Thursday, April 18, 2013

Everything you know is wrong

...is more than the title of a great Firesign Theater album.  It's a philosophy of life which has stood me in good stead (whatever that means) for many years. 

With all hell breaking loose, not everyone may have kept up with the Kaufman County, Texas, assassinations.  The district attorney and his wife were shot to death in their house, and an assistant district attorney was gunned down in the courthouse parking lot.  Everybody -- and you know who you are -- knew it was the work of the Aryan Brotherhood, a violent prison gang who have the ability to reach out and kill anyone they want.  Were the killings related to the murder of the Colorado director of prisons?  Who would be next?  Why?  What?

Yesterday police arrested a former justice of the peace and his wife and charged them with the three crimes.  Mr. Williams is a former j.p. because he was caught allegedly stealing computers from the courthouse.  It looks as if he and the wife decided to get even, as you do in Texas when you have a gun.  Williams was Wayne LaPierre's archetypal "good guy with a gun" right up to the moment he shot ADA Hasse, who also had a gun but had no time to draw it. 

On a day when they were celebrating the Senate's predictably craven refusal to require even modest background checks for gun purchases, the NRA became a parody of itself, a bad SNL sketch.  Apparently guns don't keep you safe, and just as apparently, the answer to any situation is not more guns.  Oh, and publishing photos of innocent bystanders and accusing them of horrific crimes?  Also not a good idea.  Rupert Murdoch and his minions should stop pretending to be journalists and stick to something they know, like hacking Hugh Grant's phone.  Building a  nursing home and two schools in the shadow of an enormous fertilizer plant was another questionable move.  Forcing air traffic controllers to sit home instead of landing planes because the T-party hates Barack Obama...look, before you act on the basis of what you know you know...

Read the title again.

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