My present to you this morning is a gun nut mouthing the predictable “arm every soldier at Ft Hood” idiocy getting smacked down, hard, by a Medal of Honor recipient Jack Jacobs. Jacobs won’t tolerate being interrupted, and he tells the gun shill to “be quiet” and “stop being rude”, while Chris Jansing mainly sits there like a bump on a log.
There are many things to dislike about cable “news”, but the stupidity of the constant interruption and talking over each other is certainly one thing that Tip and Ronny would have agreed upon over drinks in the Oval Office. A political discussion doesn’t need to sound like an episode of Maury Povich, but apparently the producers of these shows think that it’s a key component of their awful “product”.
RuhRow_Gyro
The most interesting aspect of the encounter was the female with the gun confronting the shooter. At the point of action, the female with the gun hesitated, but even the hesitant female with a gun was enough for the shooter to off himself.
Amir Khalid
Guests on shows like this should be told in advance by the producer: “We don’t tolerate guests interrupting other guests. Those who do will have their microphone cut off, and be rebuked on the air. No exceptions.”
somethingblue
John Lott making a rare appearance under his own name.
Jane2
John Lott?? How can anyone take cable “news” seriously.
Botsplainer
Lott is a douchebag of the first order. He never served, but like every other chubby wingnut pundit, believes himself an expert on guns and military policy and the patriotic duty to send other young men off to conflict to show that ‘Murka is strong. As an academic, his research is shoddy, but he’s been contributing heavily to the miasmic cloud of conservative propaganda (which has bee every effective at swaying opinion through lies and race baiting) for nearly 30 years.
Here’s hoping that he blows his own fucking skull out in a gun cleaning accident. The world would be a better place.
Biscuits
What’s with the eyebrows? Don’t mean to be rude.
WereBear
To quote a John D. McDonald novel: Let’s hope their Kraft is Ebbing.
Pogonip
@Amir Khalid: All those interruptions are why I hate cable news in general and Fox in particular. My mom is now too senile to follow a TV show but before that she was all Fox, all the time, and I’d just hate to try to hold a conversation having to shout to be heard over those shouting idiots on TV. If a TV host can’t control his panel of assperts–Er, experts–he ought to be replaced by someone who can.
Villago Delenda Est
The producers know that this sort of conflict is entertaining to the majority of their audience, and they are there, their jobs are, to entertain that audience so the audience can be sold to the true customers of the networks, the advertisers. That it degrades the political discourse is irrelevant. You can’t monetize that, but you can monetize ratings.
mai naem
@Pogonip: I had an aquaintance that I saw everyday during the 08 election who had Fox news on all the time during the Rev. Jeremiah Wright issue. Fox had his clips on a loop. They were playing his “not god bless America” clip at least ten times an hour. It was like watching a modern version of a Hitler rally.
Villago Delenda Est
@Botsplainer: Lott was caught running a sockpuppet to approve his own comments in an internet forum back in the 90s.
As somethingblue alludes to, quite nicely.
He’s a vile sack of shit.
Cassidy
Such an interesting display of dominance training.
mai naem
I saw a blurb at TPM that Stephen Colbert is the favorite to take over Letterman’s spot. I don’t know if I want him to leave his Oreilly persona yet back at Comedy Central! Also too, I think Jon Stewart would be better at the regular talk show kind of show.
Pogonip
@Pogonip: Someone such as Col. Jacobs, for instance! A man who says those three little words–“Wait your turn!”–when needed.
I found myself in the odd position of agreeing with both of them. No responsible commander would allow his entire command to walk around post armed, but it is also true that at a DOD installation a crazy man knows he’s guaranteed a large number of helpless targets. The solution, I believe, is many more trained, armed MPs, but I fear DOD will not go for that because that’s money they could spend on consultants.
JPL
The second video is interesting. It was someone talking to Hannity about kids right here in America getting drunk. When the blond person was in college, she saw college kids in Cancun act that way but now it’s in Florida. I’m shocked to find out that college students go to Florida during spring break and get drunk.
