civil war.

Yes, there is that.

Any such internecine conflict would — theoretically — pit states against each other and/or the federal government. It’s hard to imagine a Trump-led federal government going to war against a state, or cracking down on liberty to the point where small government types mount a ground-up insurrection. Just as it’s hard to see California messing with Texas.

The Trump presidency can’t/won’t repair the fault lines between statists and (true) libertarians, which do bifurcate along state lines. You know, blue states vs. red states. But I can’t see this leading to civil war. That’s not to say such a thing is impossible.

The American middle class has too much to lose to try to overthrow the U.S. government, even in the face of tyranny (soft or hard). Ipso facto. Think of all the liberties small government Americans have already surrendered without rising up, from gun control to “free speech safe zones” to the aforementioned Terrorist Watch List (with its no-fly provisions).

The lower class, on the other hand, has everything to lose. Should the U.S. government stop funding the welfare state, mostly likely due to economic collapse, millions of Americans would be instantly destitute. The same fate that the South believed would befall them should slavery be banned. Without government financial assistance, people stuck on the bottom rung of the economic ladder will riot.

Would these massive riots constitute civil war? In a way, yes. The rioters would be pitted against police and then, possibly, government troops. They would fall under the sway of leaders promising them reinstatement of a socialist state/guaranteed paycheck. As they do now. Only violence would be their stock in trade.

How that would play out is anyone’s guess. But our society, our liberty, would suffer. Again. Still. Because if you think about it, gun control was/is/and will be designed to keep down the lower classes.

So why “allow” the lower classes to keep and bear arms?

Because there’s not much downside; the criminal class amongst them are already armed. But it’s their natural, civil and Constitutional right to keep and bear arms. It’s important for people who’ve been historically disenfranchised to see that those of us who believe in these rights believe in these rights for all.

By the same token, you can’t credibly tell people on the lower end of the economic scale that you want them to fully realize the American dream while denying them all of their civil rights.

So it is what it is. The welfare state is a powder keg. Weaning Americans off the government teat — creating quality education and conditions for gainful employment across America — is the only way to defuse this inherently dangerous state of affairs. Suggesting that the answer lies in engendering “civil discourse” is a great landing at the wrong airport.

James Freeman reports about Wednesday’s liberal mass shooter and the reaction thereto:

A violent assault can leave far more than mere physical scars. And it appears that Wednesday’s attack on Republican lawmakers and their associates has proven to be particularly traumatic for the editorial page staff of the New York Times. Symptoms exhibited by the afflicted Timesfolk include the making of assertions that have not been established as facts and a refusal to accept those that have.

To be sure, the last 24 hours have been highly stressful for progressive leftists. Creating conditions of extreme psychological discomfort are the published writings of suspected shooter James T. Hodgkinson. Among the revelations is that Hodgkinson appears to have accepted as fact virtually the entirety of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ over-the-top rhetoric about U.S. political and economic systems.

Perhaps as a coping mechanism, the New York Times now editorializes that Hodgkinson “was surely deranged, and his derangement had found its fuel in politics.” One can argue that anyone who seeks to assassinate politicians is by definition deranged. Some people might even argue that Hodgkinson’s proposal to lift marginal tax rates to “70% or more” was insane. But Hodgkinson’s mental condition has not been established.

The Associated Press reports that as of March 24 of this year, just before Hodgkinson set off for Virginia from his home in Illinois, local law enforcement in that state had no knowledge of any psychiatric issues. That’s when police were called to his house by neighbors concerned about the multiple gunshots he was firing. According to the AP:

St. Clair County Sheriff Rick Watson said Wednesday that Hodgkinson showed the deputy all required firearms licenses and documentation for the high-powered hunting rifle, which he said he was simply using for target practice.

The deputy cautioned Hodgkinson about shooting around homes, given that the rounds can travel up to a mile. No charges were filed.

‘‘He said, ‘I understand,’ and said he needed to take the gun to a range to shoot it, Watson said. ‘‘There was nothing we could arrest him for, and there was no indication he was mentally ill or going to harm anyone.

Various accounts of Hodgkinson paint a picture of a horrible foster parent with a history of mostly minor brushes with the law, but not a raving lunatic. In its news coverage, the New York Times interviews the suspect’s brother:

“I know he wasn’t happy with the way things were going, the election results and stuff,” his brother, Michael Hodgkinson, said in a phone interview after he received the news on Wednesday.

