At Sunday night’s Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders was asked a curious question with the lead-in, “I did want to ask you about a neighbor in San Bernardino who reportedly witnessed packages being delivered to that couple’s home, that it set off red flags, but they didn’t report it because they were afraid to profile.” I’ve heard this claim before. And it has been a big deal in conservative media because it feeds the narrative they most believe: that political correctness is destroying our nation and if we were just using racial profiling, we would all be safe. But it has never passed the smell test. It just seems too tidy and too much what people make up after the fact to contextualize this kind of tragedy.

Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog is as up on this kind of “news” as anyone I know, and he explained that this claim isn’t even as strong as this. He wrote, “One neighbor of Syed Farook’s mother in Redlands, California, claims that another neighbor saw suspicious activity, but the second neighbor didn’t say anything because she didn’t want to engage in profiling.” And this claim itself comes from a single local television news reporter, although he reported it twice, so I guess that’s supposed to add credibility.

This whole thing leads me to the same place I find myself with the New Atheist crowd that claims that they just follow the facts. The brain doesn’t work that way. And I’ve seen far too many people unknowingly massage the narrative of things that have happened to them. It’s almost like Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski. Step one: I don’t know what happened. Step two: You know what might have happened? Step three: It definitely happened. So I suspect that this went something like this:

A: “It just doesn’t make any sense!”

B: “I know. Did you ever see anything suspicious?”

A: “Well, they were getting a lot of packages. It seemed a little strange.”

B: “Why didn’t you say anything?”

A: “I don’t know. Racial profiling?”

B: “You didn’t say anything because you didn’t want to be seen as a bigot?”

A: “Yeah. I think that must have been it.”

On the other hand, if it had been just some crazy person, the narrative that develops is that they didn’t want to get involved or they (Rightly!) respect other people’s privacy. Normally, people don’t say anything simply because they have their own lives to lead. If they went around trying to explain why people do every inexplicable thing they do, there wouldn’t be much time left for anything else.

This reminds me of David Mitchell’s video, Social Signals. It talks about our tendency to act out little scenes in public to signal what is really going on. So instead of just turning around and going back to your house to get the phone you forgot, you make a big production of showing to anyone interested that you have in fact forgotten something. But of course Mitchell is right: no one cares. That is, no one cares until you turn out to be a mass murderer. Then that “crazy” business of walking back and forth in the street comes to be meaningful in a way that it was not at the time.

It’s interesting that no one has gone back to San Bernardino to locate this neighbor of a neighbor who didn’t want to engage in racial profiling. But the truth is, even if someone did, it wouldn’t matter. At this point, it is impossible to say — barring a diary entry, “Those people across the way are up to something; I should probably say something; but I don’t want to be accused of racial profiling.” That sounds like something Glenn Beck will put in his next novel.

The most disappointing thing in the Democratic debate Saturday night was that both Clinton and especially O’Malley accepted the Republican frame about the threat of terrorism and how afraid we should all be. And I’m really trying to get my head around all this. Here’s the thing: I’m not afraid. Yet I consider myself a complete coward. How can that be?

I think it has something to do with my clear grasp of sampling bias. Let us suppose, for a moment, that the San Bernardino attack had not been committed by a couple of Muslims. Imagine if it had been a white couple of the Alex Jones inclination. In that case, we wouldn’t be talking about ISIS as though they were some kind of existential threat to the United States. The San Bernardino attack did not change anything on the macroscale about the United States, but somehow it is an entirely acceptable position to think that everything changed — like it was 9/11 all over again.

Other than this attack being more successful than most, how is this any different from any other attack? Even if you want to limit it to Muslims who think they are part of some worldwide jihad, how does this attack change things? Has there been an uptick in these attacks? What about Nidal Hasan? Why didn’t that attack require that we change the whole fabric of society and our foreign policy? Could it be, I don’t know, that there is a presidential campaign on now?

Despite the fact that media and the political class are convinced that the San Bernardino shootings are Very Significant, I haven’t found many people who think this. And those who do think this are people who have been frightened into it by that very media and political class. As a people, we live in a nation is used to mass shootings happening every day. Unless 5 people get killed in one, it isn’t likely to even make national news. But we have been told that this is one that we must really pay attention to. It is so very meaningful that we must monitor the internet and destroy encryption.

At the beginning of the debate, Clinton gave far too much emphasis on this. But Martin O’Malley seemed almost hysterical about it. He calmed down eventually, but for a while I thought he would have fit in better at last Tuesday night’s debate with his clear acceptance of the Republican frame about terrorism. Sanders was the standout in this part of the debate, because he just didn’t go there. He’s good at focusing on what’s important.

But it was quite an interesting contrast. Because even when the Democrats are talking about terrorism, the focus is on specific things that we might do. I watched the whole Republican debate. It contained nothing that you couldn’t get from six seconds of The Fly, “Be afraid; be very afraid.” It’s interesting that the film came out in 1986 at the height of the “Reagan Revolution.” At least we had cause to be afraid then.

The truth is that as gullible as Americans are, they are even more quick to distraction. So the San Bernardino attack will fade from memory and they will get back to focusing on what they always do: their poor economic situation. This Republican frame will not last. But it does raise a concern that a similar attack in July or August of next year could throw everything into chaos and we could end up with President Trump.