Villago Delenda Est
@JPL:
Next you’ll be telling us that the sun rises in the East!
That blonde really should be admonished for perpetuating the dumb blonde stereotype.
Pogonip
@JPL: So am I. The last place I’d get drunk is Florida. Some nut might decide to stand his ground and kill you. If I were in Florida I’d maintain a low profile, something drunks aren’t too good at, and a high state of alertness.
Ash Can
Chicago Tonight is the only current events discussion program I’ll watch. People on that program talk one at a time, in normal voices. As a result, more opinions and ideas are expressed, by everyone involved, in a 10-minute panel discussion on that show than in any complete hour-long installment of generic shoutfest elsewhere on the tube. By an order of magnitude. That more than anything else is what makes all the other news discussion programs a complete waste of time.
Pogonip
@Ash Can: Does Col. Jacobs moderate that program?
SiubhanDuinne
@JPL:
Didn’t these people ever see Where the Boys Are?
Ruckus
@Pogonip:
I have no idea how things have changed in the last 40 yrs but when I was in the Shore Patrol, the base gate guards took their jobs very seriously. A lot of cars searched at random, all levels of rank got the look. I’ve had occasion to visit Edwards AFB on business 20 yrs ago and getting in and around was not easy. Not that it wouldn’t be impossible to have taken a gun or whatever on base but it would have been very risky.
It sounds like your premise is that we need more guns to protect ourselves, at least on a military base. And yet I see the military has proven that far fewer problems arise when guns are much more rigidly controlled.
Villago Delenda Est
@Pogonip:
More money for defense contractors, who then siphon the money to the CEOs of the defense contractors, while providing inferior product (electrocution showers, anyone?) to the troops.
Brian R.
@Biscuits:
My thoughts exactly. He looks like a drag queen after hours.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
OK I see I was going for the theoretical discussion and you were going for the reality.
Booger
Get all Diane Rehm up in his grill, bitchez!!
Ash Can
@Pogonip: Heh! It may be, in all seriousness, that the Chicago Tonight producers and/or moderators do exactly as Amir Khalid mentions at #2, and make it clear to their panelists that cross-talking will not be tolerated. It’s also possible that they limit their invitations to people who understand that it’s far more intellectually and literally economical, not to mention effective, to be able to express a given point in 15 seconds as opposed to the three or four minutes it takes to be heard over the din.
As an aside, it occurs to me that the shoutfests are formatted that way for a reason. The networks have X amount of time to fill with their news discussion programs, and they know that if their guests present their views clearly and concisely, within the context of an orderly format, they won’t come anywhere close to filling the entire time slot. So they have to do something to stretch the proceedings out.
gene108
@JPL:
That was funny. The folks getting plastered in Cancun aren’t Mexicans. I guess she believes, if Americans are going to behave badly, they should do it in another country.
Ivan X
@mai naem: Beg to differ. Stewart’s interviews with any non-political-types are beyond inane, and he’d have to do a lot more of that on a general format show.
Pogonip
@Ruckus: No, my premise is we need more trained, armed MPs, not more guns in general. There are already too many armed crazy people.
Security varies from base to base, depending on the location, the branch, and most importantly, the individual commander. Good commander, good security.
Ruckus
@Ash Can:
I think you are giving them too much credit. Money. That is what is important. Nothing else. How can they make more? Have more sets turned on. Full stop. A quiet discussion gets turned off by most people. Maury Povich made good money having people argue on TV so it must work. TV people are nothing if not regurgitaters of bad ideas, as long as they make money.
Ruckus
@gene108:
So she’s a conservative. The people who think we should act badly in other countries all the time. Usually with weapons.
Ruckus
@Pogonip:
I thought you might mean that. But as most bases are(or were) relatively restricted places, really what used to happen was a control point that was enforced, not a general, we need more cops.
different-church-lady
Most people don’t watch porn for the plot.
