Politics and other nightmares

Golly, gee, the GOP has gone and discovered diversity:

One of the darkest days in American history:

Forty years later, the images remain searing: Throngs of desperate South Vietnamese civilians trying to scale the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, hoping somehow to squeeze aboard one of the helicopters evacuating U.S. personnel and their associates in the face of an onslaught by North Vietnamese forces.

[. . .]

This seems to be amusing lots of folks on the right:

Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t just running against Republicans. She’s also running against parts of her husband’s legacy.

Rand Paul on the violence in Baltimore:

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a contender for the GOP nomination for president, offered his take on the Baltimore riots on Laura Ingraham's show this morning, saying a "lack of fathers" and a "lack of a moral code in our society" were responsible for the "thievery and thuggery."

It's risky to predict Supreme Court decisions, but the consensus seems to be, 1) The court will split in the usual four-four way on the gay marriage question, 2) Justice Anthony Kennedy will be the swing vote and, 3) given the opinion he wrote in the case partially dismantling the federal Defense of Marriage Act, he will vote in favor of gay marriage. Therefore, gay marriage as the law of the land is a done deal.

Cognitive dissonance:

Our bubbled mainstream media got a serious crash-course in reality this week with the revelations that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio don’t hate gays, and that Bruce Jenner, who is in the process of transitioning into a woman, remains a Christian Republican.

So much damage to do, so little time left:

The man who arrived in Washington six years ago to “transform” the nation has already done considerable harm, and he still has more than 18 months to strip America of the values, traditions and character that made it “the exceptional nation.”

Should John Hinckley be released from psychiatric custody? As Ed Morrissey points out, he is already mostly out. He stays with his mother in a gated community for 17 days every month. Now his lawyer, Barry Levine, say he has been in "full and stable remission for more than two decades" and is "clinically ready" to live full-time outside a mentl hospital:

Democrats don't have to even think about immigration reform, let alone answer tough questions about it. They just say it's wrong to discriminate and America is the nation of immigrants, and their base thinks that's just fine. But Republicans do have to think about it, because it's an issue their base cares a lot about. So presidential candidates have to sound tough enough for the base but not so tough it scares the "moderates" away in a general election.

George Will on why today’s very lame and PC mindset, and why free speech is more threatened today than it was during the eras of the Alien & Sedition Acts, or the Red Scares. “Today’s attack is different. It is an attack on the theory of free speech. It is an attack on the desirability of free speech . . . What we have today is an attack on the very possibility of free speech. The belief is that the First Amendment is a mistake.”