The Democrats are having a debate tonight and almost no one will watch it because, well, the Democrats are having a debate tonight. But it got me thinking about the Republican debate last Tuesday. The most shocking thing about it was not Cruz or Christie or Trump; it was John Kasich. He’s the “sane” one. He’s the governor of a bluish state. And thus far in the campaign, he is the only one that is a simulacrum of a human being. But I guess that isn’t working, so he’s decided to be like the others. And so he said, “Frankly, it’s time we punch the Russians in the nose.” That’s crazy.

There are so many things wrong with this. First, of course, is that it is a really bad idea. This is an excellent way to start World War III. And I don’t know what’s so terrible about what Russia has been doing. The country is awful, of course. But is it any worse than the United States? It is just pushing forward with its interests. In fact, its foreign policy seems a lot more clear headed than ours. I see that Ukraine is in its sphere of influence. I don’t see how Iraq ever was in ours. Yet when we decided to go to war with it, Russia didn’t think it was time to punch us in the nose.

But Kasich’s statement is also bad politics. He clearly does not understand the Republican base. It’s best to think of it as a schoolyard bully. It doesn’t want to start a fight with someone who can punch back; it wants to pound on defenseless targets. We managed to “win” the Iraq War in less than a month and a half. And now we bomb wedding parties via remote control. These are the kinds of fighting that Americans, conservatives most of all, want to be part of.

Kasich seems to think that what the Republican base wants as their leader is someone who is strong. But that isn’t true. They want a leader who will say the things that they think need to be said. Russia isn’t in the news. The focus hasn’t been on Ukraine in some time. And most people are confused about what Russia is doing now in the Middle East, but they know that they aren’t on the side of ISIS. What’s more, my pick for a strong president is Barack Obama. But again, getting things done, making sure that the US gets its way, these are not things that Republican voters care about. Republicans want to hear some bellicose fool proclaim, “We’re number one!” And they don’t care about much else.

So John Kasich wants to start World War III because, “They’ve gotten away with too much in this world.” He’s the “sane” one. But there he is, without the sense God gave an amoeba, calling for a provocation with the only country on Earth that has a similar number of nuclear weapons to us. We don’t know how exactly he would go about punching the Russians in the nose. But provoking another powerful country because we don’t like what they are doing is a long way past stupid; it is crazy. I hope to hear far more sense from the Democrats tonight.

Afterword: Kasich Isn’t the Only Crazy One

I know that Chris Christie was talking about shooting down Russian planes. But he isn’t the “sane” candidate; he’s the candidate who shut down a bridge to spite a local politician.

Kevin Drum had a good catch, Strike Two For Pair of New York Times Reporters. For a while now, we’ve been hearing conservatives going crazy with this story that the San Bernardino shooters had been all over social media about their desire for jihad. What’s more, this is part of the war on political correctness: the reason that the government just stood back and let these people murder 14 was because we didn’t want to profile them or be similarly insensitive. Great talking point for the Republicans! The problem is that according to FBI director James Comey, it isn’t true.

The story came from an article in The New York Times by Matt Apuzzo, Michael Schmidt, and Julia Preston, Visa Screening Missed an Attacker’s Zealotry on Social Media. Reporters get things wrong from time to time. But Apuzzo and Schmidt where also the guys who brought us the completely bogus, Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of Email. As Drum noted, “In the end, virtually everything about the story turned out to be wrong. Clinton was not a target. The referral was not criminal. The email messages in question had not been classified at the time Clinton saw them.” It’s hard to image that this is just dumb luck.

These two articles both provided the Republicans with major ammunition against the Democrats. One attacked Clinton and the other Obama. But ultimately, as we saw in the Republican debate, “Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton” is now a single thing in conservative parlance. I know better than to think that these reporters have an ax to grind. They’re just looking for that Pulitzer. So either they are very bad at their jobs, which is a stretch, or they have sources that have an ax to grind. Is there any other possibility? Nothing else seems reasonable to me. You have to look at the effect of the false revelations, which include Ted Cruz saying this at the debate:

What seems especially strange is that The New York Times would publish another blockbuster article from the same reporters without being extra careful. But I think this is indicative of a more fundamental problem at the paper of record. Both articles were based on anonymous sources without a lot of justification. In the first article, it was “senior government officials.” In the second, it was “law enforcement officials.” There are fine distinctions here. There was a core of truth in both articles. The government was looking into the Clinton email. And Tashfeen Malik may have sent private messages about jihad. So maybe the Apuzzo-Schmidt sources are just kinda-sorta informed on these things and The Times is just really desperate for a scoop.

But after Judith Miller, you have to wonder. It would seem that reporters for The New York Times are not very good at spotting when they are being used. Of course, in Miller’s case, she was basically a Bush administration mole. She was clearly keen on the war and more than happy to work as a propagandist. I don’t know what’s up with Apuzzo and Schmidt. Apuzzo has won a Pulitzer, but of course, so had Miller. The New York Times only employs people who have good resumes. The question is whether they employ competent people — either as reporters or editors.

Afterword

The New York Times has not printed a retraction. And it is possible that James Comey is wrong. But it is likely that he isn’t and that the paper will print a retraction. At this point, there has been almost no press on Comey’s statement — unlike the original, apparently false, report.