What has the world come too?????

By: Mark Morford:

Two Chechen-American idiots watch too much Internet and flagellate themselves into detonating a couple homemade bombs in Boston, and suddenly it’s an epic domestic terror attack that floods the nation with fear and panic, shuts down an entire major city and triggers the President of the United States to call Vladimir Putin directly, as an ever-whiny Congress re-debates immigration reform and “pressure cooker” shifts meaning in the American lexicon forevermore.

Meanwhile, Mother’s Day. A parade celebrating same courses through some rough neighborhoods of New Orleans. Suddenly, a 19-year-old thug (at least one, maybe more) of no greater or lesser quality than the idiot Tsarnaevs whips out his NRA-adored handgun and shoot 19 people, three of them children, for no reason whatsoever save that he, too, wished to lash out at his perceived enemies, the cops, the world.

The reaction? A numb shrug. A tragic sigh. Just another case of urban street violence that barely registers in the American consciousness because, hey, gun attacks are just the American way, aren’t they? And we’re powerless to stop them, right? Because guns are awesome? Because violence is just who we are? Right.

Besides, poor black people shooting each other in the mean streets of New Orleans? Who cares about that? It’s not like that teenager was shooting white children in Connecticut or something. Now that would be terrible.

Such a dicey and delusional species are we. Such masters of self-deception, of bizarre equivocation, cherry picking our tragedies and our collective neurosis as we are told by the warped media, nasty politicos, hate-radio pundits and marketers of all kinds just which thugs and demons we should fear most, and which merely exist somewhere in blighted, faraway neighborhood you need not care about.
What’s your tremor du jour, citizen? Hooligans with guns? A twitchy NRA with even more guns? Chechen morons with unregistered cookware? The IRS?

Ah, the IRS, doing what the IRS does best: being sort of hateful, targeting various groups it doesn’t like, adding pressure to groups it feels are some sort of threat, nailing little people from whom it feels it can suck some extra dollars. Nothing new there.

Except now, now the IRS overstepped even its own ignoble rules in targeting some dumber-than-thou conservative groups, right around the last election. How utterly stupid. How utterly embarrassing. How utterly pointless.

Then again, who doesn’t know the IRS targets specific demographics all the time? Who doesn’t know that this is essentially what the IRS does? Do you know how many (liberal, wonderful, not the slightest bit rich or threatening) friends I have who run small businesses that the IRS has decided to audit, for no other reason than it’s far easier to scrape a few bucks from 10,000 little guys than it is to go after one heavily armored, tax-exempt megacorp? Lots, that’s how many.

Do you know who’s laughing hardest about the current IRS microscandal? Exxon. Apple. Microsoft. Monsanto. Genentech. All those giants of industry that escape billions in taxes by way of various loopholes, exemptions, armies of expensive tax attorneys. Carry on, rich people – go get richer. It’s OK, no one’s looking.

The worst part of this little IRS scandal? Nope, not that Obama is having another Worst Week Ever. It’s that the Tea Party is suddenly back in the national spotlight, all righteous and spittle-flecked, full of its usual inbred nonsense, when it was all but dead a week ago. Worse still: If the GOP has its way, we’ll be hearing the Tea Party’s nasally shriek through the 2016 elections. Thanks, IRS.

Obama and Benghazi? Obama and the IRS? Obama’s Justice Department going after the AP and secretly nabbing months’ worth of phone records of its reporters and editors in an “unprecedented overreach?” Jesus. Ugly all around. As Jon Stewart so perfectly put it, “Congratulations, President Obama — conspiracy theorists who generally can survive in anaerobic environments have just had an algae bloom dropped on their f–king heads, thus removing the last arrow in your pro-governance quiver: Skepticism about your opponents.”

Not mentioned in this ungodly hellstorm of GOP-empowering gassiness? The lesser but still feisty tale of the federal judge who’s been unloading all sorts of awesome sass all over Obama’s FDA, Kathleen Sibelius in particular.

I speak of the sort of amazing Judge Edward Korman, of course, a 70-year-old Reagan appointee who’s been just falling just short of calling Sibelius a lying, two-faced dingleberry for her duplicitous and completely impossible-to-defend attempts to block the over-the-counter sale of Plan B to girls of all ages, which Korman recently ordered via a landmark decision.

Have you followed this delightful tale? It’s a personal favorite for a variety of reasons, one of which is, while I hate to add more ammo to those attacking the Obama administration right now, there simply are no right-wingers championing Plan B, or Korman’s position. He’s acting alone. He’s acting brilliantly. He’s empowering all young girls to get access to safe birth control. The GOP hates that.

What’s more, he’s speaking truth to power like you almost never hear at this level. The fact that the power in question is part of the Obama administration makes this story sort of backwards and bittersweet, to say the least. But what the hell; you take what you can get.

Which is why it’s safe to say, all is not lost on this odd and bleak news cycle. While it’s true Obama is having a terrible week (despite a surprisingly healthy economic outlook and a record-high Dow), we can always find the gems among the grime, the rainbow amidst the ugly political thunderstorm.
Look, there’s another one right now, beaming bright over Minnesota, which just became the 12th state in the union to approve gay marriage. Can you believe it? Is it not a thing?

Wait, you must look closer. For Minnesota is not just another state that defied expectations and changed direction sort of radically from just last November, when a referendum banning gay marriage forevermore almost made it into the state constitution.

Minnesota is, of course, also home to the Tea Party’s twitchiest nutball, its most flagrantly insane hood ornament, one Rep. Michele Bachmann, a goofy homophobe of epic proportions who once dragged a squadron of conservative “prayer warriors” into senate chambers to ask God to help smite the evil gays.

And lo, it would appear God has finally responded to Michele Bachmann, and the nation’s right-wing homophobes in general. Can you see it? Why, it looks like a very large, very bright, very unmistakable… middle finger.