Quote of the Day

"“‘Bleeds when shot' ... been there already, no thanks assholes."

-- Colin Goddard

I'm reluctant to even bother mentioning this item because really it's what the people behind it want. They team who put together the product I'm about to bring up flawlessly blends the cynical marketing ethos which dictates that negative publicity is actually good publicity with the cackling playground bully defiance we've come to expect from the modern political right. And the result is, predictably, fucking unconscionable.

You probably already know about Zombie Industries, the company that made some headlines and drew a lot of impotent indignation a few months back when it began selling zombie mannequin targets for gun enthusiasts that actually "bleed" when you shoot them. The targets came in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and likenesses, including one specifically made to look like President Obama and one called "The Ex" that was basically a woman in a bra with a bellybutton ring (tellingly, the mannequin didn't look at all like a "zombie" beyond a little red paint splashed across it). While the NRA, in what I guess passes for a rare show of decency, asked that Zombie Industries remove the bleeding Obama target from the company's booth at its latest convention, it's not like it stopped selling the thing. It actually did discontinue production on "The Ex," what I guess also passes for a show of decency, but by that time the news had been made and the company had reaped the benefit of everyone suddenly knowing about its existence.

Now, Zombie Industries has a new target it's marketing. It's called "The Gun Control Lobbyist," what it bills as "The Most Dangerous Zombie in the USA Today." As usual, it bleeds when you shoot it, allowing tough-guy gun fetishists the purest form of wish-fulfillment anyone could legally grant them in a country that has yet to turn the Lower Ninth Ward into a game preserve. The ads for "The Gun Control Lobbyist" feature, of course, an image of the actual target in the foreground -- but in the background is a darkened photograph of actual gun control activists speaking in Washington. Among them is Colin Goddard, who works at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. What brought Colin Goddard to the Brady Campaign and made him an outspoken critic of America's unyielding lust for firepower and the damage it's caused to so many lives? What made him a vocal proponent of gun safety?

Colin Goddard was a student at Virginia Tech back in 2007. He was shot four times during the rampage there that left 32 people dead.

See, Goddard knows what it's like to be shot by a guy with a gun. Someone who was ostensibly a good guy with a gun -- in that he acquired his arsenal entirely according to the letter of the law -- right up until he became a bad guy with a gun. With more than one gun, in fact.

Goddard has of course asked that Zombie Industries remove his picture from their ad -- hence his brilliant quote above -- but why would they possible do something like that? And even if they do decide to comply with his request, again, the damage is already done. By calling them out for being the sociopaths they are, Goddard just brought them the attention they were aiming for in the first place. The company gets asshole cred from the right for pissing-off those pussy liberals and now everyone who may not have known about the "Gun Control Lobbyist" target certainly does. It's a win-win for them.

But it still leaves us with the problem of what can be done about a group of people who positively revel in seeing their enemies helplessly plead for a measure of humanity from them; who love knowing that they get under liberals' skin as a kind of sport and who see this as its own reward; who have no shame, decency, or remorse and who therefore can't be reasoned with or intimidated. A group of people who can look at a guy who was shot four times and basically make fun of him.

At this point I think that decent people are left with only one option, that there's only one thing that will make gun worshipers and their NRA overlords understand what they're advocating for and whom they're standing against.

Shoot them.

No, really.

Do you honestly think Wayne LaPierre, or Ted Nugent, or the CEO of Zombie Industries, would really continue to laugh in the faces of victims of gun violence if somebody put him down on the ground, pissing his pants, and pumped four rounds into him?

Everyone knows that there's only one way to truly deal with a bully: you fight back. Beat the living shit out of him once -- send him crying and bleeding to the hospital -- and he will never touch you again.

Well, consider my suggestion the same thing, writ large.

It's an idea who's time has come, America.

Time to go big or go home.

Time to speak to them in the only language they understand.




It goes without saying that thinking about the horrors Colin Goddard went through and somehow survived immediately brings me back to this piece from April of 2007. The story of Max Turner. What still may be the best thing that's ever been posted at this site.

"And All That Could Have Been" (Originally Published, 4.19.07)

There were maybe five of us, gathered around a television, watching a woman die.

I had only been in television news for a few months and hadn't yet developed the rough and thickened callus on my soul; that unavoidable consequence of a life lived knee-deep in day-to-day tragedy; the natural armor required to sustain such an existence. I was still learning to crawl among those who had long since evolved into wearied and indifferent creatures for whom another dead body was another dead body was another dead body. They already knew something which I would eventually have to learn -- that sometimes, you have to suppress your gag reflex, bury your humanity and willingly allow the more mechanized aspects of your personality to roll over your emotions like a tank. You needed to do this to get the job done -- and to keep yourself from going insane.

I didn't yet have the luxury of such peaceful detachment though, and so as I stood there -- watching the live feed from Jackson Memorial Hospital in Downtown Miami -- I found that I could barely keep at bay the myriad unnerving thoughts clawing at the inside of my skull.

The pictures we were watching, live and in brutally vivid color, showed the Miami-Dade Fire-Rescue chopper setting down on the hospital's rooftop helipad and the subsequent whirlwind of controlled chaos as the young woman on board was quickly transferred onto a stretcher and whisked inside. In plain view the entire time -- the desperate and seemingly hopeless fight to save her life. I simply stared as one of the doctors jumped onto the stretcher and straddled the woman's naked upper-body, pumping away at her failing heart, his palms flat against her skin. I closed my eyes for an instant to avoid the sight of the bag breathing air into her faltering lungs. I opened them just before the stretcher slammed through the double-doors leading into the hospital -- just in time to catch a glimpse of the massive head wound she'd received less than a half-hour earlier, when someone had fired a 9mm round through her driver's-side window while trying to carjack her in broad daylight, in the middle of tony Coral Gables.