“Totally out of the blue,” he added, saying that his brother was engaged in politics but otherwise led a normal life.

The paper also quotes Charlene Brennan, a real estate agent who said Mr. Hodgkinson had conducted inspections for various of her housing sales: “He did not come off as an unstable individual. He wasn’t belligerent. He was just kind of a normal guy.”

The Washington Post found another person who didn’t seem to think Hodgkinson was deranged:

Charles Orear, 50, a restaurant manager from St. Louis, became friendly with Hodgkinson during their work together in Iowa on Sanders’s 2016 campaign. Orear said Hodgkinson was a passionate progressive and showed no signs of violence or malice toward others.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Orear said when told by phone about the shooting.

Hodgkinson’s hometown paper, the Belleville News-Democrat, interviewed Hodgkinson’s neighbor Aaron Meurer:

“I knew he was a Democrat, a pretty hardcore one. I know he wasn’t happy when Trump got elected, but he seemed like a nice enough guy,” recalled Meurer, who said the couple lived across the street for about six years.

This column could go on citing witnesses who found Hodgkinson to be a more or less normal guy with leftist views but there are even more egregious errors in the Times editorial that demand attention.

This column thinks it’s usually unfair to hold political leaders responsible for all the acts and views of their followers. Pick the nuttiest person at any large political rally of either party and you’ll find someone whose comments are not easy to defend. The Times has a different view, and seeks whenever possible to blame shootings on conservative politicians. So it may be understandable that one symptom of its Hodgkinson’s disease is a heightened sensitivity and fear that people on the right will use the Times technique against leftists that the Times admires, or even against the Times itself. Perhaps deciding that the best defense is a good offense, the paper editorializes:

In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They’re right. Though there’s no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right.

Because Sarah Palin is a well-known former politician, she’s in a category of people who face enormously high legal barriers to winning libel cases. This is as it should be. We want a vibrant free press to vigorously hold politicians to account and when people step into the political arena they understand that rough treatment from the media is part of the gig. But if Mrs. Palin were just another private citizen, she would sue the New York Times and she would win. As this column’s most celebrated alumnus noted in 2011, politicians of both parties were publishing similar maps about each other. And despite the New York Times’ fondest desires, it turned out Loughner wasn’t a conservative at all but a babbler of nonsense who adopted a mish-mash of views from both the left and the right and whose tastes in literature ran the gamut from Ayn Rand to Karl Marx.

If the Times followed its own unfair standards, it would now be blaming Mr. Sanders, not dredging up long-discredited smears against Mrs. Palin. But correcting the Times’ journalistic flaws can wait. The first priority must be treating the victims on its editorial page.

The Times did Tweet a retraction about its Palin claims:

But of course corrections are never seen as often as the initial cause of the correction.

The Washington Post reports:

A gunman, who was identified by law enforcement as James T. Hodgkinson, unleashed a barrage of gunfire at a park in Alexandria, Va., as Republican members of Congress held a morning baseball practice. President Trump later announced that the gunman had died.

The gunman was James T. Hodgkinson of Belleville, Ill., a Bernie Sanders supporter and Donald Trump hater based on his Facebook pages (which Facebook took down early Wednesday afternoon).

The object of Hodgkinson’s worship issued this statement:

Sanders gave the correct response. So did Democrats at the scene, according to the Washington Examiner:

There’s only one response appropriate in the face of tragedy, and the Democrat roster practicing at a different diamond across town displayed it: They prayed.

Wearing sweaty workout clothes, Democrats asked God to protect Republicans. Unable to help their colleagues in the moment, they were driven to their knees, turning a concrete dugout into an impromptu sanctuary.

It was beautiful and it was good. And most of all, it was American.

Our nation’s pastime, baseball is a manifestation of democracy. At least in the National League, every player must be able to throw, field, and bat. Because of that democratic ethos, there’s no division on the field, only unity around the love of this American game.

Throughout our history, baseball has broken down society’s barriers. That happened again this morning. Though partisanship has reached a fever pitch in this country, it hasn’t gotten so bad that liberals won’t pray for conservatives. As a nation, we should put aside what divides us, follow their example, and unite in prayer.

