Mediaite Morning Reading List: Tea Party Lawmakers Want to Go Back to Washington
Every a.m., Mediaite publishes a primer of what the interweb machine is writing, talking, tweeting, and blogging about, so that you may fool friends and family into thinking you are a trove of information and insight. Today: an in-depth look at the disintegration of the Tsarnaev brothers; the nexus of smarm, policy, and writing; gun deaths since Newtown; and more.
“The Fall of the House of the Tsarnaevs” (Sally Jacobs, David Filipov and Patricia Wen, Boston Globe)
Today’s long-read and must-read: a five-month investigation by the Boston Globe into the lives of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the accused Boston Marathon bombers. The extensive article fills in in crucial information about several generations of their family, details about their motivations for immigrating to the United States, their very troubled path once in Boston, and, perhaps most important, the nagging suspicions about elder brother Tamerlan’s mental health, signs that seem to point to schizophrenia.
The Globe explicitly argues that the brothers’ motivations were more personal and familial than religious or geopolitical, and makes no bones about the fact that such a categorization would reroot their motives onto American soil, with immense implications for the still incomplete narrative of anti-American terrorism and the surveillance operations that have sprung up, ostensibly, to fight it:
Taken together, these findings suggest that the motivation for the Tsarnaev brothers’ violent acts is more likely rooted in the turbulent collapse of their family and their escalating personal and collective failures than, as federal investigators have suggested, on the other side of the globe. It is a portrait that makes the plot that yielded the carnage of April 15 seem less complicated, and the horrific outcome less preventable.
If the truth is that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his rangy teenage brother acted out of private motives, reinforced by the fervent entreaties of the Muslim militants whose voices and images boiled on their computer screen, they would join the ranks of homegrown murderers such as the Colorado movie theater shooter and the Oklahoma City bombers.
Read the whole etc.
“G.O.P. Firebrands Tone Down Their Message and Run Again” (Jennifer Steinhauer, New York Times)
Former tea party lawmakers—the very ones who ran against the idea of “incumbents” in 2010—are now scrambling to get back to Washington. The New York Times reports on a slew of one-term legislators, voted into office in 2010 and out in 2012, who are moderating their message to take advantage of anti-Obamacare sentiment. It’s a kindler, gentler tea party, one that opposes government shutdowns (so long as its legislators are not the ones in office causing them). YMMV as to whether you buy it.
“Why Tom Scocca Thinks a Culture of Positivity Helps the Powerful” (Dylan Matthews, Washington Post)
A good interview with Tom Scocca, whose essay “On Smarm” has single-handedly generated content for the internet for the past two weeks. While much of the discussion so far has centered on literature, WaPo’s Dylan Matthews gets at some of the policy and political implications of Scocca’s argument.
“Hack List No. 10: Malcolm Gladwell” (Alex Pareene, Salon)
Related to Scocca’s interview—Malcolm Gladwell is a critic of Scocca’s unified field theory of smarm—Alex Pareene’s annual hack list kicks off today, with a piece that’s less a takedown of Gladwell than a meditation on a question posed by Gladwellianism: is a good writer morally obligated to write a good book?
“Since Newtown, 127 Children Have Been Killed by Guns in Their Own Homes” (Mark Follman, Mother Jones)
In response to the “good guys with guns” demi-argument, Mother Jones crunches the data on the 194 children (12 years of age and under) killed with guns since Newtown, two-thirds of whom were killed in their own home. One-third of the deaths were accidents, and half of those came from children handling guns they’d found in their house.
[Image via AP]
