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-Land of the Free
Bill Moyers: NRA is an armed bully
2013-12-19
A hard rule in American journalism is you can trash an amorphous group, just don't target an individual.

Moyers bravely does this as he burnishes his fascist credentials.
Back when Charlton Heston made that defiant boast at the NRA convention -- that gun control advocates would have to pry his rifle from his cold dead hands -- he must have thought he was back in the fantasy world of Hollywood, re-living his roles as those famous Indian killers Andrew Jackson and Buffalo Bill Cody, whose Wild West, as he called it, courses through the bloodstream of American mythology. For sure, Heston was not channeling his most famous role as Moses striding down from Mount Sinai with a tablet of stone inscribed with God's blueprint for a civilized society, including the commandment: "Thou Shalt Not Kill."
It helps, Bill, if you ignore the egregious encroachment of government in privates lives, which has accelerated since 2001, so the straw man of Hollywood fantasy works. Otherwise it's just as old and tired as the notion that the government protects everyone with the draconian guns law we have on the books.
Rant on.
Oh. My. God. Mr. Moyers, as I recall, is "The Power of Myth" man. As such, it behooves him to get it right more than the rest of those bleating about "Thou shalt not kill." What it says in the original Hebrew, my dear pseudo-intellectual, is, "No murdering." To murder, since you seem to be having difficulties with your native tongue, is to kill unlawfully. There are plenty of Hebrew Bible laws requiring lawful killing, such as the waging of war, the punishment of certain crimes, and even the occasional case of taking revenge. You probably don't recall that Judith, in the time of the Judges of the Israelites -- she was a judge in good standing, as it happens, an early example of the standing of women in the Jewish tradition, as it happens -- invited an enemy general to her tent for dinner, fed him, then killed him by pounding a tent peg through his skull as he slept. Not murder, and therefore highly approved.
/Rant
But the good lord seems not to have anticipated the National Rifle Association. Its conscience as cold and dead as Charlton Heston's grip on his gun, the NRA has become the armed bully of American politics, the enabler of the gunfighter nation, whose exceptionalism includes a high tolerance for the slaughter of the innocent. "Mother Jones" magazine reports that at least 194 children have been shot to death since Newtown. 127 of them died in their own homes and dozens more in the homes of friends, neighbors, and relatives, not strangers. 72 pulled the trigger themselves or were shot by another youngster.
Terrible. No excuse for poor firearms handling and for killing of victims outside of self defense.
And I didn't know Bill Moyers was a Christian. Cool! We can reliably expect him to STFU about guns any moment now.
My native state of Texas leads the country in the number of young ones killed by guns. While some states passed tougher firearms legislation after Newtown, Texas enacted ten new laws against sane restrictions on guns.
That's "sane", sirrah. Though why anything known to be ineffective in its design would be considered sane is beyond me.
Which is partly why last month, four women had lunch at a restaurant just outside Dallas. It was a planning meeting for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, that's a group started after Newtown that describes itself as the "Mothers Against Drunk Driving of gun reform."
Oh, good. Another group created to massage government statistics in order to direct public policy, and further reinforce a state monopoly on armed violence. It is called using the armed might of the state as your personal agenda-enforcing army. You know that morality thing, Bill, you know, the Lord? Something not quite moral about attacking your citizens using the power of the state. I don't think that is what He had in mind.
As the four women ate and talked, about 40 members of a pro-gun group called Open Carry Texas -- champions of guns anywhere and everywhere -- gathered outside the restaurant, many of them with their firearms. They said they were there not to intimidate but to make a point. Sure, as if real men need guns to make a point.
Moyers is writing about a false event; I know, surprising for a liberal, right?. The event with the open carry folks was planned weeks before this incident, and as far as I know, none of the two groups interacted, so there was no, as in zero intimidation. And if there was, there's a simple solution. Get a gun.
So it goes. "Thou Shalt Not Kill,"
See rant, above.
but if you do, hide behind the Second Amendment, made holier and more sacrosanct by the NRA than God's own commandment.
I said it before: With something north of 150 million firearms int the US, the peace that that has brought is a testament to undoing our firearms laws.
Posted by:badanov

#10  Meyers is a dipshit who is deliberately misleading with that statistic. Texas is on of the largest states, so it will have more of everything. That's why people use per capita, as above. Raw number in this context are a sign of the extremely dishonest or terminally stupid (or both)
Posted by: OldSpook   2013-12-19 23:25  

#9  My native state of Texas leads the country in the number of young ones killed by guns.

An interesting statistic, but what does it actually mean?

First, gun deaths is an aggregate that includes suicides, accidents and murder. For suicide, guns are matter of convenience - getting rid of guns won't change the suicide rate.

So let's look at murders, specifically the murder rate, since total murders is misleading (although nice for statistical hysteria!). 2010 data from Wikipedia (I know!) says the state with the highest gun murder rate at 16.5 per 100,000 is Washington, DC. Not Texas. But we'll give Bill a pass since DC is not really a state. Next is Louisiana at 7.7, followed by Missouri (5.4), Maryland (5.1), and South Carolina (4.5). Texas? They are at 3.2 murders per 100,000.

