Was Brian Beutler right when he explained, Why Conservatives Should Praise God for the Supreme Court’s Gay Marriage Decision? His argument is pretty standard. The decision allowing same sex marriage across the country has saved the Republicans from themselves. He compared it to Brown v Board of Education. He noted, “If a different Supreme Court hadn’t helped end the civil rights debate, a big segment of the country would’ve remained separate-but-equal fanatics for years and years, and driven their elected officials into that dead end with them.” He’s right about this, of course. In another couple of years, same sex marriage is going to have 80% approval and it helps the Republicans a lot to not have to talk about it.

But there is a bigger point here: conservatives are always on the trailing end of history. And the Republican Party has set up a system where they have to use these ancillary issues in order to further their primary goal of enriching the already rich and empowering the already powerful. And they really do get stuck in their own traps. But it is hard to feel sorry for them because issues like same sex marriage serve them well for a long time. And they would be lost without them.

The more important point is that, as same sex marriage becomes a thing of the past, they will simply find new things to stand against. This is Corey Robin’s very definition of conservatism: being against liberation movements. The point is always and forever that whoever are in charge at any given time are the right people to be in charge. So we always will hear things from conservatives like, “Well certainly Jim Crow was bad, but that’s all a thing of the past!” Whatever it is that people are asking for now must be resisted because freedom is a limited quantity. In fact, that’s been quite explicit in the same sex marriage debate where it was bizarrely claimed that it would harm heterosexual marriage — like there is some law of conservation of marriage.

And let’s not forget that the ultimate fall back for conservatives is the poor. LGBT rights has always been a sideshow. The true popular power of the Republican Party has been its veiled (and not so veiled) attacks on African Americans and Latinos as the moocher class. This has the advantage of being fairly straightforward. It really goes along with what conservatives believe: the rich are rich because they are better and the poor are poor because they suck. This was, by the way, one of the primary arguments for chattel slavery. Not much has changed.

So I think that Beutler is basically correct: for the Republican Party, the legalization of same sex marriage is helpful. There will, of course, continue to be culture warriors like Mike Huckabee who will pander to that consistent 20% of the population that hates everyone and everything. But mostly, the party will abandon it. But it will continue on with its usual bigotry. And it will find new things to demagogue against. Cheer up Republicans, the dream is not dead!

Hans Noel via Jonathan Bernstein explained an issue that a lot of people have no doubt found puzzling, The Flag Was No Fluke. The question at hand is why did the murders at the Emanuel AME Church end in political action about the Confederate flag and not the more obvious gun control. I’ll tell you what I had assumed: everyone is tired of gun control.

After Sandy Hook, even the smallest changes to our gun laws were out of the question. To even talk about them, we were told, was to politicize the tragedy — as though telling people not to talk about guns is a less political act. So it isn’t surprising that for a lot of liberals, it doesn’t make sense to start talking about guns when even many Democrats will be against doing even the smallest things.

What Noel highlighted was that the gun control movement and the African American community are two constituencies of the Democratic Party. But the African American community is far more important. The truth is that although most Democrats would like to see more reasonable gun laws, it is at the top of the list for very few. So when the Charleston massacre happened, and there were two possible responses, the Democrats followed with the stronger and better organized group.

The Confederate flag has been a big issue for activists for decades. I don’t consider racism to be one of my core issues and yet I’ve written about the Confederate flag obsessively over the last five years. It isn’t personally offensive to me the way it is to many African Americans. But it is such an obvious offense. I’m sure there are a lot of white liberals like me, but who haven’t given the issue much thought. And when it was brought up in such a barbaric way, it’s clear, “Get rid of that flag!”

The other side, of course, is that there are people in the Republican Party who have long wanted to get rid of the flag. It is not welcoming to African Americans, or for that matter, anyone except for those who fetishize the flag. And those people are already big Republican boosters. It goes back to Lee Atwater’s idea that racist appeals have to be made more subtle over time. Well, the Confederate flag ain’t subtle.

