The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions

Public opinion is driven by mass caprice.  When the subject is “American Idol”, that’s fairly harmless (and where the hell is Ruben Studdard?).

When the subject is our civil liberties – especially the ones that are less popular with the coastal media “elites” that would set the popular tone? Less so.

P.J. O’Rourke, many of you know, is a conservative humorist and, as such, one of the great public intellectuals of the past forty years.  In his classic A Parliament of Whores  – which is rapidly pushing 25 years old and in a just world would be required reading in every high school civics class – O’Rourke summed up the capriciousness of democracy, defending the contrarian idea that our democracy is, in fact, protected by the most counterintuitively autocratic institution of them all, the Supreme Court.

The SCOTUS – and the Constitution that the SCOTUS is supposed to protect – is that way because it’s intended to be immune from the vagaries of public opinion.

Here’s the money quote from Parliament (with emphasis added):

“In the final D-day invasion results, Normandy was a decisive winner, with 54% of the votes, while 43% of American soldiers thought we should re-invade North Africa and only 4% favored a massive land, sea and air attack on the folks back home.” There wouldn’t even be any democracy to defend if our every national whim were put into law. We’d sacrifice the whole Constitution for those lost kids on milk cartons one week, and the next week we’d toss the Rights of Man out the window to help victims of date rape.

After every crisis large and small – drug abuse, naughty words in music lyrics, gay marriage, food poisoning, people opposing gay marriage, mass murder – there are, inevitably, calls to reconsider whether freedom is really all that much more important than public safety.

And always, always, there’s someone out there willing to profit politically from those calls.

Especially when there are children involved.  Propose cutting welfare?  “Children will starve!”.  Propose paring back teachers union benefits or pensions? “Kids will turn stupid.  Invade Iraz?  The anti-war movement ten years ago made a grab for “absolute moral authority” by parading Cindy Sheehan in front of the cameras, after she lost her child (an adult who’d volunteered for the Army) in Iraq.  And it worked – until Sheehan went batspittle crazy and started making Mike Malloy look pretty well-balanced.

Anyway – this impulse is never as powerful as after an ugly mass shooting – and Sandy Hook, in which a deranged “adult” targeted children because they were children, was the ugliest since the Stockton Massacre in 1988.

There’s no question about it; losing a child is the most awful thing a parent can experience.     It strikes a chord in just about every parent, one way or the other.  It’s impossible for a parent not to feel something way beyond sympathy.  Some respond “I have to protect my children”.

Others respond “someone’s gotta protect my children”.

A group of the Newtown/Sandy Hook parents were flown to Washington last week, their every motion from leaving their homes to getting on Air Force One to arriving at the White House to listening to President Obama’s angry rant over the failure of his bill recorded in minute detail.  (It’s worth noting that it was only the right Sandy Hook parents were invited – and that for some reason no parents of black kids murdered in Chicago showed up)

They believed, I’m sure, very sincerely that the Senate’s bill – which would not have impeded their kids’ murderer in the least – was the right response to their childrens’ deaths.

But the prominence they got in the media – from a President who was desperate to pass his bill in the Senate, to get his vote in the House to try to use guns as leverage in swing districts in 2014, and to draw attention away from debt, deficit, spending, taxes, an ongoing war and the gathering disaster that is Obamacare?  That was pure, distilled cynicism.

Twin Cities talk show host Bob Davis – morning guy at AM1130, which is a cheap copy of AM1280, and a guy who gave me my first shot at trying talk radio again, ten years ago last January when I filled in for him for an evening on his old KSTP-AM night-side show – has taken a ton of flak for his remarks about the exploitation of the Sandy Hook parents and their grief (and especially other parents’ fear):

I have something I want to say to the victims of Newtown or any other shooting, I don’t care if it’s here in Minneapolis or anyplace else: Just because a bad thing happened to you doesn’t mean that you get to put a king in charge of my life. I’m sorry that you suffered a tragedy, but you know what? Deal with it, and don’t force me to lose my liberty, which is a greater tragedy than your loss.

I’m sick and tired of seeing these victims trotted out, given rides on Air Force One, hauled into the Senate well, and everyone is … terrified of these victims. I would stand in front of them and tell them, ‘Go to hell.’

The comment has gotten the usual manufactured outrage by the national leftymedia, and the inevitable chest-thumping “come here and say that!“.

The responses – on both sides, really – miss two key points:

  • Davis is fighting cynicism – the Administration’s exploitation of the parents – with cynicism; major-market radio lives by the dictum “all publicity is good publicity”.  Wanna picket the station?  Send hate mail?  Burn Davis and Emmer in effigy in front of the TV cameras?  The folks at the station say “Great, go for it!”. The station can’t pay for publicity like this.  (No, literally – they can’t.  KTCN’s owner Clear Channel is freaking broke).
  • Davis is right – but is focused on the wrong people.

