Things You Never See If You Don't Live In Trump Country

Most communities of any size have give-away papers.  Usually weekly.  Sometimes monthly.   A Penny Saver.  Real estate circulars.  Maybe an alternative news outlet like The Reader in Chicago or the Illinois Times in Springfield.   

You'll find them near the exits of hardware stores and grocery stores – anyplace lots of people are coming and going.  For example, in Springfield, you can find the Times, on Thursday, neatly stacked inside the Chase Bank ATM kiosk on Wabash Avenue.  In fact, I found this week's stack of ITs at that very ATM just yesterday, still bound tightly up in split film polypropylene twine, which kinda defeats the purpose.  Do better, Illinois Times!

  However, if you don't live in Trump Country – like we do –  you’re probably unfamiliar with a monthly giveaway paper called Gun News, which -- surprise! -- is not about gun safety or sensible gun control.  It’s published by Guns Save Life incorporated and every month it tells its loyal readers all about how dirty, commie Gun Grabbing Liberals are coming for your assault weapons and bazookas and how to stop them!!   

The one I’m holding now, for February of 2023, is Volume 30, Number 2.  Meaning this hysterical rag has been in continuous publication for 30 years.  So what was going on in 1993 that triggered the freakout of gun nuts and prompted the creation of outfits like the publishers of “Gun News” 

Here’s a clue:

After months of debate, in November 1993, a substantially watered-down version of the originally-proposed assault weapons ban was finally passed by the U.S. Senate.  In May 1994, infamous gun-grabbing Liberals like Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, wrote to the U.S. House of Representatives in support of banning "semi-automatic assault guns." They cited a 1993 CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll that found 77 percent of Americans supported a ban on the manufacture, sale, and possession of such weapons.

30 years later, here are some of the “stories”

A boldfaced headline that reads “SEE YOU IN COURT” refers to new restrictions and registration rules which Governor Pritzker has signed into law.

The Protect Illinois Communities Act (PICA) bans the sale or transfer assault weapons."People who already own such firearms will be required to register them with the state government by January 1, 2024, once a system for registration has been created later this year."

The law also "caps sales of high-capacity ammunition magazines, bans ‘switches’ that convert legal handguns into assault weapons, and extends the ability of courts to prevent dangerous individuals from possessing a gun through firearm restraining orders."

Since the passage of PICA, most Illinois county sheriffs, who are elected by voters, have announced they will not enforce the law. Some sheriffs, like Jeff Connor of Madison County, cite the Fifth circuit court's radical Bruen decision last year  (which, among other barbarities, allows convicted domestic abusers to keep their guns) as justification for not enforcing the law.

There’s an editorial (the whole paper is an editorial) entitled “Go Pound Sand: Sheriff's Message for Pritzker.”

There are pages going into detail about various crimes committed in Chicago because goobers in southern Illinois fucking hate Chicago for all the usual, paranoid racist reasons, but also because so many of their kids get the hell out of their parent's jerkwater towns and head for the Big City once they get a taste of the world outside the Trump country bell jar.

There are paeans to "2A Sanctuary Cities".  There is a giddy celebration of "scamming" Chicago's no-questions-asked gun buy-back program by trading in enough useless, rusted-out junk guns to raise thousands of dollars.  Enough to send their kids to gun indoctrination camp!   And their antics got  Chicago's gun buy-back program shut down for three years!  Victory!

There is a truly pathological hatred of the sane gun control group, "Moms Demand Action", reprints of National Review articles about how awful Pritzker and those gun-grabbing Liberals are, and endless ads for guns, gun shows and gun paraphernalia.  

And from the Executive Director, an announcement of “Operation Ridicule” a little of which I’ll share with you here:

YOU can join the fun...

'Operation Ridicule' coming their way

Just like racist bigots in the Jim Crow South fought against desegregation of public schools after Brown v. Board of Education, some Illinois politicians ignored the Bruen decision and passed a gun and magazine ban.

Did I forget to mention that this organization of splenetic old white gun nuts and anti-vaxxers who are obsessed with "urban crime" is also 100% sure that Liberals are the real racists?

And that "Bruen decision"?  That's the decision by the Fifth Circuit court that now allows convicted domestic abusers to keep their guns.  

Now that "Public Act 102-1116" has become law, don't make any dumb or ill-considered posts on social media.  Don't paste a target on your own back by saying, "Molon Labe."

