Instantman has been running several long posts on the Pink Pistols (a gay gun-rights group), and their interactions with the NRA. It’s interesting to read the whole story, but what struck me about it was the intolerance of the gay and liberal community.

From one of Glenn’s correspondents:

I would say there is a consistent bias in the media, both gay and straight but particularly gay, in the way that gun owners and their views on GLBT people are represented. But I don’t think it’s so much a reporting bias as an editorial bias. Now Steve writes an article on the NRA convention. It says what happened, calls out a speaker who was inappropriate, and talks about the Pink Pistols, giving fair coverage to the point that most gun owners are not homophobic. Steve has done his job. But PlanetOut has never before covered the Pink Pistols in any other context. We’ve been the fastest growing gay sporting organization in the country, probably the fastest growing gay group, and we’ve had a pitched legislative battle with a lesbian senator whose most notable achievement was to amend gun- control legislation to allow arbitrary discrimination against anyone, including gay people, and particularly women and the poor (and who was subsequently endorsed by HRC). During that time, news media from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Blade covered the Pink Pistols, but PlanetOut was nowhere to be seen. Hmm.

Continuing along that line, I note that I never read an article in the gay media like “Gay gun owners say NRA members pretty friendly to them”. We got positive coverage in Gun Week and Guns & Ammo. Does PlanetOut report that? “Gay gun group praised in Guns & Ammo” is just as important a headline as “At NRA gathering, speakers ridicule gays”, isn’t it? Everyone expects Schlussel to mouth off, so is that really bigger news than a gay-friendly gun group getting great coverage in gun media and being invited to speak at lots of pro-gun events, which many gay people claim is impossible?

I found it interesting (but no longer surprising, particularly after the Dr. Laura deal), that the gun rights people seem to be much more tolerant of gays, than the gay and liberal community is of gun activists. It really shatters the stereotypes, and further highlights the hypocrisy of their ongoing demands for “acceptance” and “tolerance.” Don’t expect to read about this in the mainstream press…

Jonathan Last is shocked to discover that gun owners are not only human, but they’re, well…good people.

And I’m shocked to discover that the editor of the Weekly Standard on-line is shocked by this. This, to me, is simply evidence of how pervasive anti-gun hysteria is in our culture.

Jonathan Last is shocked to discover that gun owners are not only human, but they’re, well…good people.

And I’m shocked to discover that the editor of the Weekly Standard on-line is shocked by this. This, to me, is simply evidence of how pervasive anti-gun hysteria is in our culture.

Jonathan Last is shocked to discover that gun owners are not only human, but they’re, well…good people.

And I’m shocked to discover that the editor of the Weekly Standard on-line is shocked by this. This, to me, is simply evidence of how pervasive anti-gun hysteria is in our culture.

The always-dependable (when it comes to spouting imbecilities) Richard Reeves sends in a missive from whatever planet he inhabits–it’s clearly not this one. The basic theme is that Mr. Bush is not up to the job, and that he will therefore be a one-termer.

It’s so full of chocolaty stupidity, I hate to excerpt it, but I will anyway. Fortunately, it’s short. His talent (as it were) is such that he manages to pack a whole universe of idiocy in a very brief bit of mental flatulence.

This was a day in the life of the president of the United States, Thursday, April 18, 2002:

• The circumstances of endless savagery in the Middle East forced him to look into a television camera and tell the world that Ariel Sharon (news – web sites) is “a man of peace.”

  Well, it seems to me that things have been a lot more peaceful over there in the past couple weeks. At least no more Israeli bat mitzvahs have been interrupted by murderers disassembling themselves.

• Halfway around the world, on the West Bank, the U.N. peace envoy to the Middle East, a Norwegian hardly given to flamboyant language, one of the first outsiders to inspect Mr. Sharon’s recent work, looked into other cameras and said: “Horrifying, horrifying … Israel has lost all moral ground in this conflict.”

  No, he’s only given to flamboyent language when the subject is Israel. When it comes to Arafat, and his bomb factories, and his exhortations to murder, and his booby-trapped refugee camps, and his unending lies, and his general violation of every single tenet of the Oslo agreement for which he won his Norwegian peace prize, our Norwegian friend seems to have lost his tongue.

• In Kabul and Washington, members of the forces commanded by President Bush (news – web sites) had to face the cameras and apologize for the killing of Canadian soldiers, our best friends, by American bombs in yet another friendly-fire incident of the kind that punctuates long-distance, high- tech warfare.

  Yes, Richard. This is war. And even if weren’t, people are often killed in training (typically a couple dozen per year in each service, I believe). It is tragic, but these are real weapons, with real explosives, and sometimes things happen. It’s not a good day for a President when they do, but it’s certainly not a challenge to his presidency.

• Back on television, the president gave a lecture to the elected president of Venezuela, an incompetent, if charismatic, lefty named Hugo Chavez, who had been overthrown two days before with some help and cheers from the right-wingers running the middle levels of the Bush State Department. Bush warned Chavez that he better do more of what we consider the right things, or we’ll get his army after him again.