We’ll see how far this goes. I’d like to get rid of it completely. Clearly, it should be scrubbed from state grounds and courthouses. But I’d like to see more. I would like to see the display of the Confederate flag be treated with the same public distaste as the display of the Nazi flag. But we can start with the Confederate flag at the South Carolina capital.

Oh. My. God! Did you know that Bernie Sanders was pro-gun?! Mark Joseph Stern seemed pretty worked up about it last month, Bernie Sanders, Gun Nut. He wrote then, “But before liberal Democrats flock to Sanders, they should remember that the Vermont senator stands firmly to Clinton’s right on one issue of overwhelming importance to the Democratic base: gun control.” Really?! Is that an issue of overwhelming importance to us? Because I didn’t know that. I thought the Democratic Party had given up on gun control some time in the 1980s.

But okay, Sanders is no kind of gun control fanatic. Just the same, he’s no kind of gun rights fanatic. It’s hard to figure out NRA ratings, but as far as I can tell, Sanders’ NRA grade was F in 2003, D- in 2012, and F now. So let’s think about this. Even if Sanders is inclined toward more gun freedom than the Democratic base, how would it ever matter given the state of not just the Republican Party but the conservative wing of the Democratic Party? What’s more, I don’t think that most Democrats are all that extreme when it comes to gun control. It is just a matter of sensible measures — and even they are beyond the pale.

I kind of think that Stern’s article was an indirect attack from the Clinton campaign. But now we have an attack ad from Generation Forward, the Super-PAC of Martin O’Malley. And it’s pretty effective in its way. Just the same, when I saw it, I though, “So?!” For one thing, I know that Sanders isn’t a liberal. In most nations, socialists are the nationalists. One of the great things about Sanders is that he is no shrinking violet. Conservatives might blast him on his economics (which are hugely popular), but they can’t pretend that he isn’t strong — they can’t paint him as effete.

There’s more than a hint of desperation here. This line is telling, “The NRA even paid for ads attacking a Sanders opponent.” That’s a reference to Sanders 1990 campaign against Peter Smith for the Vermont’s at-large Representative seat. Apparently, Smith had angered the NRA by voting for the assault weapons ban. So it was 25 years ago, and it certainly wasn’t an endorsement of Sanders.

The text that goes along with Generation Forward’s YouTube post of the video claims, “You can’t claim to soak the fat boys and exempt the profiteers in the gun industry.” That’s a good one! For one thing, it’s a total distortion of Sanders’ economic policies. For another, there is a big difference between different gun control policies and proper economic policy. No one thinks that Sanders has voted the way that he votes to curry favor with the small weapons industry and its media arm, the NRA.

Politics is serious business. I don’t blame O’Malley for doing whatever it takes to get a little traction. I just doubt it will work. It seems a little early to start this kind of thing anyway. There are still the debates, which will doubtless help him. But for right now, I can see his campaign getting a desperate. Sanders is getting a lot of good attention. But so did Howard Dean in 2004. We should all relax.

Oh, also: Bernie Sanders 2016!

Bobby Jindal announced his run for the presidency yesterday with a video — probably because it’s too expensive to pay actors to fill a room. There is no doubt that he’s a long-shot. For the past six months, he’s had a string of embarrassments. Most notably, he went to the UK to talk about the supposed “no-go zones” in London. He was widely mocked in the British press. Lucky for Jindal, the American press is much nicer about this kind of thing. To me, the biggest thing about Jindal is his social conservative bent. He is normally a Catholic, but he sounds like an evangelical. He follows the church’s teaching when it comes to homosexuality and abortion and pretty much nothing else. (Note: the Catholic church is not easy for liberals or conservatives.)

But Jonathan Bernstein has a positive take on the candidacy, Bobby Jindal’s 2016 Bid Makes Sense. He noted that the race is actually wide open. Jindal may be polling at number 15 (which puts him below some people who haven’t officially announced), but a lot could change, “Jindal — like Chris Christie, who is apparently moving ahead with his own effort — has correctly assessed that the Republican front-runners are weak enough that a long shot could win the nomination.” So why not?