Instead, focus your anger and use it constructively.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Betcha top of the list is send us money!!! 

First and foremost, join Guns Save Life and contribute to the legal defense fund(s).  Use your employer match if it's available. Encourage clubs and organizations where you belong to donate to our legal fight.

Told you.

Here's the part where things get fun.

The days of congeniality have passed. 

What fucking "days of congeniality"?

Those who support this rabid gun control law hate you. They hate  your independence and your beliefs. They haughtily mock you and your family as though you're all knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.  

Return the love.

In Alinsky's Rules for Radicals...

Did I forget to mention that these knuckle-dragging Neanderthals (tm) are obsessed with Saul Alinsky?  Also George Soros.  A prosecutor they despise is never just a prosecutor.  They're a Soros-funded prosecutor.  

I swear, the derangement boils so close to the surface, that if you just feed 'em a couple of PBRs and give even a hint that you're a sympathetic ear, they'll tell you in vivid detail all about the International Jewish Conspiracy, the Demon-Rat  (Democrat) "plantation" on which "the blacks" are kept in brainwashed thrall, and so forth.  

Oh, and they're definitely In-Dee-Pen-Dants so the Forward Party should be able to scoop 'em, no problem.

Continuing...

In Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, the old communist  author wrote that ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

Use it ruthlessly.

Write letters to the editor of your local dead-tree newspapers [which almost nobody but sneering old white gun nuts and anti-vaxxers read anyway].  Make it personal with the politicians who voted for them.  Ridicule them about scandals past and present...

Relentless ridicule...

Mention the racist roots of gun control...

Chicago...

un-American...

Compare politicians who voted for this to the racist bigots in the south...

Other tip:  Don't use other adjectives.  America's most popular self-defense firearms, not..."assault weapons".  "standard capacity" [magazines] not "high capacity".

And it goes on like that.

But here's the thing about ridicule: it doesn't work if the person doing the ridiculing is, himself, utterly ridiculous.  And these goofs are, among many other things, definitely ridiculous.  They're first-class members of The Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair (a quick refresher on the nature of that tribe:)

Longtime readers know that "The Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair" is my shorthand for inbred Conservative meatsticks who have wallowed in wingnut Hate Radio racist dung and Fox News Liberal Conspiracy claptrap for so long that is has become the quotidian argot of their wretched lives.  It is their tavern-talk -- their worst, paranoid delusions, externalized, validated, tarted up as The Unvarnished Truth and then regurgitated back to them by ghouls and treason-mongers like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly... which are, in turn, passed around again like so many fish stories, getting bigger and wilder and truthier with each iteration.    It is the shit they eagerly rub in their hair -- the shit which, year after year, they sculpt into ever more elaborate pompadours because everyone else in their dingy, lightless corner of Universe is doing it and they lost their sense of smell 40 years ago.

They preen over each other. They are happy in each other's company. They praise each other on the little, individual touches with which they have customized their Shitheap Toupees -- an extra layer of Benghaaaazi, perhaps, appliqued over something something the New Black Panther Party because ACORN!.

And all is right with the world...right up until they leave the cocoon of their Wingnut Pig Sty and step into the normal world, where they are Shocked!Shocked! that ordinary people flee from them in horror...

 

They're cultists, whose one, true God is Vulcan, hollow-point be his name:

And to be ridiculed by such emotionally stunted weirdos is a thing to be worn as a badge of honor by any civilized human being.  

I Am The Liberal Media

The Case for Doing Nothing vs the Case for Doing Almost Nothing

In today's story of alternate history, it is January of 1942.  

The Great Depression rages on unchecked and millions of Americans are at the brink of starvation because President Joseph Manchin III believes any government action would be useless and the markets will eventually correct themselves.  

The ruins of Pearl Harbor are still smouldering, and President Joseph Manchin III's appeasement delegation still waits for an audience with the emperor of Japan.

The end is near for England.  German bombers command the skies over London and German forces are reported to be massing near Calais in preparation for invasion.  There had been some talk of lending or leasing arms to the British to help them defend themselves, but pressure from Senate Majority Leader Charles Lindberg and his America First party convinced an easily-swayed president Manchin that now would not be the time to "politicize" the war.  That the problem was not the Nazi's guns or tanks or U-boats or bombers; the problem was "mental health" and that perhaps "hardening" all but one door in all British buildings -- bricking them up-- would frustrate the invaders and they would go home.

