Response to Paris Burning

(See: Just Above Sunset: Paris Burning)

To bring this home to our country, I am presuming Paris will work better for the Republicans in the 2016 race than the Democrats.

I heard this morning Tom Ridge, interviewed live on CNN, essentially saying something similar (although he seems to see it as a good thing), as he also calls for "American leadership" to do over there what needs to be done, and if the White House doesn't do it, he says, someone else will.

And although I haven't heard it yet, I also expect to hear the gun crowd chime in with the "if only them Frogs had been armed" arguments. I hate to admit it, they may have a point, even though I stand by my anti-gun bona fides. Although I'm sure there are many other reasons this stuff seems to happen in France instead of here, it actually could be that potential attackers realize that a country where nobody has guns is a better target than one where you just can't be sure who's going to shoot back. At the very least, that would take some of the wind out of ISIS's sails.

But while I personally wouldn't want to make too much of that, I imagine there are plenty of conservatives here who will, and there won't be much the rest of us can do about that.

And it is amazing to me that, while yesterday morning, many of us were still laughing about the Keystone-Kop antics of the Republican candidates, in that same afternoon, a small group of zealots with guns, driving around Paris and killing a few hundred people, could change the course of political history here in the United States by somehow improving, even slightly, the chances of one obvious idiot or another from becoming our president. How this all plays out will be a real test of what we are made of.