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SAY WHAT? - Kentucky Really Knows How To Pick 'Em Dept: Last week, days after the Oxford school shooting, Rep. Thomas Massie reached a foul new low in the GOP's race to the bottom and basest when he posted an incendiary "holiday" photo showing him and his pasty, vacuous, glassy-eyed, Stepford-smiling spawn and wife all holding hefty weapons of war - he hoists a $69,000 M60 belt-fed machine gun, the others have Uzis and assault rifles, each worth many times what Kamala Harris' infamous French cookware cost - with the caption, "Merry Christmas! P.S: Santa, please bring ammo" to prove he won't let a silly little thing like a few dead kids in Michigan, not yet buried, stop him from owning the libs. "And wow, I didn't just kick a hornet's nest, I aggravated every hornet in the world," he later gloated, like a bratty 10-year-old who'd put a whoopee cushion on his homeroom teacher's chair and rushed to happily tell his leering little buddies about it after an hour in the principal's office, for some reason referencing Ghostbusters en route. "I crossed guns with family and Christmas, and those are three things that really could trigger the leftists, and I didn't realize that it would be such an explosive cocktail when you put it together. But it adds up to freedom."
Oh RIGHT: the much-vaunted "freedom" wherein kids wear bulletproof backpacks to school, walk through metal detectors and practise traumatizing shooting drills in case some day a crazed kid turns up until, one day, one does, at which point, a Michigan lawmaker raged, the press endlessly reports, as it has over the 22 years since Columbine, "another school shooting, this time in Michigan" even as we know "there will be another, and another after that, and another," because "THIS is the country we recognize today," where children's lives are deemed worth far less than guns. Again, the horrific numbers: 3,371 children dead from guns in 2019, one every two hours and 36 minutes; 16,644 wounded in 2018, one every 32 minutes; 193,000 killed since 1963, over four times the U.S. soldiers killed in our ill-begotten wars in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq combined. This, as a resolutely soulless, breathtakingly hypocritical GOP blocks gun control at every turn in the blood-soaked name of profit and power while defending the "right" to open-carry to the grocery store - What are they so afraid of? A school shooter? - but decrying putting a piece of cloth on their face as "tyranny." Right. That "freedom." "This," says Ilhan Omar, "is who they are." (This, too, is Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil.")
Thus did the Gun-Fetishists-'R-Us post by Massie, once critiqued as too-pro-gun by a generous NRA, draw the outrage he was trolling for. "This is sick and appalling," wrote Steve Schmidt in a screed calling the photo "an act of premeditated provocation grounded in cruelty (and) emotional sadism." Online, people asked why the Massie ghouls were "posing as terrorists," what they were so afraid of, "what the hell is wrong with you?" Parents of school shooting victims posted photos of their dead children; several juxtaposed Massie's atrocity with the 2019 image of a bloodied E.R. in Philadelphia after doctors tried, and failed, to save a teenager shot in the street; many wondered, given the "Christmas" theme, what "the birthday boy Jesus," the "original anti-violence man on earth," would do. Tuesday, after many wiseacres photoshopped the guns into giant dildos and Massie - who evidently finds penises more offensive than dead children - feverishly blocked them, the Knight First Amendment Institute charged he was infringing on their right to free speech per multiple court rulings. They acted on behalf of Techdirt editor Mike Masnick, who had written Massie to point out the violation, after which Massie blocked him. Masnick was philosophical: While Massie's post was loathsome, "the 1st (and) 2nd Amendment allow him to reveal himself as just that kind of person." But Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow has seen too many dead kids not to be enraged, especially after trying for three years to get a GOP-run legislature that's blocked dozens of gun control bills to even recognize the issue of gun violence. "Are we aware now?" she asked in a fiery speech. "Is it close enough to home?" Watch, and weep.
Update: Wow. Classy. Do these obscene trollers ever do any work?
(Abby Zimet has written CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, involved in women's, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues.)