And while those around me cracked jokes, or discussed lunch, or waited to rush the tape of what we were watching into editing -- I silently demanded answers of myself. I wanted to know what gave me the right to watch this woman's final moments of life. I wanted to know who I thought I was that I should be privy to such tragic vulnerability -- to witness the dying breath of a complete stranger. I was a twenty-one-year-old who knew nothing of this person -- nothing of her life, her loves, her hopes and dreams -- yet through nothing more noble than the technology which made such macabre voyeurism possible, I was allowed to be there for her death.

I remember finally turning my head. "I'm so sorry," was all I could whisper as I cast my eyes downward in shame and walked quickly away.

Since that moment, my skin has grown considerably thicker and more bristly. What used to be soft has calcified under the fifteen-year steady drip of daily disaster; what was once overly sincere naivete has given way to the kind of gallows humor that can turn even the most heartbreaking tragedy into a ghastly joke -- one which always ends with a smirk and the cynical admission that only hell can await such crass insensitivity.

This is the necessary defense mechanism -- and this is what was instinctively exploited in the hours that followed the worst shooting rampage in American history.

As the details of what had unfolded on the Virginia Tech campus poured in, I found myself at first engaging in verbal gymnastics.

T.S. Eliot once said something about April being the cruelest month; that was in a poem known fittingly as "The Burial of the Dead," which was the first part of "The Waste Land;" The Who once sang about a "Teenage Wasteland," which is what Virginia Tech has now become.

Then, as the hours and hours passed and the body count skyrocketed -- the sheer enormity of the violence finally becoming clear -- I moved on to logical analysis, followed by a kind of rational righteous indignation. I shook my head at what I knew would surely be the knee-jerk reaction to come: the hand-wringing and political posturing over what might have been done to prevent what was, in reality, a devastating human anomaly -- one that may have been anticipated, but likely couldn't have been stopped by anything short of locking up a troubled and dangerous kid who, until Monday morning, hadn't technically broken the law. I swallowed outrage at the vile opportunism of Scientologists, who were quick to claim that psychiatry was behind the gunman's brutal impulses, and Jack Thompson, who wasn't even aware of the killer's identity and yet was already pointing the finger of blame at the time-honored boogeymen of video games and pop culture. I clenched my fists, closed my eyes and exhaled my fury at one television news anchor agreeing with a local pastor's unforgivably trite nostrum that God sometimes works in mysterious ways. I worried about the possibility that a substantial portion of creative, dark, shy or otherwise unusual kids might now find themselves eyed with suspicion and apprehension -- simply because of one twisted bastard with delusions of martyrdom and the weaponry to bring his furious fantasies to life. I wondered if someone might demand to know why it's as easy to buy a Glock 19 in this country as it is to buy a Happy Meal -- and finally do something about it.

By yesterday morning, I had shut out the ridiculous calls by some for sirens on all American college campuses, and moved on to the curious spectacle of the collegiate mourning process and the round-the-clock coverage of it. I stared quizzically at my monitor as students gathered to loudly proclaim their "Hokie Spirit" -- admitting quietly to myself that truer words were never spoken. I wondered, were I a male Virginia Tech student, if I would pull an Otter-esque line about not wanting to be alone during such a traumatic time in an effort to get CNN's Brianna Keilar to come back to my dorm room. I even sang Team America's I'm So Ronery to myself everytime the image of the gunman -- finally identified as South Korean-born Cho Seung-Hui -- flashed across the screen.

Mostly though, I concerned myself with the question of why every news correspondent in the country had descended on the tiny town of Blacksburg, Virginia -- like locusts desperate to devour the bumper crop of suffering until there was simply nothing left. All the more disconcerting, the millions of television viewers eager to have that pain regurgitated back into their own hungry mouths.

There was, and still is, something grotesquely orgiastic about the whole thing.

Over the past twenty-four hours, the names and faces of the victims have surfaced, a few at a time. As has become ritual, the various news organizations are parrotting every possible detail they can gather as to who these young people were in an admittedly genuine effort to both humanize and memorialize them. The ages of the victims always come first -- simply because there's no other single characteristic about each person that can better convey the overwhelming nature of what was lost in this senseless act. The ages are usually followed by majors, extracurricular activities, then one or two prosaic platitudes about their smiles or infectious personalities or optimistic outlook on life -- this final trait taking on a sad irony given the situation which led to the need for disclosure of such information in the first place. Unfortunately however, no matter how noble the intentions or how powerful the tribute, it's impossible not to feel that so much is missing.

The reason is because each person's unique life is still being filtered through an intermediary -- told second-hand via the one relaying it.

For the first time though, there's another way to learn about the victims of this kind of atrocity -- a way which excises the middle-man, and lets them tell their own life stories in their own words.

As incomprehensible as it would have seemed in life, MySpace has provided each victim his or her own epitaph in death.

Even a cursory scan of their pages reveals the true heartbreaking depths of this loss.

I'm not sure what led me to search MySpace for profiles of some of the dead; I'd like to believe that it was an honest desire to find out who these kids really were -- what they loved and hated, what they wanted for themselves and their futures before it was all ripped away from them by someone who had a plan for their lives they weren't even aware of, nor could they stop.

For some reason, the first name I searched was the victim whom the least was known about at the time.

Her name was Maxine Turner.

She was a twenty-two-year-old chemical engineering student.

Her MySpace address contains the words "Super Sneaky Ninja," which -- despite not knowing the meaning behind it -- brought a sad smile to my face when I first saw it.

Maxine, as expected, went by the nickname Max.

Her site, although rather unremarkable, lists her as single, from Vienna, Virginia, 5'1" and slim -- no doubt the result of Tae Kwon Do classes, which she took regularly. She didn't smoke, but she did drink.

She hoped to have children someday.