Pogonip
@Ruckus: Most bases are a lot less restricted than they were 40 years ago. Many more contractor personnel go in and out , for one thing.
Mike in NC
After 9/11, I never saw a military installation that wasn’t crawling with armed guards around the clock. But they can’t be everywhere. Appears that a whole bunch of idiot GOP politicians have descended on Fort Hood to grandstand about guns. The CO should have had them barred from entering the post. Assholes.
MikeJ
Most of the audience don’t understand the topic being discussed, no matter what the topic is. They can still enjoy a spirited argument about it though. “Hey, that guy got really angry!” The internet is full of conversations that boil down to “you mad, bro?” Why is it surprising that TV is too?
In short, the audience isn’t watching to be informed, they’re watching to be entertained. Cable News could switch to an all Pokemon format and allow people to argue about the best Pokemon and they wouldn’t really have to change much.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
Should, but won’t be. One of the most important moments of TV in the past couple of decades was Geraldo Rivera being whacked with a chair. Having an actual brawl on the air was ratings gold, and even respectable talk shows have focused more on shouting and conflict than rational discussion ever since.
Ruckus
@Pogonip:
So the problem is not too few cops or guns but too much unlimited access. Way too often we see the completely wrong answer that creates a much bigger problem.
BTW I was in the Shore Patrol at Long Beach Naval Station and we had huge amounts of contractors working on the ships. They went through the same gates as the sailors and it didn’t create problems. It was expected. The amount of cars/people entering/leaving the base every day was impressive but there was a massive war effort on and the navy was approx twice the size it is now.
ETA BTW while in the SP I didn’t carry a gun, just a nightstick. The only armed people I remember were the gate guards. We had weapons available, locked in the office but did not carry them.
Pogonip
@Villago Delenda Est: As far as our wonderful Congress is concerned, DOD is primarily the Department of Middle-class Welfare, existing to employ, in the Congressman’s district, engineers, scientists, management consultants, trainers, and other six-figure types. Any actual defense is incidental. This is why generals spend a lot of time begging Congress to close unneeded bases. I think the ultimate solution is to maintain the Department of Middle-Class Welfare as is, and start up another department concerned with actual defense of the nation. They’d handle things like setting up a functioning medical system (for epidemics and biological attacks), repairing the decaying infrastructure, and all the other myriad things that go with real, actual defense. Real, actual defense is not about dropping bombs on shepherds half a world away. Real, actual defense involves careful planning. Consider what you do to ensure your own safety, then multiply that by 350,000,000.
raven
@Ruckus: Jarheads ran the gates at Great Lakes when I was a kind and my old man headed up special services there.
Ruckus
@Pogonip:
That’s an idea!
Of course it makes too much sense so will never get implemented.
Chris
@Pogonip:
Pretty much. The DOD is the only jobs and infrastructure program in the nation that can make it through Congress uncontroversially, so naturally, it gets saddled with more and more of that stuff. (Even in the so-called “liberal consensus” era, Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System had to be presented as a defense program in order to get it past the right wingers in Congress).
Ruckus
@raven:
The gate guards at LBNS were Marines as well, remember the Marines are part of the navy. They’d sometimes like everyone to forget that but so far that hasn’t happened.
Most bases I was on the Marines were gate guards but not all of them as I recall. And the SP was made up of both. For a while I rode with a Marine gunny who was the best drug sniffer I’ve ever seen. No dog had a better nose.
Villago Delenda Est
@Pogonip:
This is true, and it helps explain why Iraq was such a complete custerfuck, quite apart from being an illegal and immoral war of aggression in the first place. von Rumsfailed actually told planners NOT TO PLAN for the occupation…something that is to my military planning trained mind nearly as great as an obscenity as “enhanced interrogation techniques” and “new management” of the rape rooms, headed by Allen West.
