Cowboy Confessional

News headline writers should be considered criminal suspects until proven otherwise.

Because of my expertise in gun control policy, I receive daily feeds of news stories concerning the subject. I was rather surprised today to see two “identical” news stories with very different headlines. One headline amplified the core political story and the other amplified the bias of the reporting newsroom. That for former was a newspaper in good repute and the latter was a TV station is not a surprise.
When I say the stories were “identical”, I’ll note that the report from a television web site was a reduced version of the newspaper report, but copied their content word-for-word.

The newspaper in question is the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a truly great paper which I had the please of reading for seven years while residing in the magnificent city of Richmond, VA. They report that a state agency will review private sales of firearms at gun shows. This is a sensitive issue nationally, but especially in Virginia where we have held suspicion of the intentions of government ever since Patrick Henry said “Give me liberty of give me death.”

The Times-Dispatch rightly headlined the piece “Gingerly, panel to examine gun show sales.” Though incomplete, the headline cornered the issue of how the government will delicately investigate if private sales of firearms at gun shows contribute to guns entering the underground market (this is a useless review given the standing criminological research that concludes such leakage is minimal).

Keep in mind that the city of Richmond is in the center of the state, cradled by urban, suburban, and rural regions. It truly reflects the state’s varied populations and thus is quite attuned to neutral phraseology.

The TV station is in Washington D.C. where guns are, for practical purposes, banned. The TV station headline reads “Va. Crime Commission To Study Gun Show Loophole.”

For those unfamiliar with the debate, the phrase “gun show loophole” is a fanciful and borderline insane description of the issue. It was invented by organizations with stated goals of eliminating private firearm ownership. Aside from being a inaccurate issue statement, the term “gun show loophole” is designed to invoke fear by falsely insinuating that there is an unintended oversight in the law.

It is instructive then to see that the television station borrowed a lobbyist phrasing in order to invoke fear in their viewership, and not the more reasoned original headline provided by the newspaper.

The funny part is that biased folks in the media still don’t understand why they are losing market- and mind-share. Folks, if you repeatedly mislead people — especially in the age of the Internet and instant fact crosschecking — they will soon ignore you as an unreliable source.

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Normally I am saddened to witness a fellow human sink into the abyss of madness.

But for Tim Robbins I’ll crack open a fresh bottle of Jack Daniels and bid his brain a joyous bon voyage.

Tim is a possum in political animal zoology - slow witted, ugly, odoriferous and leaving the bad taste of road kill in one’s mouth. Leveraging his marginal fame, which in turn is based on his marginal acting abilities, Tim thrust himself into the political arena with the confidence that only complete idiots posses.

This time the poor folks attending the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) suffered Tim’s delusional diatribe. Having attended two NABs myself and witnessed first hand the utter insanity of the mass communications market, it was difficult for me (until today) to imaging anything that could add to the intellectual chaos therein.

The last year I attended NAB I stood at the intersection of two isles, and witnessed a near collision of professional wrestlers from the WWE, models from the Playboy Channel, and a televangelist who — momentarily distracted by the passing semi-clothed men and women — stood in helpless bewilderment.

They had nothing on Timmy.

Seemingly unaware that he was speaking to the proverbial hand that feeds him, Tim initiated a monologue on the deficits of the media. News reports from NAB tell that Tim could not speak a sentence without inserting multiple profanities, making his remarks unavailable for broadcast.

Though cursing is the sign of a weak mind and a weaker vocabulary, it is not in and of itself proof of madness. But the following quote is:

“Just when we were close to a national news media providing a general consensus on what the truth is …“

First is the rather psychotic notion that the media has ever come close to reporting what the truth is (whether they know what “truth” is, and if what they report instead of truth are entirely different matters). For Timmy to bank his political hopes on the old media is like a drunk pegging his ambitions on holy water.

Media madness aside, Tim was scarily close to Goebbels’ axiom. If the national news media were to agree upon what the “truth” is, then it would sure-as-sin be a lie. In one breath Timmy was lambasting the media for not being inquisitive enough, then in the next breath seems to believe they need to have consensus. The two objectives are mutually exclusive, unlike the questions “will the sun rise in the east” and “is Tim Robbins insane?”

Let’s set in concrete Tim’s nutty notion that there is one truth and that the media (of all people) should know and agree upon what it is. He then skids completely off the mental highway by saying:

“… along comes the Internets [sic] that allows its users a choice on the kind of news it watches and the YouTube. My God, we’ve got to stop them.”

The interesting thing about the Internet (singular) is that it allows anyone willing to spend $12.95 a month to be a broadcaster. In other words, the Internet is the Grand Democracy were every man, woman and hermaphrodite can speak his/her/its mind. All ideas are set forth for public exposure, critique, ridicule, analysis, and adoption through thoughtful process.