The parents?  Yep, they’re awash in grief.  They’re trying to bring some meaning to a really, really horrible loss.  I sympathize with them.

Every parent worthy of the title does.

And the people who booked them on Air Force One, and who made sure they got prominent placement (some might say “overkill”) in the media, and who made sure they were staring down from the gallery at the Senators as they voted on the President’s bill, which would have been meaningless in fighting crime, would have made law-abiding gun owners more vulnerable to confiscation, and which was never intended to do anything but increase the Democrat party’s fortunes in 2014?

Them?

They can go to hell, all right.

19 thoughts on “The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions

  1. I am no fan of Bob “anything for a laugh” Davis nor Tom “I got screwed” Emmer and stopped listening to them shortly after they started. However, I commend Mr. Davis for summing up feelings I have long felt; you have my sympathy, prayers, and the few bucks I may donate, but your loss doesn’t ENTITLE you to anything of mine that’s irrelevant to your issue. Maybe not even things relevant.

    Unless we can shed ourselves of the “victim as winner, it’s better to be pitied than to be respected, every wrong deserves a payoff” mentality, we can kiss our standards of success, achievement, and progress goodbye.

  2. A while back, there was (and may still be) an abortion survivor who would speak at pro-life rallies. I wonder what the Mpls paper would think if Congresswoman Bachmann would parade her around congress next time an abortion bill come up.

    I hate the idea of using people as props.

  3. In his classic A Parliament of Whores – which is rapidly pushing 25 years old

    Ouch. That’s just mean.

  4. Eliminating the use of dead children to pass legislation would deal a severe blow to the output of Minnesota’s Senior US Senator, Vanilla Fluff.
    As for Bob Davis, it was probably too soon to have that reaction – but I understand the frustration. They don’t call them shameless politicians for nothing.
    Our Democrat Dominated Media Culture has likely already written the story for the first plane crash due to (tangentially connected or not) the furlough of air traffic controllers because of sequestration.

  5. I’m not willing to let the parents off the hook. It might have been tougher to identify them as willing accomplises to Barry Sotero’s attack on the constitution if they had been uniformly of a mind.

    …but they’re not.

    I don’t have an accurate count (because the MSM ignored them), but more than 1 grieving family stepped forward to say they didn’t want their grief to be used as a weapon against our constitutional rights of self protection.

  6. Davis can be a moron. But, occasionally something accidentally slips out of his never-resting lips. He merely said what a lot of us were thinking. Now the question becomes whether or not AM 1130’s management will have the spine to NOT reprimand him.

  7. Connecticut’s regulations regarding firearms did exactly as planned, prevented Adam Lanza from purchasing a firearm. So he did what many criminals do to obtain firearms…he stole them, and used the stolen firearm to commit his crime.

    An aquaintance recently lost a daughter to a drug overdose. I wouldn’t be so insensitive to even ask (let alone so inhumanly callous as to parade her around for the media to further an agenda) if she took any comfort in the fact that the drugs that took her daughters life were, in fact, illegal.

    It doesn’t seem that it is that difficult to obtain what is likely the most heavily regulated (if not outright banned) “product” out there…that also doesn’t happen to have the backing of a right for any law abiding citizen to own…Constitutionally guaranteed.

  8. There was a time in radio when you could take it the bank that episodes like this were planned, or if not actually planned then at least followed up for promotional value, maybe with a much-hyped (and paid) “suspension” followed by a triumphal (and lavishly publicized) return to the air. Episodes like these used to be promoters’ dreams

    It remains to be seen if Clear Channel are radio people or bean counters.

    Seems ghoulish to you? Major market radio in its heyday made Glengarry Glen Ross look like Mister Rogers.

  9. “I don’t have an accurate count (because the MSM ignored them), but more than 1 grieving family stepped forward to say they didn’t want their grief to be used as a weapon against our constitutional rights of self protection.”

    Yea, swiftee! These people didn’t get a ride on AF One because they didn’t support his excellency’s meme.

  10. “Major market radio in its heyday made Glengarry Glen Ross look like Mister Rogers.”
    And that’s when it was just a little bit dangerous (interesting). Howard Stern comes to mind.

  11. swiftee you ass bandit
    Are you gonna be wearing those ass-less chaps while riding at Deals Gap this year? It’d be interesting in a “deep” ‘Howard Stern’ sorta way, just to see you up there packing some mud in the turtle.

  12. Farts & assbandits & “packing mud in the turtle”

    I’m sensing a theme here.

    Something you want to disclose, Emery? At this point, I don’t think there’s anything you could say that’d come as much of a surprise to anyone.

  13. At this point, I don’t think there’s anything you could say that’d come as much of a surprise to anyone.

    I dunno, Swiftee. He could say something coherent.

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