Pogonip
We interrupt this discussion for two important updates:
Dailypuppy.com is an exceptionally cute furball today
Goodmorningkitten.com today looks a lot like Tunch.
Enjoy.
Pogonip
@Villago Delenda Est: Rumsfeld should have been charged with first-degree stupidity. Also with impersonating a human being.
dmbeaster
<blockquoteapparently the producers of these shows think that it’s a key component of their awful “product”.
Its always important to remember the extent to which all regular TV news people are actors reading scripts and playing roles based on producer decision making. It is an infotainment business.
Frankensteinbeck
@gene108:
I had all kinds of jokes set up, but really, her audience are 70 year olds, and specifically the 70 year olds who have mistaken episodes of Leave It To Beaver for their own youth. They’re just offended by all these partying kids today who won’t get off of their lawn.
@Villago Delenda Est:
That was one of my major takeaways looking at the mess Iraq and Afghanistan became. We shouldn’t have been in Iraq period, but who even knows if those countries could have been rebuilt peacefully? The Bush administration actually ordered the Pentagon to throw away its plans to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq and said the administration would wing it because they were deciderers. A few years of that kind of thinking, and that pooch cannot be unscrewed.
Redshift
@Booger:
Whaa? I stopped listening to Diane Rehm because centrists and journalists were polite (there were rarely any actual liberals) and conservatives interrupted a lot, and nobody did anything about it. It’s true that nobody shouted, but that’s the lesser part of the problem.
? Martin
@Pogonip: Seat belts and clean drinking water have saved orders of magnitude more Americans than 300 million privately owned firearms.
Villago Delenda Est
@Frankensteinbeck: The stage was set when Eric Shinseki testified that we’d need a lot more warm bodies to occupy Iraq properly than we had in uniform, which of course did not fit with the deserting coward malassministration line, and Shinseki was shown the door as Army Chief of Staff for giving a professional assessment that conflicted with neocon fantasy.
Pogonip
@? Martin: More than likely so. Definitely the clean water.
mattH
Who is Mary Rosh? (Sorry, every time Lott shows up, you have to post it)
PurpleGirl
@Pogonip: You know what is important in life — cute animals.
Frankensteinbeck
@Villago Delenda Est:
And it really was a fantasy. Cheney wrote a paper laying it all out. He (and presumably everyone around him) believed that if America went in and kicked the shit out of a Middle Eastern country, they would rebuild as a pro-American democracy so perfect that the entire Middle East would be transformed as every country begged for their turn. We wouldn’t have to directly control a puppet state. Everyone would want to kiss our boots.
That is neocon dogma, and the spectacular failures in Afghanistan and Iraq didn’t make the neocons reconsider for one second.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think it’s based in large part on the myth of World War Two (maybe combined with a fondness for Hollywood endings in which when the Emperor dies, the galaxy rejoices, and everything’s happily over within ten minutes of that). They remember That Glorious Time that Americans went overseas and kicked Hitler in the face and freed Europe and just look at how successful and democratic Europe is now! And they somehow completely forget the years and vast amounts of resources that were sunk into Europe AFTER World War Two (Marshall Plan). After all, that stuff doesn’t make for good action movies.
El Cid
@Frankensteinbeck: One difference, though, is that the Allies in WWII really cared how Europe actually turned out.
When it came down to it, though, folks like Cheney and the Administraiton just didn’t give a shit. If it went the way they thought it might, if it didn’t, not much skin off their nose if any, and certainly not compared to what they gained.
Ruckus
@Chris:
There was, if I’m not mistaken a lot of planning that went on during and after WWII. It was understood that getting a huge amount of humans to do anything in some fashion required massive planning. Even doing the wrong thing required it. Just winging an entire war? Just letting things happen without planning should have been an impeachable offense, I mean considering what the last impeachable offense was.
Chris
@Ruckus:
I think that was the war that gave us Ike’s saying “plans are nothing, planning is everything.” Certainly Roosevelt, Truman, Marshall, and the rest understood that very well.
