No trombones here: This is a solo for black rifle.
That wasn’t a Glenn Miller big-band number they heard yesterday at the rally in Pennsylvania.
Those folks were dancing to another sort of tune altogether. The Black Rifle Boogie.
As has become traditional, before the echoes of the gunfire faded, the Keyboard Kommandos Rapid Response Team — “Last to Know, First to Blow, We Will Defend to the Death Our Right to Remain Misinformed” — instantly let fly in all directions at once.
I do not intend to do that here, beyond observing that when one has a country full of cuckoos and bang-bangs the two are liable to find each other. Frankly, given the prevailing political conditions, I’m astonished it took this long for them to come together and make music.
You’re listening to the Armed Propaganda Network. Don’t touch that dial!
Never tease the Snow Gods. They will take a frosty dump on you from a considerable height.
True, it wasn’t much of a dump; just a few heavy, wet inches. Still, during round one on Thursday the roads got so slick that Herself refused to take me back down to Reincarnation to collect the Fearsome Furster after its semiannual pulse check. And even I could see the wisdom in not tackling the trip on two wheels, especially after I nearly faceplanted on an icy spot while shoveling our ski jump of a driveway.
Round two overnight was strictly a broomer, but the icy bits remained, and I checked my footing as I swept this morning.
“I break a hip and she’ll put me down for sure,” I mumbled to myself. “She’s a sensible woman, albeit a bit ruthless, won’t let the Medical-Industrial Complex suck the nest egg dry rehabbing an ill-tempered ould villain who’s months away from the brain fleas even if he gets back to limping around the property, acting out all the parts in whatever noxious play he’s producing in that scabby, hairless head. Hire some 19-year-old stud-muffin to handle the shoveling and other personal services. …”
Speaking of jobs of work, I see Joe reared up on his hind legs and talked some smack, so I guess he wants to keep the job after all. Christ only knows why. He has to have enough tucked away to sweep Jill off to a white sandy beach somewhere, let the SS boyos fetch the umbrella drinks and fajitas, take the weepy calls from Hunter in gaol. No, no newspapers, thanks all the same. And keep that TV turned off.
Meanwhile, Wayne LaPerrier, that fizzy little firearms fancier, is stepping down from the NRA to spend more time with his lawyers, guns, and money, because the rest of that wonderful Warren Zevon lyric.
And I guess Doug Lamborn finally got tired of being the King of El Paso County. Surely some worthy Democrat can finally snatch that House seat from the cold, cruel clutches of the GOPee hee hee hee haw haw haw haw as fuckin’ if.
The Duck! City may have frozen over but Hell hasn’t. I just checked The Weather Channel.
In a perfect world, I would be writing about a cat in a sack, the hummingbird snuggled into a nest outside my office window, or the bunny that just hopped by underneath it.
This is not a perfect world.
I have nothing pertinent to add to what James Fallows has written on the four themes in “the empty rituals of a gun massacre.”
Closer to home, Texas MonthlyDan Solomon reminds us that Gov. Greg Abbott, who has overseen a steady expansion of gun rights, is even more clueless than the rest of us if he really thinks the latest massacre is “incomprehensible.”
Abbott, who first won election in 2014, has had a lot of opportunities to learn how to comprehend this kind of violence. In November 2017, a man entered the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs and killed 26 people. Six months later, a seventeen-year-old high school student shot and killed eight of his classmates and two teachers at Santa Fe High School, outside of Houston. A little more than a year later, in August 2019, a far-right gunman who had posted a manifesto online drove from Dallas to El Paso and murdered 23 shoppers in a Walmart. Later that month, a shooter killed 7 people in Odessa and injured 25 others. Thus far in 2022 alone, there have been 21 mass shootings in Texas. Uvalde is just the deadliest.
I’m not singling out Texas. Here in The Duck! City we have teenagers shooting up gas stations (and killing all the wrong people) over drug deals gone sideways. Plus, New Mexico leads the nation in pedestrian deaths per resident population, traffic deaths being another problem we have decided to do nothing about (beyond jacking our jaws, that is).
These are problems with solutions. We have decided not to solve them. We love our SUVs and our AR-15s. The body count is something the survivors have agreed we can live with.
Mad Blog Media 