Finally, as a bipartisan compromise, Manchin and Lindberg jointly proposed sending 1,000 First Aid kids to England, along with 7,000 pounds of mortar to help the British with the task of "hardening" their buildings: the compromise was sufficiently toothless that the fascist America First party raised no objection, and the minority Democratic party was sufficiently desperate to take anything the fascists offered.

You know the rest.

The ships carrying First Aid were sunk by Nazi U-boats which now controlled the Atlantic unopposed, and while the mortar ships were allowed safe passage, the "hardening" of  British buildings proved to be a complete failure.  

In an address to a joint session of Congress, president Manchin offered the now-conquered British Isles America's "thoughts and prayers", and told Americans that this proved once and for all that government actions and international laws are useless and that people with guns are just gonna do what they're gonna do and there is nothing anyone can do about any of it.  

He was given a 12-minute standing ovation by the America Firsters.

 End.

+ + + +

Today I am going to propose a resolution.  

Each year in high school debate, the national debate society comes up with resolution that's sufficiently open-ended that it allows for lots of interpretation and therefore demands that debate teams do a lot of research on a wide array of subjects.  For example, the 1976-77 topic -- "Resolved: That a comprehensive program of penal reform should be adopted throughout the United States." -- was broad enough to include everything from decriminalizing pot and prison overcrowding, to mandatory minimum sentencing and the deportation of resident aliens.  

And I can reliably report that there was a whole lotta contention over the interpretation of the word "comprehensive".

So, here is your Gun Control topic for debate: 

Resolved:  "That anything less than a comprehensive reform of national gun sales, possession and safety laws would be worse than useless." 

Opposing the resolution:  Passing whatever weak and watered down legislation Joe Manchin and a handful of Republicans will permit Democrats to vote on -- say, improving background checks -- is worth it because even a marginal improvement over current conditions would probably prevent some tragedies and save some lives.

In favor of the resolution:  Passing whatever weak and watered down legislation Joe Manchin and a handful of Republicans will permit Democrats to vote on will not stop the next mass shooting, or the one after that, or the one after that.  What it will  do is hand more ammunition to the "Laws are useless" gun nut crowd.  "See, Dems got what they wanted!  They got one more Big Gummint gun control law passed!  And what good did it do?  None at all."  Thus making it that much harder to ever pass any  meaningful gun control legislation in the future.

Your comments are welcome, but since I moderate comments and have other things to do, it might take awhile for your comment to appear, so please don't post it nine times.  

Proud Former Debate Team Captain and Member of the National Forensic League

Let 'Em Dangle

You Have The Right To Remain Silent

If you give up your right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be dismissed, warped, twisted and used against you by everyone on the Right from Wayne LaPierre (from today)--

In the midst of genuine grief, in an understandable passion, as millions of Americans searched for meaningful solutions, what do we find? Chris Murphy, Nancy Pelosi and more, cheered on by the national media, eager to blame the NRA and call for even more government control. They hate the NRA, they hate the Second Amendment, they have individual freedom. 

-- to the NRA's enablers at The New York Times -- 

David Brooks wrote something terrible this week. This is not a surprise. The Times pays him handsomely to write snotty, unedited editions of David Brooks Understands The Little People on a regular basis. They will not fire him, not even for takes as dopey and casually nauseating as this one:

So if you want to stop school shootings it’s not enough just to vent and march. It’s necessary to let people from Red America lead the way, and to show respect to gun owners at all points. There has to be trust and respect first. Then we can strike a compromise on guns as guns, and not some sacred cross in the culture war.

I think we’ve all seen what bending over backwards to accommodate Red America looks like. It looks a lot like the bullet-ridden liescape we all now currently occupy. Does the Times care that they’re printing this dreck? Of course not. Quite the contrary, the Times seems very happy these days to secure the endorsements of pretentious (and spineless) conservative publications and high-end white nationalist pamphleteers alike, and they have adopted a siege mentality when it comes to any profane opposition...

-- to a random Republican Congresswoman from New York --

Rep. Claudia Tenney, a Republican from New York, claimed in a radio interview Wednesday that “so many” people who commit mass murders “end up being Democrats.”

...