The song posted on her profile, which plays automatically, is, strangely, one of my favorites from my own youth -- Men At Work's Overkill, sung by the band's lead singer Colin Hay. I listened to it as I moved beyond the basic information into the tiny singularities of Max's life. There's a blue box which sits directly under the "About Me" headline; it reads "Your Superhero Profile." Apparently, her superhero name was "The Hour Dog"; her special power was biotechnology; her only weakness was -- ironically, devastatingly -- blood; her mode of transportation was a pogo stick.

She wanted to meet Shakespeare, Christian Bale and John Cusack.

Her final blog entry is entitled "For the Ladies," and has her mood listed as "Mischievous." It's an extended and oddly sweet dissertation on the right and wrong way to measure yourself to ensure that a bra is the correct size for your body.

Of all the little details on her main MySpace page though, none proves so haunting as the timeline of comments -- concerned friends at first begging over and over again for a simple phone call, then on Tuesday morning, those same friends' comments abruptly changing to messages of sorrow and loss.

But those are just words.

It's what's inside Max Turner's "pics" page, that leaves you utterly heartbroken.


One photo shows her seated on a stone wall, facing away from the camera -- staring out over a vast valley covered in deep green.


Another shows her sitting on an empty beach, under a wide sky filled with high, white clouds. The caption simply reads "Sand Castle!"


There's a slightly blurry image of a little gray nose and large black eyes, just inches from the lense of the camera that captured it. The caption: "Say hi to Jujubee, my pretty hamster."

In one she's holding a snake, in another she's practicing Tae Kwon Do.

Beneath each picture are dozens and dozens of comments from friends and strangers alike, commemorating her life and expressing regret for her untimely death.

I never met Max Turner, and I never will; I have no doubt that this is my own loss to mourn. I know only as much about her as she herself was willing to disclose, and yet what I've seen leads me to believe that the world is an infinitely lesser place without her in it. The same can surely be said for Ross Almeddine, and Reema Samaha, and Emily Hilscher, and Ryan Clark, and Daniel Perez Cueva, and Mary Read and the more than two dozen other victims of this incomprehensible tragedy.

I'll go to my own grave grappling with the question of how someone, anyone, can be so consumed by rage that he can look at the face of Max Turner and decide that she has to die.

Like fifteen years ago, I have nothing to offer except an apology -- this time not out of shame, but out of genuine sorrow and an overwhelming sense of helplessness.

I'm sorry that humanity failed you, Max.

I'm so sorry.

Tweet of the Day

Perfect. Just perfect. I've gotta give Stockman credit: He manages to push two GOP articles of faith in one simple sentence and create an image of a kind of conservative utopia, where abortion is impossible and even the unborn are armed.

Stockman, by the way, is a special kind of raging idiot, even among Texas conservatives, who as you know have raised raging idiocy to a transcendent art form. He's the one who took Ted Nugent as his date to the State of the Union address earlier this year; he's vowed on more than one occasion to try to impeach Barack Obama; and he recently invited any gun owner who feels "persecuted" by his state to move to Texas, an idea that I have to admit I'm all for. By all means let's concentrate them in the one place they're all already pretty much concentrated in, then maybe build the 50-foot-high electrical border fence they've all been clamoring for and cut the whole fucking place loose as its own post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Seriously, Texas is the stupidest goddamn place on Earth.

Adding: Oh, hey, look. No sooner had I posted the above than I came across this tweet from Barry Smitherman, whom Rick Perry appointed as the top Texas oil and gas regulator. Basically, Smitherman is all outraged over Republican lawmakers who either support sensible gun control or who apparently aren't fighting hard enough to defend unimpeded gun access -- so of course he circulates a picture that accuses them of being guilty of "TREASON" and hangs a noose next to their names. Not only are these people stupid and crazy, they're also really fucking dangerous.

Quote of the Day

"But is the gun OK?"

-- Gawker commenter "MyNameIsJay" responding to the story of this morning's shooting rampage in Orange County, California in which a man shot five people, killing three of them, before finally killing himself.

Quote of the Day

"If you have guns, if you own guns mostly we would prefer you have them in a lock box. At least have them out of the reach of children."

-- Greenville, South Carolina Police Media Relations Officer Jonathan Bragg, following the death of a three-year-old boy who accidentally shot himself in the head while playing with a real pink handgun that he thought was a toy (for obvious reasons)

Needless to say, the kid is dead.

There's an old Life in Hell strip, written by Matt Groening, that features a sign in a restaurant bathroom that reads, "Employees are encouraged by law to wash hands." I loved that surreal little touch the first time I read the comic -- and the above comment brings it right back to mind.

Really? The police would "mostly prefer it" if parents kept deadly weapons in lock boxes? Or "at least" out of reach of children?

First of all, if you buy a pink handgun you're an idiot who probably shouldn't have a gun at all since I seriously doubt you respect and fully appreciate the power of it. It's not a toy, whether you're a child or an adult. As for police preferring that guns in households with small children be locked safely away, sorry but that's not good enough. Put the fucking thing in a lock box or not only will you lose your child if he or she happens to find your weapon and play around with it -- you'll lose your freedom.

Stay Classy, Assholes

Today's column for the Daily Banter is a response to what happened last night in Hartford, Connecticut, when a grieving father tried to speak.

Here's an excerpt:

"If you haven't yet seen the video clip of gun enthusiasts heckling Neil Heslin, the father of 6-year-old Sandy Hook shooting victim Jesse Lewis, last night in Hartford, Connecticut, get ready to want to put your fist through a wall. It's so sickening, so profoundly disrespectful that I can't imagine anyone with a soul defending it. There honestly isn't language strong enough to describe the kind of mentality it must take to try to overpower the voice of a man who's holding a picture of his dead child in his hands while he's speaking publicly, fragilely about his personal pain. And to do it simply because you're that obsessed with being able to own as many guns of as many shapes and sizes as your heart desires without ever having to meet an ounce of resistance from anyone is fucking insane. Completely fucking insane."