Other liberals had a different response; go to Chicks on the Right for a depressing selection that includes (language alert before you read):

Capitol police were there because Scalise was there; apparently House leadership gets security. U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D–California) said there was no security for the Democratic team because there was no leadership there. But apparently Hodgkinson didn’t target Democrats, only Republicans. U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R–Kentucky) said there would have been a “bloodbath” were it not for the Capitol police, who ultimately killed Hodgkinson.

Readers will recall that yesterday I posted an obligatory response to “the next mass shooting.” It was prompted by the one-year anniversary of the Orlando, Fla., nightclub shooting; I didn’t expect it would be pertinent less than two hours after it was posted. So read that to counter the predictable bad-guns responses. I will bet lunch that no readers’ guns went off by themselves in the past 24 hours.

I have been predicting something like this for more than five years. The only surprising thing here is that it took until now for this to happen.

John Moody blames culture:

What did you expect?

“Julius Caesar,” dressed and looking on purpose like Donald Trump, is knifed to death nightly in a New York theater presentation lauded by CNN as “a masterpiece.”

Tom Perez, the head of the Democratic National Committee, says “Republican leaders and President Trump don’t give a sh*t about the people they were trying to hurt.”

That noted political philosopher, Madonna, thinks a lot about blowing up the White House. …

There is a kind of head-shaking inevitability about the attack on Rep. Steve Scalise, his protective detail and his aides. Democrats are fully justified in being disappointed, even enraged, that Trump was elected instead of Sanders or Hillary Clinton. But far too many seem to feel that because Trump is an unconventional president, there are no bounds to what can be said, threatened, broadcast or published about him.

Are there any late-night comedians who haven’t joined the competition to say the most shocking things about the president? Stephen Colbert, willing to do anything to breathe ratings life into his deeply unfunny show, concocted, that’s right, concocted a term to suggest Trump performs oral sex on Vladimir Putin. The result: uproarious laughter and higher ratings.

The once-venerable New York Times, whose anti-rich people, pro-transgender, government as nanny state agenda has been on view for years, has abandoned any attempt at objective reporting on the current administration. Surprisingly, some people still read the Times, and cannot help but be influenced by its out-there stridency.  

Bellwether won’t even bother to call for restraint, now that the violent passions on display have crossed the line to shooting violence. Restraint seems too noble a goal to hope for. Instead, how about three days of silent, personal reflection among all the anti-Trumpers who have worked themselves into a collective hissy-fit that knows no trip-wire? Seventy-two hours of keeping your minds open and your mouths shut. Too much to ask?

No one expects liberals to fall in line behind Trump, who has made it easy to hate him with his undisciplined, sometimes uncouth speeches and tweets. He has magnified the natural, understandable conflicts that arise in politics.

It is possible to despise the president and his policies without violence? It is impossible to justify what happened Wednesday morning. But, just watch. Some will try.

Everything Moody lists (and all those tweets previously presented) protected by the First Amendment, as they should be. But the First Amendment does not absolve someone of the consequences of their free expression (see Griffin, Kathy, Former Career), nor does it require anyone to support, in Moody’s list, Griffin’s beheaded Trump, or Julius Caesar Trump’s nightly assassination.

Unlike the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D–Arizona), where there was no discernible political motive (and the shooter was a registered Democrat), there clearly was a political motive here. The Post also reports:

Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.), who represented the district where alleged shooter James T. Hodgkinson resided, said that Hodgkinson had contacted his office 14 times through email or telephone.

Bost said his staff conducted a search after law enforcement contacted him this morning about the suspect.

“Every issue that we were working on, he was not in support of,” Bost said, saying the communications were of a left-wing slant but delivered “never with any threats, only anger.”

“This one never crossed the line, but he was always angry,” said Bost, who said his office continues to cooperate with law enforcement.

And …

James T. Hodgkinson, identified by police as the suspect in Wednesday morning’s shooting, wrote frequent letters to the editor of his local newspaper, the Belleville News-Democrat. The paper has now published a collection of those letters from 2012, in which Hodgkinson repeatedly raised concerns about the nation’s income inequality and was deeply critical of Republican policies and tax breaks for the wealthy.

“Let’s vote all Republicans out of Congress, and get this country back on track,” Hodgkinson wrote in July 2012. “If we don’t want another Great Depression, we should reelect the man who is working for the working man. President Ronald Reagan’s “trickle down” policy did not work, and never will. A strong middle class is what a country needs to prosper.”

