Emerging out of the sewer like hangover that I have been nursing for a few weeks I find my voice again. Thank you Ann Coulter for proving what a worthless piece of shit you truly are, and neatly bundling this fecal storm together for me. In the past month the government has failed to pass non-comprehensive gun control, failed to fix The Sequester, and the media has failed at their jobs, but no failure has been as colossal and complete as that of the Right Wing, who canāt shake the narrative that somehow everything is the fault of the poor. Ā They are the dog turd in our shit sandwich, and make even the Democrats look like filet mignon by comparison.
Part I: Gohmert Pile
Rep. Louie Gohmert, the phallic representative from Texasā first district, a district so stupid they elected him with nearly 80% of the vote in 2012, likened restrictions on guns to homosexuality last month. Now this is nothing new for Gohmert, whoās continued electoral victories make a strong case for instituting an IQ test that all members of congress must pass before being allowed inside.Ā Yet his logic sets the opening for this Kabuki theatre.
Gohmert on limiting gun magazine clips:
And I pointed out, well, once you make it ten, then why would you draw the line at ten? What's wrong with nine? Or eleven? And the problem is once you draw that limit ; it's kind of like marriage when you say it's not a man and a woman any more, then why not have three men and one woman, or four women and one man, or why not somebody has a love for an animal?Ā
Let us ignore for a moment the obvious slanderous insult of likening homosexuality to having sex with Louie Gohmert (see what I did there?) and address the far more witty hypocrisy. Gohmert likens regulating magazine sizes to deregulating marriage. You see in the first district if you say something with enough flare you donāt actually have to be correct, you can even equate two ideas that are polar opposites, regulation and deregulation, and your audience will still think you piss gold.
Gohmert is an easy target, and certainly on the wrong side of history. Yet his argument against gun control points us in an interesting direction. It seems even worthless gun control measures that are essentially a token gesture canāt make it through congress. A bill merely to push for background checks on gun purchases canāt make it over the mud heap, and while there is a limit on how many boxes of Sudafed I can buy in a single outing to a drugstore, there is no limit on the amount of bullets I can purchase online.
Truth be told I donāt really believe in the kind of gun control we are likely to pass in this country, nor do I see a direct statistical correlation between a reduction in murder rate and the banning of handguns. (See United Kingdom post 1998 vs. pre 1998) Our major gun problems arenāt from mass shootings. Mass shootings are few and far between. Our major problems are more socioeconomic in nature. Over 270 school aged children have been killed in Chicago over the past 3 years. There is a drive by shooting or gun violence erupting in the city weekly. By January 6th of this year 10 people had already been gunned down, yet Conservatives choose to ignore this and instead push for bills to hand out shotguns to people in high crimes neighborhoods for the purposes of āprotection.ā Let the poor kill the poor. Fuck āem.
The media arms of the Left and Right Wing have no interest in the violence emanating out of the South Side of Chicago, with The Huffington Post focusing on Lindsay Lohanās sideboob, and The Blaze telling heroic anecdotes of, I kid you not, people overcoming adversity to fire guns. The truth is we cannot fix the gun problem in this country by simply banning firearms, so long as we focus on the tools rather than the causes we can completely ignore the problem, focusing on the loudness of a voice vs. the content of it's tenor.
Part II:Ā Sequester of The Sequester
The Sequester has hit the poor, homeless, and elderly people hardest. I have felt no ill effects from it as yet, and as such could be persuaded to believe that it has no real effect. The conservative spin machine has been pushing the narrative that The Sequester is toothless since we first entered the quagmire. They made no mention of the drastic cuts to Meals on Wheels, no mention of the cuts in benefits to the elderly, no mention of the cuts to homeless shelters and feeding the poor. Let the poor eat the poor. Fuck āem.
In the middle of last month this lack of narrative was hijacked. We all stood tense as Boston, my hometown, was rocked by explosions. As the dust settled (or before it began to) all the good nature that is usually accompanied by a common tragedy shared by the country was destroyed. I make no secret of hating Conservatives, and disagreeing with most of their views, and while this may seem like a one sided attack... fuck it, sometimes they just deserve it. No excuses needed.