You might conclude that Mr. Moyers is trying to mislead you. But don't worry, it's for your own good!

And yeah, what Iblis said in #4.
Posted by: SteveS   2013-12-19 19:45  

#8  Bill Moyers: NRA is an armed bully says supporter of IRS abusing president who directs spending 4 trillion per year extortion racket.
Posted by: Bright Pebbles   2013-12-19 17:46  

#7  Moyers served as assistant news editor for KTBC radio and television stations--owned by Lady Bird Johnson...

:) Yeah Lady Bird. Lyndon was only a freelance ad salesman ya see.
Posted by: Shipman   2013-12-19 16:06  

#6  The blather of a nasty hothouse liberal:

He started his journalism career at sixteen as a cub reporter at the Marshall News Messenger in Marshall, Texas. In college, he studied journalism at the North Texas State College in Denton, Texas. In 1954, then-U.S. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson employed him as a summer intern and eventually promoted him to manage Johnson's personal mail. Moyers transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, where he wrote for The Daily Texan newspaper. In 1956, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism. While in Austin, Moyers served as assistant news editor for KTBC radio and television stations—owned by Lady Bird Johnson... During Senator Johnson's unsuccessful bid for the 1960 Democratic U.S. presidential nomination, Moyers served as a top aide, and in the general campaign he acted as liaison between Democratic vice-presidential candidate Johnson and the Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy.

During the Kennedy Administration, Moyers was first appointed as associate director of public affairs for the newly created Peace Corps [and] served as Deputy Director from 1962 to 1963. When Lyndon B. Johnson took office after the Kennedy assassination, Moyers became a special assistant to Johnson [and] played a key role in organizing and supervising the 1964 Great Society legislative task forces and was a principal architect of Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign. Moyers acted as the President's informal chief of staff from October 1964 until 1966... [H]e also served as White House press secretary. After the resignation of White House Chief of Staff Walter Jenkins because of a sexual misdemeanor in the run up to the 1964 election, President Lyndon B. Johnson, alarmed that the opposition was framing the issue as a security breach, ordered Moyers to request FBI name checks on 15 members of Goldwater's staff to find "derogatory" material on their personal lives. The Church Committee stated in 1975 that "Moyers has publicly recounted his role in the incident, and his account is confirmed by FBI documents." Moyers also sought information from the FBI on the sexual preferences of White House staff members, most notably Jack Valenti. Moyers indicated his memory was unclear on why Johnson directed him to request such information, "but that he may have been simply looking for details of allegations first brought to the president by Hoover." Moyers approved the infamous "Daisy Ad" against Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign.

In a 2003 interview with BuzzFlash.com, Moyers said, "The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won." He added that as "the corporate and governing elites are helping themselves to the spoils of victory," access to political power has become "who gets what and who pays for it." Meanwhile, the public has failed to react because it is, in his words, "distracted by the media circus and news has been neutered or politicized for partisan purposes... As Eric Alterman reports in his recent book—a book that I'm proud to have helped make happen—part of the red meat strategy is to attack mainstream media relentlessly, knowing that if the press is effectively intimidated, either by the accusation of liberal bias or by a reporter's own mistaken belief in the charge's validity, the institutions that conservatives revere—corporate America, the military, organized religion, and their own ideological bastions of influence—will be able to escape scrutiny and increase their influence over American public life with relatively no challenge."
Posted by: Pappy   2013-12-19 15:26  

#5  
"Armed bullies" twenty years ago last April. Wasn't stopped then, wasn't stopped with F&F either.
Posted by: Besoeker   2013-12-19 11:36  

#4  If that were true you wouldn't dare say so. The fact that a coward like you feels comfortable repeating such drivel is proof positive that no one anywhere feels threatened by the NRA.
Posted by: Iblis   2013-12-19 11:02  

#3  Moyers doesn't mention the government's role in gunwalking. He doesn't mention the crimes committed by the thugocracy in this country. Leave the NRA alone--they support the vets, they support our Constitution, and they support gun rights and legally armed citizens. Moyers, go find some other group to target or do a hit piece on. You could write a travel piece or something on cooking.
Posted by: JohnQC   2013-12-19 10:40  

#2  Funny, after Sandyhook NRA said that they should have armed folks in schools. Recent events had a shooter and an armed guard and the event ended with minimal tragedy. Seems Moyer should be rethinking the NRA, perhaps they have a few ideas worth considering..
Posted by: rjschwarz   2013-12-19 09:30  

#1  Such a terrible thing the Constitution is, right Bill. Now if we can all be gentlemen and just agree to do away with it to impose our will without regard to being stuck with something a bunch of old white men composed over two hundred years ago (as opposed to all those successful autocracies in say, Africa or Asia that didn't depended upon the racist Enlightenment as a guide in governance)./sarc off

From the man who made his millions on the dole of the American tax payer. Certainly a captain of the Plantation House system.
Posted by: P2Kontheroad   2013-12-19 09:02  

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