The next month, he wrote: “I have never said ‘life sucks,’ only the policies of the Republicans.”

Hodgkinson also called for legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana to “stimulate the economy.”

Read the letters here.

The News–Democrat, which probably had the most number of hits on its website it will ever have yesterday, reported:

Hodgkinson has a varied arrest record in St. Clair County, for offenses such as failing to obtain electrical permits, damaging a motor vehicle, resisting a peace officer, eluding police, criminal damage to property, driving under the influence and assorted traffic offenses.

I’m not a psychiatrist, but neither his letters (every newspaper has serial letter writers) nor his non-violent arrest record suggests mental illness, which makes the claims of Hodgkinson’s being a wacko unconvincing. His apparently having spent considerable time in the Arlington area makes it appear as though this was premeditated, not merely someone who snapped in the wrong place at the wrong time.

One of Hodgkinson’s possible targets, U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks (R–Alabama), had this to say, as reported by the Washington Examiner;

Brooks, R-Ala., was on deck to bat and gave a harrowing account of the gunfire. Asked later whether it had affected his views on gun control, Brooks said, “not with respect to the Second Amendment.”

“The Second Amendment right to bear arms is to ensure that we always have a republic. And as with any other constitutional provision in the Bill of Rights, there are adverse aspects to each of those rights that we enjoy as people. And what we just saw here is one of the bad side effects of someone not exercising those rights properly.”

Brooks said many amendment rights besides the Second Amendment can have “adverse aspects” as well.

The News–Democrat quotes an eyewitness, U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis (R–Illinois):

“The camaraderie exists. That’s a misperception. We have great camaraderie out here between Republicans and Democrats. I urge you to ask many of the Democrats I’ve served with, No. 1, if they know me, and No. 2, what we’ve worked on together. Because we’ve worked on a lot of things together in a very bipartisan way. We have to come together as Americans.

“We have to take this tragedy that we saw today that could have been much, much worse, and turn it into a positive, to let Americans know if you disagree with your political leaders, that’s OK. That’s why we have elections. But let’s not ratchet up the hateful speech.

“We see stories about policies are going to lead to the death of people. That’s political rhetoric that has run amok and has turned into hate and it may, may be the reason why we saw the senseless tragedy that we saw today. And if it is, this could be the first political rhetorical terrorist act that we’ve seen on our soil. And we can change that. Only we can change that.”

A Facebook Friend pointed out that “What most people don’t know is, in spite of deep policy debates you see on TV, these legislators are friends.” Which should make the cynical think that Washington is really more about the Incumbent Party and not about serving the people who voted for them. Overheated rhetoric, excessive (however you define that) political spending and, yes, politically inspired violence like yesterday are the natural result of government that does too much and has too much power over our lives. That is the fault of everyone in office, Republican, Democrat or party-less, and those working for politicians. The only way you’re going to change that is to take power away from government, and not just at the federal level, but at every level.

I’ve written this so often I should just copy and paste it, but it’s still true: Politics is a zero-sum game. One side wins; therefore the other side loses. If you believe abortion is murder, and you lose a vote to end abortion rights (or a Supreme Court decision doesn’t end abortion rights), you lost. If you believe taxation is theft, and a tax cut bill passes, all you will do is be less of a victim of theft. If you believe no one should have the right to own guns, every gun in the country is a loss for you. And few people, having lost on a vote, will admit maybe they were wrong, which makes a politics a sport of infinite length where no one ultimately wins. And there are many, many problems — arguably most — that government cannot solve, despite politicans’ trying to get you to believe otherwise.

Politics does not suck because of our system, however. Politics sucks because people suck, and it could be argued that people in politics suck more because they want to control the lives of those below them. Thoughts and prayers for the victims will not change the flawed nature of man.

In a democracy, political violence doesn’t accomplish any goal beyond, in the case of assassination, removing someone from office. If Democrats got their goal and Donald Trump left the White House today, his replacement would be Vice President Mike Pence, as has happened every time a president died while in office and when Richard Nixon resigned. If Scalise, who was in critical condition as of Wednesday afternoon, cannot continue in office, there is a process to replace him. Whatever Hodgkinson thought he was accomplishing by firing at (and mostly missing) Congressional Republicans, all he gained was attention to himself, which is useless to someone who’s dead.