Read the Rest Here

Armed Response

You know, it used to be that when I wrote something that got published at the Huffington Post, the blowback I received came from HuffPo's regular peanut gallery of humorless, perpetually aggrieved professional liberals. These days, though, especially when you dare to get near a landmine in the culture war, the angry comments tend to come more from the right. I'm not sure whether there's always been a bunch of holdovers from the site's infancy -- when Breitbart was associated with it -- living underground at Huffington, waiting for the right time to stage some kind of coup, or it has something to do with HuffPo's merger with the official internet service provider of the flyovers, AOL, but there seem to be more and more voices from the far-right hijacking any and every conversation over there.

Case in point: the somewhat surprising amount of anti-gun control vitriol and general resistance in response to my piece on the role that Joe Arpaio's "posse" is playing in the guarding of schools in Maricopa County, Arizona. A good portion of the comments -- I'd say most of them, actually -- took me to task for daring to suggest that cracking down on guns and gun possession is a better idea than putting an armed retiree in a car in front of most Phoenix-area schools to defend against the problem of gun violence rather than actually trying to stop the problem of gun violence.

Behold, my public:

"Stop at your local shooting range and see who is there. You'd be hard-pressed to find a police officer.

Most of the regulars are just ordinary civilians. There are many talented people there. Yes, I want them around when the SHTF.

I don't expect libs to know these things."

-- bloodytongue

For those of you who don't speak crazy, let me help you out: SHTF, which of course stands for "Shit Hits the Fan," is a common refrain among the conspiracist "prepper" crowd. It's lingo that not only allows one nutjob who believes that some kind of societal collapse is imminent to easily know that he's talking to another, it justifies his desperate need to build a panic room in his basement, stock up on canned goods and, of course, assault rifles, and otherwise prepare himself for the arrival of the end of days. The above commenter's use of that acronym tells you immediately where he's coming from -- and it's basically a homemade bunker.

"The author is surely against anything that remotely shows signs of protecting the 2nd Amendment by utilizing trained volunteers, who have been praised by the DEA, the FBI, the DPS, ICE and Border Patrol for their conduct, behavior. knowledge and dedication. Sheriff Joe does what he feels best to protect the citizens of Maricopa County - after all, that is his job."

-- jwb544

Arpaio also unlawfully harasses Latinos, disregards the Constitution when he feels like it and has failed to investigate more than 400 sex crimes cases, most involving molested children, because he was busy taking on the Mexican menace and self-servingly grandstanding. That also part of his job?

"Assault rifles aren't used in crimes or mass shootings.

Yes we are going to 'fix' the problem of crazy people killing other people by taking away one thing they can use. Then the crazy person will be snapped back into sanity and say, 'I can't use a rifle to kill anyone, so I guess that means killing is bad and I shouldn't kill.' Magically all homicidal and suicidal thoughts stop at the signing of the AWB.

I don't think a AR-15 would make someone 'heavily armed.' Also they aren't 'military grade'"

-- Spot the Mighty

If you don't think wielding an AR-15 makes you heavily armed, it terrifies me to imagine what you think does.

"This article shows the utter absurdity of the gun control extremist position

According to the author, a gun makes an untrained kid invincible, but it's useless in the hands of a good citizen, no matter how well trained they are.

His position is a complete contradiction and makes no sense at all.

Also, mass shooters almost never seek out gunfights. That's why they virtually always carry out their massacres at gun free zones. They want helpless victims, not people who can shoot back.

If they wanted shootouts, they would go to a police station, gun shop, or target shooting range, where the people at those locations would be happy to oblige them.

Instead they pick gun free zones full of people who are disarmed and defenseless. That is not coincidental."

-- Ohio9

"Yet, mass murderers always seem to target areas where the ability to defend your life is denied. Your premise suggest we are way past due for a sociopath to show up and start shooting at a gun show or public shooting range."

-- William Ashbless

The above two comments were a pretty standard response -- that school shooters and others willing to incite an active shooter situation in a public place drop their weapons or take their own life at the first sign of armed resistance. There's a difference between being surrounded by a 30-man ESU or SWAT team and having the drop on one old guy sitting in a car, armed or not. The fact is, as I said in the piece, it would take all of two days of casing the area or simply noticing your surroundings to figure out how to easily get rid of that kind of threat. The shooter has the element of surprise and that counts for quite a bit. There very likely wouldn't even be a gunfight. The shooter doesn't need to be invincible -- he only needs to pay attention.

"Many private citizens ARE more skilled with a gun than the average cop, that is a fact."

-- EZSundayAM

"Since the feds can't enforce the existing laws on the books, then Sheriff Joe wil along with volunteers and vigilantes who cost ZERO tax payer dollars."

-- InspectorClouseau

Yes, and, I'd bet, zero taxpayer accountability.

"Well the Presidents response was to put together a crack team of gun banners to have a 'conversation' and put together a plan to ban some guns... All the while the guns were still out there, the crazies were still out there, and the kids were still in so called 'gun free zones.'"

-- Brian Bender

Ah, yes, those pussy, gun-hating liberals and all their talking. I swear, I'm seriously considering shooting the next asshole who rails against how our kids are left as defenseless lambs by any attempt to stop guns from getting near their schools. I get the impression that eventually these psychopaths are going to lobby for the right to arm the kids themselves (if they haven't already).

"I think you are missing the point, the guard aren't there to act as a deterrent, they are they to act as a barrier. If some kid with a gun rolls onto campus carrying a shotgun in plain view or tries to shoot through a door to get in, the guys with guns are there to shoot back. No remorse, no stopping to ask questions. if you walk onto campus with a rifle in plain view, you get a copper jacketed ticket to the afterlife."

-- Trevor Lawrence

A copper-jacketed ticket to the afterlife. Settle down there, Clint. Sure, this is a throwaway line but it inadvertently provides all kinds of insight into the way some of these guys regard guns and the use of them -- the 'roided out, hyper-masculine fantasy they have of what it must be like to kill somebody the same way they get to in Black Ops 2.

