Cowboy Confessional

The 24×7 news channels are abuzz (for reasons I cannot fathom) about Hillary Clinton shedding tears. The talking heads are yapping endlessly about the strain of being on the campaign trail, and how a show of emotion might or might not win her votes.

And some are wondering if those tears were provided by the campaign’s crocodile.

It doesn’t matter, because either way it hurts her chances of ever being president. Follow the truth table on this one:

They were real: If so, people rightfully worried about global terrorism will perceive her as being weak at a time when the leader of the free world needs to be strong. Strike one.

They were fake: False sincerity (for which her Bubba Hubby is so notorious) when perceived always drives away support. Strike two.

Obama’s Mo: Barack has the momentum, so opening the water works makes her appear as unable to bring on the heat at a critical point in the game. Strike three.

There is no up-side to her emotional episode. Bye bye Hill … can’t say I’m going to miss you, but I did enjoy the show.

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Why would the Lord of all Creation advocate destruction?  This is the point about Allah that Islamic suicide bombers missed.

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I live for irony, and it finds me daily. But sometimes it breaches the line that separates irony from absurdity.

There is a certain snake by the name of Senator Don Perata. I know Don, having sat with him in a corporate board while he engineered a few million in corporate welfare. I have talked him down in front of reporters. In other words, I’ve been so close to him so often that my doctor insists on conducting frequent tests for slime infections.

Like most politicians, Don has one game he most enjoys playing, that being gun control. Don has never seen a gun control proposal that didn’t make him moisten his Depends. In California he has attempted to ban guns, tax ammunition into an unaffordable commodity, and has told many false tales about threats of violence from NRA members (he loves to tell that story to reporters, but whenever challenged to produce police reports on these ancient incidents, he or his demonic staffers demur).

So imagine my giggle fit when news broke that Don “The Bay Area Bagman” Perata had been carjacked … at gunpoint. All his efforts to disarm the general populace (I say “general” because Don has at least one handgun and the rarest of Bay Area artifacts, a concealed carry permit) seem to have been for naught.

The carjackers were prototypical street thugs. They were men in their 20’s. They worked in tandem (one walking up to the car, and another boxing Don in with another vehicle). They held their gun “gansta” style (sloppily sideways). They were dedicated criminals who most likely:

• Did not have a permit from the state to buy a gun.
• Did not wait the mandatory 10-day period to obtain a gun.
• Did not obtain a permit to carry their gun in public (unlike Perata).

In short, they willingly violated every law Don Perata enacted. Meanwhile my buddy Rich, a Vietnam vet, father of two, grandfather of three, who has held a job all of his life, paid his taxes, and has never broken a law more serious than speeding … he has obeyed all of those laws.

Perata never has “gotten it.” Don never stops long enough to separate chaff and understand the motivations and rationalizations of criminals. He fails to perform simple logic and isolate the good guys from the bad.

And now Don had a thug shove a gun up his nose while Rich and I chuckled. We laughed because we know the incident will not help clarify the issue for Perata. Some skulls are too thick.

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I have enjoyed a life long love affair with Australia, despite having not the opportunity to visit. The people of Oz are warm hearted, and the country sounds like a beach bum paradise. Who could resist white sands, topless women, and a cold oil can of Foster’s?

Which is why watching them sink into a morass of collective stupidity breaks my heart.

I won’t belabor their catastrophic adoption of draconian gun control — the evils therein are self-explanatory. Nor is it necessary to note again a growing, reluctant adoption in Oz of an all controlling nanny state. It is as if the Ausies want to mimic the U.K. by abandoning their original rugged individualism.

So it should not be surprising that the Australian government now wants to censor internet content, as does communist China (a land of human rights suppression), Indonisia (a land of human rights suppression), and Saudi Arabia (a land of human rights suppression).

It is a very small step from censorship to enslavement.

The Sydney Morning Herald carried the following bit of Orwellian newspeak from Stephen Conroy, the Labor Party’s Chief of Human Domestication, in response to the complaints of civil liberties groups:

“If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.”

The fact is nobody made that comparison, but Heir Conroy’s gambit was well played nonetheless. The Oz government plans to mandate that internet service providers install content filtering systems controlled by the Oz government. Evidently the Labor Party believes that Australian citizens are too ignorant to filter their own content, and want to directly control the process through upstream pipes … beyond the control of the end user.

The danger therein is obvious. There is no oversight, monitoring, or correction of the definition of “unsuitable content.” Anyone in China can attest that information critical of the Chinese government (and the internet is heavy with such critique) cannot be found through a browser. Thus the Chinese government maintains and grows its power through the regulation of information, and continues a long and glorious history of oppression.

Now Australia’s Labor Party wants to do the same to its own people.

So goodbye Australia. Where once we were kin who threw off the yoke of the Crown’s domination, you have sadly strapped yourself to government’s plow. We shall miss you.

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