And Tim Robbins is against this.

What Timmy is really against is thought. All intellectual pursuit that does not fit his political myopia is to be shunned, discarded, and ignored by the old media. Your voice is unimportant. Alternate perspectives are to be reviled. Only the consensus of his hand chosen Illuminati needs to be considered valid.

Sail into the maelstrom of dementia Timmy. You won’t be missed.

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The government is sending me $600 as an economic stimulus. I think I’ll buy a tank of gas.

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It has been a long and slow devolution from the Federalist Papers to Monday Night Raw.

Upon occasion we have all have epiphanies that cause us to involuntarily slap our foreheads in failed attempts to distract ourselves from one source of pain with another.

Today I had a revelation for which repeatedly banging my skull into a brick wall has failed to provide masochistic equilibrium.

Last night, in a state of utter disbelief, I witnessed the intersection of surrealism that may portend the downfall of America. Osama bin Laden could not have devised a more fiendish way of eradicating American self respect, or of amplifying inanity to near-atomic destructive levels.

Our presidential candidates appeared and talked smack on a professional wrestling television program

Please, do not ponder that sentence for too long lest your bowls crawl up your esophagus and attempt to strange your brain as an act of self preservation.

Professional wrestling is to intellectual entertainment as McDonnald’s is to haute cuisine. There is no sin in detaching from realty for an hour or two, partaking of any escapist amusement. But it is impossible to cerebrally detach further than with wrastlin’. This industry has repeated the same basic scripts for the last century, and oddly the acting has not significantly improved through this repetition. Professional wrestling is a stylistically bereft soap opera for adolescent males and Budweiser soaked trailer park adults.

Politics isn’t any better.

The fact that these two outlets of substandard acting finally collided should surprise nobody. After all, the similarities are staggering. The scripts/speeches are utterly predictable. Black/white good/bad division are clearly defined with the announcers/media making them ever more pronounced. The actors are completely phony. The only meaningful differences are that wrestling has better choreography and costumes, and politics can lead to authentic mayhem.

When I caught wind that McCain, Clinton and Obama would make appearances on a wrestling telecast, I had an overwhelming urge to crack open a fresh bottle of Jack Daniels. That any potential future leader of the alleged free world might devolve to base pandering is to be expected. To become part of a production devoted to gratuitous fake violence and cheesecake honeys may be a sign of the Apocalypse. Now seeing that politicians are even worse actors than the wrestlers only goes to prove that they shouldn’t be trusted with changing the oil in your car much less a global economy or nuclear missiles.

Then it hit me.

Just when I was ready to write off this episode and proof of a declining nation, the long range scenario came painfully into view. Presidential candidates mimicking wrestlers was the culmination of cultivating the mindless voting block — the more easily duped drones with voter ID cards. Presidential rhetorical body slams are the political pitch for the new voting majority.

For years American politicians have been hyping the inane concept of getting more people to vote. They have not advocated making people more aware of issues. Nor are they pushing voter education on policy. Instead they sought to put voter registration cards in the hands of anyone with a pulse (or, in Chicago, anyone without a pulse). Motor-voter was the culmination of this insane objective, making voting easy for the lazy and brain numbed.

Like professional wrestling fans.

While witnessing Clinton mechanically mimic well known wrestler catch phrases from a teleprompter, it became self evident that the rush to enroll every adult as a voter had maniacal purpose. People who formerly were unmotivated to vote are easier to influence. This class of electors vote from emotion and are comfortable with making critical decisions based on little or no information or analysis, just as Congress does with the annual budget.

Elections have traditionally been won by turning out a “base” while convincing independent voters that you are the least criminal of the candidates. It is that latter group that has befuddled politicians. Independent voters are independent thinkers, and anyone who actively thinks about a politician’s promises does so through the cynical lens of reality. Politicos have blazed an easier path by farm-raising a group of voters who emotively adopt trivial messaging — like “change”, “hope” and “smack-down” — instead of well considered evaluation of issues, positions and the automatic rejection of candidates with documented or suspected drug use.

I fear they may have succeeded in recalibrating the voting populace. Indeed, if the outcome of this election (and perhaps the last two) have been decided by those who thrill over televised fraudulent assaults, then all future legislative misdeeds are possible.

Which may well be the end game, but there is hope. Anyone too lazy and disconnected to seek out a voter registration card may well be too lazy and disconnected to actually vote.

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Statistics show that most violent crime is caused by testosterone poisoned young males. Was Moses conducting an anti-crime campaign when he decided to “kill every male among the little ones” (Numbers 31-17 for the curious)?

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