In the weeks following the attack John Yoo wrote two pieces the entirely contradicted his points for the national review. In the first he proposed that we do exactly what the administration ended up doing (using the public safety exemption before Mirandizing the prisoner) and in the second he said the administration had done it all wrong and by Mirandizing the prisoner we lost intelligence making our country less safe. Seeing a toadie like Yoo do a complete 180 degree turn, ethically, on any issue is only strange if you've never smelled this slime weasel before. Yoo is also the man who in the same decade as suggesting there is such a thing as ātorture liteā took a teaching gig at UC Berkley. Yoo is an immoral blood tick that would run you over with his car, and then hand you his business card asking you if you would like to sue the car manufacturer.
After spending the past 3 weeks in disbelief watching the Right Wing scramble to explain how Chechnya ties into their global terrorist narrative, with a whiskey in hand and a strong desire to fellate the nearest gun, it finally started to make sense to me. See the vast majority of the citizenry in this country cannot understand anything more complex than a game of Jenga. Thus in explaining the Boston Marathon attack we have to pull one block at a time until our world topples in fear and disbelief.
Pull the first block, and explain to the populace how the Chechens have always been a huge threat and hated the United States. How somehow in acting alone, this is a massive conspiracy and they (and now Kazakhstan) are more dangerous than Afghanistan and Al-Qaida. Insist that there is a deep global threat here, in spite of all the evidence to support a lone act by deranged miscreants. Ā
Pull the second block to reveal that granting citizenship is the issue. That, like Yoo suggested, we cannot Mirandize these superhuman monsters, because if we do it will be a threat to national security. Somehow James Holmes (the Colorado shooter who killed 12 and injured 58) got Mirandized, but Tsarnaev is unique and needs to be kept in a plastic cage lest he use his mutant abilities to control metal.
Pull the third block, blaming the entirety of what happened on Muslims, immigrants, and whatever people might consider āthe other.ā Claim that 1.57 million Muslims are out to kill us all. (Eric Bolling) Suggest that we should wiretap mosques. (Brian Kilmeade) Propose canceling Muslim student visas. (Bob Beckel)
Finally you pull the fourth brick, and bring it all crashing down. Suggest that this is because they are of the āMoocher Class.ā
Ann Coulter in an epic pearl of wisdom, after suggesting Tsarnaevās wife be arrested for wearing a Hijab, proposed a theory: āMy point is: zero immigrants should be collecting government assistance." In Annās world there is no need to let immigrants get settled and adjust to a new environment, and it is irrelevant that welfare is actually self-sustaining. In Annās world immigrants that donāt have money are just future terrorists. My family emigrated from the former Soviet Union in 1989, having limited resources and no knowledge of the English language; we lived on welfare till we were able to find out footing. Without welfare we would not have survived, and so what that we have since repaid the money spent on us more than 100 fold in taxes? We were poor and deserved to die.
Part III: Fuck āem
The Right Wing narrative has always been simple. Yet the economic part of it is a pill that gets lodged halfway down your throat, and as you gag on it, forcing it to go down you cannot help but wonder, is it really true?
Itās easy, especially after an attack on US soil, to convince a large portion of the country that bombings are only ever committed by "foreign" Ā Muslims. You may even be able to convince them that the $1.4 Trillion dollars we spent on the wars was necessary to combat these evil terrorists. Ā
When it comes to economics however, how do you convince the people that slashing aid to the indigent is the solution? Sweep the effects of The Sequester under the rug? Blame the economic collapse entirely on the poor wanting more house than they could afford? Claim the government is going bankrupt because we have to finance welfare? Suggest that crimes are committed in poor neighborhoods by poor people and that the only defense against them is to arm yourself?
All of these approaches have been attempted in one form or another but lack the powerful imagery and horror that terror evokes in our psyche. Which is why Ann Coulter needed to find the Rosetta Stone that converts our zeal for xenophobic hate mongering into a Randian style survival of the fittest. Poor immigrants come to the United States, get on welfare, and then blow up the country. Without welfare these people would just cease to exist. And there you have it, the way to tie it all together in a neat little bow. Terrorists equal poor moochers, who wouldnāt exist if we just cut entitlements. We can help kill terrorists simply by slashing entitlements. The terrorists are the poor. Fuck āem.