It's this way of thinking, this kind of gun idolatry, that's the problem. And a person who talks this kind of shit, who looks at the act of killing another human being as some kind of expression of macho bad-assery, is the last person you want carrying a gun.

Quote of the Day

"I will look closely at my own understanding of the constitution, my own study, and will put that in the context of what ... others say."

-- South Carolina Sheriff Al Cannon on his potential refusal to enforce gun control laws he considers unconstitutional, during an interview on CNN this morning

Rightly, Carol Costello smacked Cannon down, reminding him of the obvious: It's not his place to determine whether a law is unconstitutional or not, only to enforce the laws as they're written. This is what we're dealing with -- gun lustful yahoos who'll do anything to thwart even common sense gun safety legislation. If they can, at the same time, take a shot at what they consider overreach by our increasingly tyrannical government, even better.

As for Sheriff Al here, it's worth repeating: It's not your fucking job to apply your "own understanding of the Constitution" in deciding whether or not something is legal. Nobody gives a crap what you think, Al. Your job is to enforce the law. Period. So shut the hell up and do that.

Safety Worst

Today's column for the Daily Banter is all about living cartoon character Joe Arpaio, whose "posse" is now officially standing guard over Maricopa County, Arizona's schools.

Here's the opening shot:

"I have this great image in my head of Joe Arpaio with a patch over one eye and wearing a long black leather coat, walking into a tiny dishwasher repair shop in a strip mall somewhere in unincorporated Phoenix. He approaches the aging owner of the place, seeming to appear from out of the shadows, and says, 'You’re pretty good with your hands, so good in fact that you’ve become part of a bigger universe — you just don’t know it yet. I’m here to talk to you about a very special team we’re putting together.' He then repeats this same basic thing all across town at various used car dealerships, bowling alleys, Home Depots and blood pressure testing machines at Rite Aid pharmacy. And this is how he puts together his own personal Octogenarian Avengers Initiative."

Read the Rest Here

Point Blank

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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This is perfect.

Alex Jones and the Prophecy of Doom

There are a few people who inexplicably have a role in our national discourse, regardless of how far to the fringe they are and should be relegated, who kind of leave me without much to say. One of them is, of course, Alex Jones. Yeah, there are people who actually take him seriously -- but who gives a shit? He's a fucking conspiracist lunatic and doesn't deserve to be granted even the tiniest amount of credence.

Proof of that, at least as far as my own view of him is concerned, is the fact that I think I've mentioned him around here maybe once or twice in almost seven years. Still, last night's hysterical meltdown by him on Piers Morgan's show -- in which he almost literally foamed at the mouth over the 1776-style revolution that he promises will be the result of any attempt at sensible gun control -- really deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. Believe it or not, there actually are people who listen to this idiot, although not enough to make him as dangerous to the establishment as he thinks he is.

The problem, though, is that his furious, fetishistic passion for guns gives you a pretty good idea what common sense gun control advocates are up against. Remember, this is a guy who believes that guns are needed to defend against the black U.N. helicopters that are going to fly into Anytown, USA and take all of us under the control of the New World Order. He's fucking insane. His beliefs aren't in any way based in reality. And he should be completely ignored -- no matter how loud he is.

Anyway, watch Jones's warm bukkake of crazy for yourself. It really is something to behold.



Incidentally, the above video comes courtesy of someone with the screen-name "Save Our Sovereignty" whose profile pic is a Ron Paul logo. Need I say more?

Quote of the Day

"I spent a career carrying typically either a M16, and later a M4 carbine -- and a M4 carbine fires a .223 caliber round, which is 5.56 millimeters, at about 3,000 feet per second. When it hits a human body, the effects are devastating. It's designed to do that. That's what our soldiers ought to carry. I personally don't think there's any need for that kind of weaponry on the streets and particularly around the schools in America. I believe that we've got to take a serious look -- I understand everybody's desire to have whatever they want -- but we have to protect our children and our police and we have to protect our population. And I think we have to take a very mature look at that."

-- Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal on MSNBC's Morning Joe today

Posted without comment -- because one isn't needed.

Low Recoil

Today's column for the Daily Banter deals with yesterday's mall shooting in Portland, Oregon -- and how chances are nothing will change in the wake of it.

Here's the opening shot:

"So here we are again.

By now you probably know the drill so well you can follow the steps in your sleep: guy goes into a public place and shoots it up, killing and injuring innocent people; the police descend and the local news stations and networks begin splashing horrifying images of the armed response and frightened bystanders all over your TV; details begin to trickle out, as well as stories of terror and heroism from average people who witnessed the shooting and got out alive; the gunman is either caught, killed or takes his own life; the futile debate over gun control begins and the right immediately begins decrying the use of a tragedy to supposedly score political points; the NRA or one of its supporters in the conservative press or Congress makes the staggeringly offensive and stupid claim that if everyone in our country were carrying a concealed weapon, somebody else would’ve been able to open fire in a crowded public place and take the initial gunman — the one not using his arsenal in a responsible manner — down with a couple of well-placed shots to the head, Black Ops 2-style.

We’re so used to this crap by now that this afternoon there’s not really a whole lot of screaming, front-page coverage of the latest outbreak of indiscriminate violence that captured the attention of the country for a few minutes last night. Yes, there are updates, but for the national press life has just about gone back to normal."

Read the Rest Here

Quote of the Day

"You know what really gets me, as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and then some senseless crazy act of terror like this takes place. People say ... where was God in all of this? We've threatened high school graduation participations, if they use God's name, they're going to be jailed ... I mean that kind of stuff. Where was God? What have we done with God? We don't want him around. I kind of like his protective hand being present."

-- Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, responding to last night's shooting in Aurora, CO

I swear I didn't want to even bring politics into it this early, but the way things are these days -- with assholes like Gohmert immediately putting the blame for senseless, inexcusable violence on our lack of faith in Jesus -- there's just no way around it. I guess this was something I forgot to mention in my previous post on this subject, because this kind of blame-the-victim thing goes way beyond simple politicization. It borders on sociopathy.

Speaking of blaming the victim, Gohmert goes on to make an argument you just knew would be coming in short order:

"It does make me wonder, with all those people in the theater, was there nobody that was carrying a gun that could have stopped this guy more quickly?"

Because if Louie Gohmert had been there with his trusty pistol at his side, he would've dropped that killer in his tracks, I'll tell you what. Bullshit. Gohmert's another pretend tough guy from Texas who, armed or not, would've pissed his pants and climbed over small children to get out of that theater once the shooting started. He's a pussy -- and nothing more.

(Sadly Predictable) Quote of the Day

"It’s just a good thing I can’t pack a gun on the Senate floor."

-- Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma

What the hell is it with these idiots and their tough-guy violence fantasies? Jesus Christ. Rick Perry intimates that the chairman of the Federal Reserve would meet some good, old-fashioned Texas-style justice if he dares to commit the "treasonous" act of printing more money and a couple of days later, as if on cue, Tom Coburn -- a pampered C Street pussy who could probably be Straw Dogged into diaper-wetting submission by a troop of Girl Scouts -- steps up to imply violence against his colleagues. It goes without saying that Coburn wasn't the least bit serious, but that's not the point: He's a fucking United States Senator, not an 11-year-old on a playground.

The most offensive thing about it is that every time one of these assholes says something like this, it forces the Democrats to respond with humorless indignation, which only increases the asshole in question's stock with his or her dumb-ass, gun-crazy constituency.

Which is why there's nothing I'd like to see more than Gabby Giffords walk over to the Senate chamber and punch Coburn in the fucking mouth.

Quote(s) of the Week (Early Contender)

"The WAR wWIL start on the stepes of the Oklahoma State Capitol. I will cast the first stone. In the meantime, I await the police."

"START THE KILLING NOW! I am wiling to be the FIRST DEATH! I Await the police. They will kill me in my home."

"After I am killed on the Capitol Steps like REAL man, the rest of you will REMEMBER ME!!!"

"Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads and throw the(m) on the State Capitol steps."

-- Twitter posts from 52 year old Daniel Knight Hayden of Oklahoma, who was subsequently and wisely arrested for transmitting threats of politically motivated violence over the internet (the rants were Twittered in advance of the April 15th, Fox News-led "Tea Party" protest at Oklahoma's capitol building)

Related: DXM: Revolutionary Goad/4.7.09

Half-Cocked and Loaded

You know something?

I can handle the simpleminded tools who don't even have the remedial education enough to understand that it's ideologically impossible to be a liberal and a fascist at the same time.

I can deal with misguided hicks who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and who see nothing irrational in blaming an administration that's been in office for three months for the complete meltdown of the U.S. economy, rather than blaming the people who ruled with almost absolute authority for eight years.

I can take the bald-faced hypocrisy of those who cheered on the creation of a warrantless surveillance state, but who now complain that it might suddenly be used to monitor the dangerous extremists on the right, or those who accused anyone who spoke out against George Bush of treason but who now make veiled and even direct threats against the new opposition president while hiding behind the First Amendment.

I can even stomach the ignorant fuckers who don't get that the Boston Tea Party was a protest against a corporate tax cut at the expense of the middle class, and that they're essentially railing in opposition to their own interests.

I can handle all that nonsense -- but I swear, I'll take a baseball bat to anyone so devoid of common sense, so offensively out of touch with reality, so consumed by bumper sticker dogma, that he or she defends the fact that a gun show in Virginia sold 10 weapons in one hour to the brother of one of the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting -- no ID required, no questions asked. Or that New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg is demanding that something be done about it.

ABC News: Bloomberg Pushes Virginia to Close Gun Show Loophole/4.13.09

Related: DXM: Blowback/6.21.07

Revolutionary Goad: Fear Factor

"Is there any doubt that Fox News is playing an increasingly erratic and dangerous game by embracing the type of paranoid insurrection rhetoric that people like Poplawski are now acting on? By stoking dark fears about the ominous ruins that await an Obama America, by ratcheting up irresponsible back-to-the-wall scenarios, Fox News has waded into a territory that no other news organization has ever dared to exploit."

-- Eric Boehlert

Media Matters: "The Rise of the Fox News Media Militia" by Eric Boehlert/4.7.09

Evasive Action

Well, that didn't take long.

The Huffington Post: Glenn Beck: "Nutjob" in Pittsburgh Not My Fault, I'm Just a "Flight Attendant"/4.7.09

Revolutionary Goad

Exactly how far is too far?

Several times over the past month or so, I've dismissed Glenn Beck, the new clown prince of Fox News, as being not much more than a guy doing Kaufman-esque stand-up -- an opportunistic little turd who's playing his audience of paranoid conspiracists like a badly tuned piano in the name of making himself rich. At one point, I even admitted that Beck was basically good, clean fun -- or at least would be until some tinfoil-hatted psychopath who took his nonsense way too seriously decided to fire off a few rounds at President Obama.

But given what we're now seeing, the question has to be asked: Is it just a matter of time before something like that does in fact happen?

Over the weekend, a man in Pittsburgh gunned down three police officers who showed up to the home he shared with his mother on a domestic disturbance call. He strapped on a Kevlar vest and armed himself with an AK-47, waited for them to come through the door, then picked them off one by one. The details that have come out about the shooter since the attack are as infuriating as they are not-the-least-bit-surprising: 22-year-old Richard Poplawski is identified as a Marine Corps wash-out, a recently unemployed white supremacist who believes that the Jews control the media and that, most tellingly, the Obama Administration is planning to ban his beloved guns. In other words, he's exactly the kind of guy who, if you went on TV and told him that his worst paranoid hallucinations were coming true and that the new left-wing government was indeed poised to kick down his door and take his freedoms away, would believe every fucking word of it and act accordingly.