@El Cid:
I think this is pretty much our entire society in a nutshell, actually.
We are ruled by people who don’t give a shit whether anything works or not, because it doesn’t affect them. Railroad and coal tycoons a hundred years ago might have been utter assholes to their workers, but at least they were trying to keep the coal coming and the railroads running. Nowadays, CEOs actively break things and jump ship in their golden parachutes, looking for the next victim and leaving everyone behind to sink. Politics is just following the same model.
From their POV, why should they care whether anything works? They have all the money in the world. They’re hilariously unlikely to ever be convicted of anything. They live in a world with no consequences. Their actions flow naturally from that.
ETA: thanks to wingnut welfare, all this applies to politicians (and many other jobs) as much as the MOTU. IF they follow the party line, they’re set for life. It used to be you could scare politicians with “if you want to get reelected, pay attention,” but nowadays they’re more worried about finding themselves booted out of the club than booted out of office.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
And post-war Europe was a lot more tightly controlled than people like to remember. Former German soldiers were kept in tightly controlled camps, and the whole country was occupied by millions of foreign troops. Oh, and there was no tradition of large-scale private ownership of military firearms, so the only source of weapons for resistance was the former military, which had been comprehensively disarmed. There wasn’t much capacity for resistance, and any attempt could have been crushed, either by military force or simply by stopping distribution of imported food, which the country depended on even when it hadn’t been devastated by more than half a decade of total war.
sharl
@mattH: I like to type “Mary Rosh” into the search box at the Wikipedia website, then watch what happens.
{And yes, I AM easily amused.}
Mark B.
I never realized how much Lott looks like Baron Harkkonnen from the David Lynch Dune movie before I saw this clip.
Mark B.
I never realized how much Lott looks like Baron Harkkonnen from the David Lynch Dune movie before I saw this clip.
MathInPA
It’s interesting to note just how completely wrong the gun nuts are about safety here. They are describing fantasies, as was pointed out above, not too different from the Iraq and Afghanistan ones, and it all needs to be confronted more often. Too many people just accept that the idea of putting more guns in an area would serve as a deterrent has “some valid points but.” It’s… I mean, every aspect of what they say is wrong.
More guns make things less safe. They increase the number of accidents and of lethal conflicts. People are too willing to use them, and the consequences of mistakes in maintenance, let alone practice, are too high.
More guns make it harder to stop killers. We’ve seen plenty of reports in the latest wave of gunfail of officers or even other intervening citizens either hesitating (which could be fatal in the wrong situation) because they couldn’t tell whether or not the guy pointing a gun at someone else was the killer or someone trying to hold off the killer, or of tackling or otherwise trying to take down someone who intervened for the same reason
More guns do not deter these massacres. The conservative fantasy that crises are about will and guts and staredowns into the soul is nonsense; these killers are moral cowards, not physical. Most of them already want to die, and having more guns around doesn’t deter that calculation.
Which brings us to the final point: more guns do not mean that it’s easier to stop a gunman. If your gun is in a holster, in a bag, even on the table in easy reach, you -still- will be crucial seconds awcay from responding. The one with the gun already out, with intent and desire to kill, has a huge advantage. And even if the bar or the movie theater or whatever erupts in bullets, _the gunman’s goal will be achieved_. People will die. From a certain point of view, the well-armed area is a FRIEND to someone who wants to cause death and destruction.
TR
John Lott must have the world’s tiniest dick.
Ruckus
@TR:
I’m not checking.
But that would be a big club he’d be in. Well not a big club, no wait, an enormous club? That’s not right. OK, a club with a lot of small members. Did I just type that?
JaneE
My husband was a Marine during the Korean Conflict. He says that back then, the only people on base who carried arms were the ones on guard duty. At least now they can tell who the shooter is – if more people are firing guns at each other, how do you decide which ones are the bad guys?