Weigel

Opening Act: 19 Executive Actions

Today, the White House reveals its gun control proposals. The gun lobby’s wasted a month on amazingly self-destructive PR moves; the House GOP has come out early, warning about excutive orders, but remaining murky about what bills it could support.

David Frum climbs aboard the “Republicans are gonna have to cave on the debt limit” train, which is occasionally conducted by my colleague Matthew Yglesias.

Alex Seitz-Wald has been filing some incredible stories about the Sandy Hook “truther” movement. We can’t say how big it is, but we shouldn’t be surprised anymore when something useful for gun control advocates becomes, in the mind of opponents, a “false flag” conspiracy. The latest dispatch introduces us to Gene Rosen, who comforted some children who escaped from the school and is now harassed by truthers.

“There must be some way to morally shame these people, because there were 20 dead children lying an eighth of a mile from my window all night long,” he said, choking back tears. “And I sat there with my wife, because they couldn’t take the bodies out that night so the medical examiner could come. And I thought of an expression, that this ‘adds insult to injury,’ but that’s a stupid expression, because this is not an injury, this is an abomination.”

Christian Heinze unleashes his inner Andy Kaczynski and reminds us that GOP moderation guru Jon Huntsman had tried to remake himself as a conservative.

And Philip Roth rates his own books.