And if you don't think that that's exactly the message the Richard Poplawskis of this country are being inundated with from the far right these days, you're even more delusional than Poplawski himself.

Over the space of just the past couple of weeks, Glenn Beck has warned his loyal, terrified viewership of the coming socialist junta; lunatic congresswoman Michele Bachmann has claimed that the U.S. dollar is about to be replaced by foreign currency, American youths will soon be sent to "re-education camps," and patriotic citizens should be "armed and dangerous" and ready for revolution; disgraced CNBC loudmouth Jim Cramer has called the Democrats "Bolsheviks" and compared the U.S. House of Representatives to the Politburo; and Dick Morris, the no-lie smarmiest shitbag alive, spat this little pearl of wisdom into the Fox News echo chamber:

"Those crazies in Montana who say, ‘we’re going to kill ATF agents because the UN’s going to take over’ -- well, they’re beginning to have a case."

In case you missed that, let's rewind: Dick Morris says that militaristic nutjobs willing to kill government agents now have a fucking case.

Once again, exactly how far is too far?

While free speech has to be respected and the right to it protected, is there no line of rhetoric so incendiary, so dangerous, so shameless in its aim of instigating simply for the sake of ad revenue, that it can't provoke absolute outrage? If you know that there are an inordinate number of Richard Poplawskis listening to you and that they already buy thoroughly into half-baked persecution fantasies -- and then you purposely try to at best validate their fears or at worst scare the hell out of them even further -- don't you bear at least a small amount of responsibility for the outcome? Shouldn't there be accountability?

In a display of hypocrisy that's almost staggering, many on the right who once railed against the twin evils of violent video games and Marilyn Manson and decried their supposed relation to teen violence are now hiding behind the very argument they say bleeding-heart liberals used against them way back when: that you can't blame the messenger for the effect the message might have on one or two unstable individuals. To his credit, Bob Cesca has a good take on this specious comparison; he points out that the difference between, say, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold -- the Columbine killers -- and someone like Richard Poplawski is that Harris and Klebold, while certainly being budding gun fetishists, hadn't yet developed the intransigent political ideology that goes hand-in-hand with a maniacal worship of weapons in this country. Harris and Klebold, like Cho Seung Hui -- the Virginia Tech killer -- were basically impressionable kids using guns to lash out and make themselves feel powerful (the latter, a trait they indeed shared with Poplawski and one that should have precluded them from ever owning a goddamned gun in the first place). They loved guns, sure -- but they didn't yet have the distrust of a government they feared would one day come and take their precious weapons away. Poplawski was impressionable in another way in that he did think that his weapons made him part of a larger culture of True Believers, and any confirmation of an attack on the way of life espoused by he and those like him would be all it took to set him off. And it did. Poplawski likely always figured his guns could be used to level the socio-political and economic playing field, and in his twisted mind, that's exactly what happened.

But for those who would still claim that everyone is impressionable in his or her own way and that, at some level, both the creators of GTA4 and Glenn Beck need to acknowledge that their actions may have unintended consequences: You're right, to an extent. The bottom line is that while free speech and expression must be respected, there has to be a level of responsibility attached. It's reckless, dangerous and immoral to knowingly stoke the demons of a person's nature -- and what's worse, to pass off fantasy as fact and do it in the name of making a buck or a political point. It's intellectually dishonest to pretend that you're operating in a vacuum -- whether you're Marilyn Manson or Michele Bachmann -- and that nothing you say will have an impact on the crazies within your target audience.

So, I ask yet again: How far is too far?

I talked to my father a few days ago. He's an ex-cop and ex-Navy SEAL who now lives part-time in a little Florida town called Sebring -- right in the center of the state's hyper-Republican I-4 Corridor. He's had a concealed weapons permit for decades and is about the most qualified and responsible person I can imagine being allowed to carry a weapon. He mentioned to me that he had recently been to the local Wal-Mart looking for ammunition for his handgun -- the kind of thing that's typically in abundance at a Central Florida big box store. But what he found surprised him, and scared him a little.

The place was almost completely out of ammo. In fact, it turns out they can barely keep the stuff on the shelves these days.

Somebody out there is listening to the "warnings."

And I'm betting that what we've seen lately is just the beginning of the nightmare.

Tuesday is Recycling Day

"An Equal and Opposite Reaction" (Originally Published, 8.15.08 and Related to the Above Column)

Maybe I've been wrong all this time.

While a lot of the usual suspects on the left seemed to embrace victimhood at the hands of the Coulters, Limbaughs and Savages of the world, I always kind of dismissed the bellicose mouthpieces of the far-right as little more than Vaudevillian boobs. I looked at them as the media's equivalent of carnival barkers -- cut-rate provocateurs spouting amplified, affectedly shocking nonsense aimed at whipping their audience into a feeding frenzy while enticing new recruits into the tent by playing on their fears of liberal-agenda infestation. Sure, they were obnoxious as hell and probably deserved most of the blame for the complete erosion of civilized political discourse in this country, but in the end they were basically harmless; they'd simply stumbled upon a template for a brand of shtick sure to make them rich and it happened to involve, ironically, exploiting the lily-livered gullibility of Red State America better than anything their sworn enemies could've come up with. The best way to deal with their crap? Ignore it -- because anything else just emboldens the bullies and makes them not only increase the antagonism but laugh in your face for either not being able to "take a joke" or for failing to recognize just how powerless you are against them. Besides, I had always assumed that although plenty of people found these pompous loudmouths entertaining and bought wholly into the sentiment behind the saber-rattling, no one took them that seriously -- did they?