“I am fed up with the media and liberals attempting to politicize tragedies and demonize law-abiding gun owners and conservative Americans every time there is a horrible tragedy,” Tenney said in email statement to The Washington Post.

-- which precisely echoes the casual, reflexive, unhinged slander of Democrats that has become the every-day, all-occasion Mother Tongue of Republicans since at least the rise of Limbaugh and Gingrich a quarter of a century ago:

Mr. Gingrich's remarks were reminiscent of an interview he gave to The Associated Press just before the 1994 election in which he spoke of the widely publicized case in which two children had been drowned by their mother, Susan Smith.

"I think the mother killing her two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick society is getting and how much we have to have change," he said at the time. "I think people want to change, and the only way you can get change is to vote Republican."

I gave up my right to remain silent right around the time GOP turned their party over to scum like Gingrich, Limbaugh, Rove and Atwater.

And I've never missed it.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Try a Time Machine

The King of Both Siderism thinks it is high time to get political about gun violence.

I completely agree.

Huh??? We need to make this political ASAP. Time to do something. That is absolutely putting country over party. You might try it.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) October 2, 2017

One big step in the right direction might be for Matthew Dowd to travel back in time a year or so and use his privileged position as ABC News' chief political analyst to pimp-slap the ever-loving shit out of any of his colleagues with a media platform who were playing the game of "Both Side Do It -- Disrupt! -- End The K'rupt Duopoly" between a political party that is a wholly owned subsidiary of the fucking NRA (from the NYT, 04/28/17) --

Trump Tells N.R.A. Convention, ‘I Am Going to Come Through for You’

ATLANTA — President Trump received a thunderous welcome from thousands of gun lovers as he appeared here on Friday at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention to thank the group for its unwavering support of his presidential campaign.

A supporter of restrictions on guns before he entered politics, Mr. Trump became a fierce champion of gun rights during his bid for the White House, earning early backing — and $30 million in campaign support — from the powerful lobbying group.

“Only one candidate in the general election came to speak to you, and that candidate is now the president of the United States, standing before you,” Mr. Trump said. “You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you.”...

-- and a political party that is not the wholly owned subsidiary of the fucking NRA.

Of course there are risks. 

For example, the Butterfly Effect that may arise from Present Matthew Dowd blocking Yesterday Matthew Dowd on Twitter for suggesting that we can't just love, love, love the NRA away and that waiting around for the Party of Moloch to "evolve" on this issue is insane may cause the space-time continuum to cough up a hairball and Mr. Dowd to vanish in a temporal paradox fart.

But I am willing to risk it. 

Professional Left Podcast #344

"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."

--  W.B. Yeats, writer

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Links:

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Gun Nuts and Creepy Fundamentalists

Turns out, at least two of the Five Pillars on which Modern Conservatism stands (Ammosexuals and snake-handling Christopaths -- the other three being Bigotry, Corporatism and, most important of all, Dogmatic Denial That The Other Four Pillars Exist) don't fare so well when cable teevee fame and big money are in the mix.

From The Daily Banter:

The Duggars Deliberately Covered Up Child Molestation in Their Ranks

 Chez Pazienza on May 22, 2015

The schadenfreude would be absolutely delicious if the story weren’t so sickening. 27-year-old Josh Duggar, the eldest son of the Duggar family — the Christian zealots who parlayed their unwillingness to stop churning out children into a multi-media empire — now admits publicly to molesting several little girls when he was a teenager, many of them his own sisters. He was forced to come clean after an In-Touch magazine article, published earlier today, detailed a 2006 police report revealing that Josh had confessed his acts to his father, Jim Bob Duggar, but the family patriarch withheld the information from police for a full year. Five young girls apparently had their breasts and genitals forcibly touched and groped by Josh, both while they were sleeping and while they weren’t. According to In-Touch, the report had remained hidden until the magazine filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The investigation treated Josh’s crimes as felonies.

From Fox411 (emphasis added):

Trouble just keeps mounting for former “Sons of Guns” star Will Hayden.

When Scary met Calley

And then one day the anti-wanking O'Donnellite teabaggers and pro-armed-insurrection Angloid teabaggers joined forces...

These Days

Many American politicians seem reluctant

to spend American money on

winning American hearts and minds?

Do We Already Have

All the nurses we need?
Either way, I'm sure competent professionals are working on it.