Think back to the 2012 Republican nomination fight. It seemed that every week there was a new front runner. But 2016 was supposed to be different because there were going to be some top tier candidates. I don’t even know what that means anymore. The Republicans have a problem in that they really don’t disagree about anything. Every once in a while, someone will come out in favor of immigration reform, only to be shouted down. So who is in the lead is more or less random — based upon the most recent news. (Check this out: Donald Trump currently polls in second place in New Hampshire.)

Remember that Newt Gingrich got 137 electoral votes in the primary. If he had been a reasonable candidate, he could have caught fire and gone the whole way. And he wasn’t even trying hard. Consider, more tellingly, Herman Cain. Had he been a real candidate, he probably would have won. The truth is that the Republican base is desperate to vote for an African American who will tell them that race is not an issue and that they are the true victims. And I think Jindal fits that bill very well. The Republicans, after all, are proud of having the two whitest Latinos in the world — Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The fact that Jindal in Indian, doesn’t matter.

It is a crap shoot. But sure: Jindal has a shot. I certainly think he has a better shot than Chris Christie does. But the fact that he has a shot is more a reflection of the Republican Party than it is of him. The truth is that the party has little to offer. So they are all going to stand on the debate state and pander to the base. We will see which one of them can be more against immigration or more for destroying the Islamic State and just generally be more “real America.” Jindal could catch a break. So could almost any of them. Just like in 2012.

It usually doesn’t mean much to tell people not to be afraid of airplane travel because it is so much safer than automobile travel. Similarly, it doesn’t mean much to tell people not to worry about terrorist acts because they are far more likely to be crushed by their refrigerator. So on that level, I don’t think it much matters that New America released a report that found that right wing terrorists were responsible for just under twice as many American deaths as jihadists were.

Of course, most Americans are not worried about terrorism. It is something far removed from their lives. It is just something that they worry about now and then because the media get them worked up about it. And for those poor people who have Fox News on all day, we must have great sympathy. They are fed a constant diet of hate and fear to the point where they actually think that the Islamic State poses a threat to them in the suburbs of Kansas City.

But I think the New America report ought to be very important from a policy standpoint: that we aren’t using our resources effectively. After Dylann Roof committed his heinous murders and we found out about his online “manifesto” and his well known attitudes and threats, I wondered where the FBI had been. It seems that a couple of times per year, we hear about some big terrorist plot that was stopped by the FBI. And in each case, it is the same: the FBI found a mentally unstable person, whipped him up into a jihadist frenzy, and then arrested him for it. It’s like clockwork.

And the coverage is always the same. The mainstream media report on the big “terror plot.” There are congratulations all around. And then, we read in The Guardian or The Intercept that it was just another FBI plot foiled by the FBI. We seem to spend a whole lot of time and energy on this kind of thing. And just imagine how many people the FBI tries to set up who won’t go along with the deal. Regardless, these resources could be used to scan all the new domain name purchases. One called The Last Rhodesian should stand out. Or it would if the FBI were interested in real threats to Americans rather than creating finely scripted “terror plots” for the mainstream media to eat up and the government to keep funding.

But look at the chart above. It’s from an article by Glenn Greenwald and Josh Begley, The Greatest Obstacle to Anti-Muslim Fear-Mongering and Bigotry: Reality. It is a nice reminder. It brings back memories of Fahrenheit 9/11, where people in a Virginia suburb can only come up with Walmart as a possible terrorist target. But the truth is that the people in the FBI and all the other parts of the “homeland security” apparatus know all this stuff. But apparently, there is little money in reducing real threats like cars and environmental hazards.

So we will continue on getting a constant focus on the jihadists, even as they seem more occupied far away killing peaceful Muslims. And we will only occasionally be reminded of right wing extremists when people like Roof pop up to kill people. There will be no more resources put on it. We won’t be allowed to talk about easy access to guns. Even racism will be largely off limits. But if we are very, very lucky, the South Carolina capital grounds will stop flying the Confederate flag. I guess that’s something. But there is still the state flag of Mississippi. And, you know, everything else.