Somewhere along the line, I guess I forgot just who we were talking about here -- just what kind of people would listen intently to someone like Rush Limbaugh day after day and what they might be capable of. This is admittedly a huge oversight on the part of someone who considers himself an avowed misanthrope; I'll try not to make the same mistake again.

The question, though, is this: Would some on the American far-right -- who've had it psychically drilled into them that liberals are to blame for all their ills -- be capable of murder?

What started as a mere whisper has turned into an unrelenting drone throughout the blogosphere after the shooting death of Bill Gwatney, the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party. Gwatney was gunned down in his office at the Arkansas Democrats' HQ in Little Rock Wednesday by a man who had just been fired from his job at Target. Police say that after shooting Gwatney, 50-year-old Tim Dale Johnson led them on a high-speed chase for 30 miles; it ended with cops shooting and killing him. Although investigators are still trying to officially connect Bill Gwatney to the man who walked into a busy office and seemed to kill him in cold blood for no apparent reason, some are suggesting that the reason, in fact, is as obvious as it is disturbing -- that Johnson, a troubled loner, blamed liberal-leaning governmental politics for the loss of his job and exacted his revenge on the biggest target among Arkansas Democrats. They point to an arsenal of weapons found in Johnson's home after the shooting -- inarguably standard issue for right-wing psychopaths -- and, more disconcertingly, the fact that Wednesday's attack comes so soon after a deadly shooting inside a Tennessee church in which a gunman claimed to be out to kill the liberals who were supposedly controlling the country and preventing him from getting a job.

Is it irresponsible to question whether the two crimes are related? No. It's sort of a no-brainer to make the connection, as the shootings do seem similar and, like the police, most intellectually curious members of the public don't like coincidences. But are the crimes related? That remains to be seen; for now, absolutely not.

Which isn't stopping a vocal segment of the left from already jumping to the conclusion that these attacks on individuals whose politics take a liberal slant represent the inevitable next phase of a conservative "eliminationist" fantasy.

It's an agenda which has, admittedly, been proclaimed and perpetuated -- whether in jest or not -- by people like Limbaugh, Coulter and Savage for some time. These three and others like them have honed their talk of zero-tolerance for the people across the aisle to a knife's edge. For years, they've blanketed the airwaves, bookshelves and internet with ultra-nationalist agitprop which asserts that those who don't think like them are not simply to be argued with and voted down, they must be utterly crushed underfoot by any means necessary -- even if it involves, as Coulter once said, taking a baseball bat to them -- because they are nothing less than the enemy of the United States of America. In the words, if not actually the minds, of these seemingly fascist demagogues, liberals are as dangerous and absolute a threat to our way of life as the terrorists they supposedly coddle.

And there's no doubt that whatever their actual intentions may be -- no matter how much of it is just theater -- people are listening to the rhetoric and absorbing it. But are a few of those people now acting on it, and do the ones allegedly inciting the indignation through their bluster and bombast bear any responsibility for what it may be metastasizing into?

For almost a century, the litmus test for the lengths to which so-called free speech can legally be taken has come from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously ruled that "falsely shouting fire in a theater" was beyond protection; it's almost always been illegal to use a public forum to incite panic, violence or imminent lawless action. By that standard, there's just no way that any pundit at any time has crossed the line and broken the law. But legal doesn't always mean ethical, particularly not when you're refusing to take into consideration the fact that a substantial portion of your audience is made up of edgy, easily malleable "oppressed" white guys -- many of whom are now unemployed and looking for someone to blame for it. Although it's never a good idea to allow the potential misbehavior of the lowest common denominator to curb the right to free speech, it's equally inadvisable, not to mention irresponsible, to act as though you're operating in a vacuum -- as if what you say can't possibly have a negative impact, despite its incendiary nature. This was what made it such a pathetically insincere cop-out years ago when some lunatic from the Army of God would gun down an abortion doctor, leading Operation Rescue's Randall Terry to immediately get in front of a camera to offer an anemic and thoroughly horseshit disclaimer that he didn't advocate violence against abortion doctors. Terry set the wheels in motion and let nature take its course; today, the same thing could very easily be happening on an infinitely larger scale.

Once again, whether they mean it to or not, the invective of clowns like Limbaugh does have an impact. Listen long enough to right-wing propaganda and your eyes eventually glaze over, your brain shuts down and you begin to subscribe completely to the alternate reality that it's constructed out of thin air: an America where your new non-white neighbors are terrorists, immigrants are stealing your job, homosexuals want to lure your children into a life of sodomy, and treasonous liberals are plotting against you and your god at every turn. Believe this paranoid fantasy completely and who knows what you'll be capable of doing to defend your way of life.

It's no secret that the natural consequence of the fracturing of media -- of everyone having a voice and being able to put his or her opinions into writing and proffer them over the airwaves and internet -- is that there is no truth anymore. We have no common ground to anchor any argument. The left and right in this country live in completely separate worlds, each with its own set of facts. When we debate, we may as well be speaking foreign languages, so entirely have we allowed a single agreed-upon reality to become muddled by dishonesty on both sides. Rush Limbaugh lies his porcine ass off regularly and no one ever calls him on it; the ones who do are just dismissed by his acolytes as delusional or secretly trying to further the leftist agenda. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal launder George Bush's every sin until he comes out on the other end of the news cycle smelling fresh and clean.

And their listeners, viewers and readers believe every word of it. Their version of the truth, right or wrong, is why a man would shoot up a church in Tennessee, intransigent in the conviction that liberals are in control of the nation (when our president and half of our lawmakers are Republican) and that they've decimated the economy and taken away his job (when it could easily be argued Bush's policies, in fact, bear most if not all of the blame for the current dismal state of things).

For so long, the fire-and-brimstone of political division has been preached from every keyboard and microphone across our land; it was always just a matter of time before anger turned to action. All that rage had to go somewhere.

Maybe it just did.