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Thursday, July 30, 2009

Dear National Rifle Association...

...please fuck right the hell off.

Seriously.

Stop calling my house with your hysterical "Obama is taking our guns Oh NOES!" bullshit.

I don't want to take your survey.

I've hung up on you three nights in a row now, get a fucking clue would you please?

You people are the ones who scare me, not the prospective Supreme Court line-up and Judge Sotomayor. Most of you rightwing NRA hard-ons are exactly the type of people who shouldn't own firearms in the first damned place and anything that puts some limits on you wackos is fine by me.

There, are we clear on this now?

Take my number off your call list. K? Thanks.

11 comments:

  1. It's not the NRA, it's the Judicial Confirmation Network.

    They're calling all over the state. A few weeks ago it was "Do you want a Supreme Court Justice that supports family values?"

    Now they've moved on to gun control.

    Asshats.

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  2. Tania, I think I might have taken that call (if it were a real person, I don't talk to fucking robots) and then said, "Thank God we have a president who will actually appoint a Supreme Court Justice who does believe in real family values instead of having a litmus test for only those who think abortion it teh evil but are willing to screw over families by allowing busines to run amok. Hello, hello, are you still there?"

    But yeah, I just heard about how the republican party asked the NRA to make her nomination a gun rights issue, and the picked up on it, 'tards that they are.

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  3. I've been getting emails of the "forward this to EVERYONE YOU KNOW" variety lately, and the gun issue has been the subject of the latest flurry. On the one hand, they're being forwarded to me by a producer I've worked for and would like to work for again, so in a perverse way, I'm just happy that I continue to be on his radar. On the other hand, I have really poor impulse control, so I usually hit "reply all" with some well considered response like Thank you for keeping me aware of what the bugshit loonies are up to by forwarding their messages to me -- Let me know when the Zombie, Nazi Sheepherders land in New Jersey.

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  4. Nathan, what, you didn't get that memo. They've been there for years.

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  5. It's too bad we have to question the motives of everyone, but we do. My mother is a huge fan of a particular news source whose motives are so obvious that it's a wonder they don't proudly admit it at the start and close of each show.

    When I ask her why she listens to the crap they spew, she looks at me like I'm nuts.

    "What are you talking about Joe? It's the news, why would you think that they'd provide inaccurate information?!"

    This from the woman who made it a point in her life to expose me to the worst of man kinds history, the Holocaust of Nazi Germany, the Tragedy of Peoples Temple in Guyana.

    Mom grew up with people Edward R. Morrow, and Walter Cronkite reporting the NEWS. You know back when the media allowed for true journalism, and the NEWS represented the Fourth Estate.

    We live in different times now, the media MAKES the news that their corporately owned puppet masters dictate to them. We don't have the benefit of a Cronkite or a Morrow to tell us that the "Judicial Confirmation Network" is calling because they have ulterior motives.

    The duties of Fourth Estate have been passed on to you, me and others like us.

    Time to kick some butt boys and girls. :)

    Joe

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  6. Well, when I get the NRA surveys in the mail, I fill them out truthfully.

    So they get my "yes" vote on closing the gun-show loophole, for example.

    Just my way of spreading the love.

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  7. Tania, yes, I know. But I did a little research - wanna guess where their funding is coming from and who is picking the questions?

    I'll have a post up on this later today.

    Joe, you hit on a very good point - a lot of folks above the age of 35/40 are conditioned to believe the News. They remember the days of Cronkite and Reasoner and, the older ones, Morrow - and don't realize that the rules have changed, that nearly all journalism today is tabloid journalism of varying degrees.

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  8. I don't think "conditioned to believe" cuts it--Murrow's contemporaries, for instance, included William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, two gentlemen who never let a fact get in the way of a good story. (One can make a very good argument that Hearst makes Rupert Murdoch look like an amateur--Murdoch may have profited from little acts of American imperialism, but I don't think he's ever been accused of helping start one, as Hearst has been.)

    Moreover, I'm not sure how many of these folks appreciated journalism's "Golden Age" from the end of WWII to the mid-'70s, such as it was (the Luce media empire boomed during the same era, for better or often for worse; the Luces--Henry and his politician wife, Claire Booth--share a considerable amount of the blame, for instance, for warping America's China policy after WWII). I suspect the same people who love Fox News probably hated the "un-American" coverage of Vietnam and the media "persecution" of Richard Nixon; before that, they may well have been Joe McCarthy supporters who thought Murrow was the one who ought to be ashamed for interfering with the Tailgunner's patriotic good work.

    Nostalgia is largely about forgetting the bad. While the '60s, in particular, produced a solid amount of investigative journalism (driven, in part, by a boom in the alternative press), it had its share of shoddy reporting, paranoia, and tabloidism. The corollary to Sturgeon's Law is that shit sinks and cream floats, so we remember the good stuff--the bold press in Saigon in the '60s, the Pentagon Papers, Woodward and Bernstein, Cronkite keeping it real. We overlook or forget the stuff that sabotages that narrative.

    Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

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  9. One clarification, though: while Hearst and Murrow had contemporary careers, Murrow was on the rise during Hearst's decline, with Murrow joining CBS about two years before William Randolph Hearst lost control of the Hearst Corporation.

    Not sure that changes the point, but accuracy seemed fitting given the subject.

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  10. Oh, fine, Eric. Bring that up. Just piss in the pool why don't you?

    Snark aside, I don't disagree. And you're absolutely right, Hearst makes Murdock look like a piker.

    HOWEVER, that doesn't change the fact that the older generations tend to believe that "they couldn't put it on TV if it wasn't true." While the younger generations tend to believe that nothing they see on TV is true. This is a subset of the larger picture, the one where a lot of the older generation of Americans (those that lived through WWII for example) were conditioned to believe that disagreeing with the government or criticizing the United States in any way was unpatriotic. We have no flaws, we're Americans. The younger generation on the other hand tends to see nothing good in America. Never trust anybody over thirty, right? Both sides are products of their formative environment.

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