  Incompetent? He seems to be pretty competent at retaining power, like most thugs. And I didn’t hear Mr. Bush say any such thing, but then, as I say, Mr. Reeves lives on a different plane of existence.

From there he drifts off into total incoherence and irrelevance. And when I get to the end, I still don’t know why Bush will only serve one term.

What an interesting day to break this story–the seventh anniversary of the OKC bombing.

If it’s to be believed, the Clinton Administration and FBI covered up evidence that Terry Nichols met with Iraqi agents prior to the bombing.

Why? We may never know for sure, but I would presume that it was more politically useful for Mr. Clinton, in the midst of his post-1994-loss-of-Congress irrelevancy, to demonize the American “right wing,” in the form of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, and to not distract people from that with Middle East connections that would then have to be actually dealt with…

It will be interesting to see what effect this will have in November at the polls. If it’s true, the Dems are in big, big trouble.

Remember the vandalism to the White House by outgoing Clinton Administration staffers, that was later denied (and basically ignored by the Bush Administration, which wanted to “set a new tone”)?

Well, the GAO has confirmed that it was true.

Those who have seen the GAO report, a preliminary document, say as many as 75 computer keyboards had to be replaced — at a cost of more than $5,000 — because Clinton staffers had broken off the W keys, a jab at George W. Bush, the winner of the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election, who was often referred to during the campaign as W.

I wonder if those are special keyboards of some kind? Seventy bucks for a keyboard seems kind of pricy, but I tend to go for the five-dollar specials at Fry’s.

Two historic doorknobs were stolen from the Old Executive Office Building along with a presidential seal, valued at $350, said the sources, who could not detail how the rest of the damages were inflicted.

Chairs and telephone tables were broken, desks were overturned, garbage was strewn in offices and telephone lines were cut, the GAO report says, but does not, in each case, attribute the acts to vandalism.

OK, now let’s pull the string on the top, and let the spinning begin…

Democrats dismissed the findings of the investigation ? which they say cost about $200,000 to conduct just to find $14,000 in damages.

So, generously assuming that those numbers aren’t lies, let me make sure I have this right. No one should have to be held accountable for their actions if the cost of identifying misbehavior exceeds the cost of the actual damages. Is that the argument here?

So, if someone is burgling, and they only steal a couple hundred bucks worth of stuff, but holding a trial might cost many hundreds, or thousands, of dollars, we should just ignore it?

In what moral swamp do these people reside?

And now that the truth is out, it also demonstrates just what kind of juveniles were running the country for eight years.

John McWhorter and others have described how many of the things that hold blacks back in America are a function of their own cultural attitudes, in which studiousness or scholarship are derided, or even ostracized, as “acting white.”

This phenomenon carries through all the way to college, in which many talented people are channeled into “African-American Studies” (just as many innocent women are cheated of a true education in “Women’s Studies” departments), rather than into something that offers prospects for professions and productive endeavors beyond being African-American Studies professors.

I ran across this very good article in the Village Voice that deals with the specific issues of black scientists involved with NASA and astronomy, and how they’re often denigrated and discouraged by their own community. I highly recommend it.

But less obvious is that NASA’s move injects life into color-blind disciplines that black scientists say have been eclipsed within their own community by more overtly Afrocentric pursuits. Some top students lifted their faces from difficult physics textbooks only to receive what amounted to a slap from a black hand.

One example: Two African American undergraduate students on the Harvard University wrestling team were walking from the gym. The younger one, a kid from the Bronx named Neil, complained that his astrophysics courses weren’t leaving him time to sleep. The banter stopped as abruptly as their footfalls.

“Blacks in America do not have the luxury of your intellectual talents being spent on astrophysics,” declared the elder student, waving his hand in front of Neil’s chest. That indictment, recounted in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s autobiography, The Sky Is Not the Limit, rings fresh in him today, though he’s an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, where he also teaches classes for the CUNY program.

No, obviously what blacks in America need are more Cornel Wests, not people who discover, and impart real knowledge.

I’m seeing some reports from people on the ground in Florida that a story’s going to break tomorrow that Juan Gonzales (remember, Elian’s poppa?) requested asylum three times from Janet “Roast the Waco Kids” Reno while he was holed up in the Cuban embassy in DC, and was repeatedly denied.

The implications for both the integrity of the INS during the Clinton administration, and Janet’s gubernatorial bid, are immense.

[Wednesday morning update]

While it isn’t direct confirmation of the original rumor, the Miami Herald is reporting that INS was considering granting asylum to Elian, because there was some evidence that Poppa had requested it for himself. The real news, though, is that Doris Meissner ordered the relevant memo destroyed the day after it was written, and furthermore, ordered that no more written communications on the subject occur.

I wonder if Ms. Meissner’s phone logs are available, and if they’ll show any calls from the White House?