Gun Control Solves Nothing; PLUS Steve Brill, Maureen Dowd, John Gotti and Irving the Wolf
(Hey, Are Bombs Being Dropped Every Day in Yugoslavia?)
More stringent laws on who can purchase guns in America? Fine by me, but don't kid yourself that the largely symbolic legislation passed by the Senate last week will halt the rash of copycat teen shootings in high schools. And neither will the hypocritical cries of politicians for Hollywood to police itself on the kind of entertainment it produces and markets. It was nauseating to watch Vice President Al Gore proclaim that a new era has dawned in the United States when he cast the tiebreaking vote in the Senate for limited gun control last week. He got a bump in the polls, and the pundits claimed his campaign had a "good week," but according to his spokesman, Chris Lehane, "What was on our mind was not politics. It was the kids." Presidential candidates are so sleazy: Why don't they leave "the kids" out of their self-serving rhetoric?
In these situations it's dog-eat-dog, with New Yorkers abandoning all manners and snatching cabs any way they can, even if it means racing ahead of people who've clearly staked out a corner. No complaints, really; in dire straits, that's acceptable. Finally, we moved over to 5th Ave. and spotted an empty taxi; we ran to it, and a businessman tried to muscle in front of us. Junior looked him squarely in the face and said, "Beat it, buddy, we were here first." We got inside and he sported a grin the size of Rhode Island and told me, "Man, Dad, we nabbed this one by the skin of our teeth!" Three buttons popped off my Harvie & Hudson shirt (that one's for you, Mr. Thomas!) when I heard that smart aleck remark.
On Saturday morning, while MUGGER III and Mrs. M painted at home, Junior and I went off to the ballfield where his team was playing the Mt. Sinai Bears. Our team, the NYPress Giants, was missing three or four players, but played exceptionally well and Junior slammed his best hit of the season, a solid grounder that zoomed past the third baseman and shortstop. The game was a bit more competitive than usual for t-ball, because of an incident in about the third inning. Scott Franchi was leading off for the Giants and powered a shot that was heading to the outfield, when a Bears coach just picked it up like he was one of the players. Talk about cheating! Robbing a kid of a sure triple is some kind of sin for which punishment is deserved: perhaps spending two weeks in the audience of a Rosie O'Donnell show. From that point on, our coaches let the Giant boys and girls take extra bases and run up the score.
Not everybody on the Bears was a bad egg, however; when our pitcher, Ella Smithie, stopped a ball with her mouth and was a little dazed, their manager came over to see how the champ was. That's the way t-ball is supposed to be played; not stopping line-drive hits by kids under 10.
But back to Irving. I wrote several months ago about the anthropomorphic wolf who was the subject of bedtime stories when I took care of my nephew and niece on a European tour back in '75. Abbie and Cal were transfixed, laughing hysterically as I told them about this crazy beast who always helped me out of jams. The tales grew more fantastic as the strong lagers went down my gullet, and I had as much fun as they did.
In Bermuda last summer, I revived Irving for MUGGER III and he, too, was spellbound. Junior was onto me, but didn't spill the beans to his little brother that Dad was a big old fake. In fact, we'd huddle in the morning and he'd offer suggestions for various plotlines. I told him that there had to be a germ of truth in the story: It had to involve some place that I'd visited when I was in my 20s or after I'd met his mother. And then, I counseled Junior, let the imagination go wild. Trouble is, about a week ago I ran out of fresh material, since after the Bermuda vacation, MUGGER III wouldn't go to sleep without an Irving cameo.
I was on a roll for nights on end before the cupboard was bare. There was the time that Irving was banned from the Bristol Hotel in Paris for staining the dining room's carpet because of his incontinence after a huge meal (a gigantic hit with my poop-conscious four-year-old); Irving tracking me down after I'd got lost in the hills of Cannes; the time when Abbie and I were at a port in Italy and ran into trouble with knife-wielding teenagers and Irving decked every single one of them; and the odd appearance of our favorite wolf taking over for the matador at a bullfight in Madrid, where my brother Doug and I had first-row seats and Irving presented us with an ear apiece from the beast he gored.
What else? Irving, of course, was present at the birth of both Junior and MUGGER III, telling the doctors to knock off the chatter and give Mrs. M more painkillers; he cradled MUGGER III at our rental in Bridgehampton one afternoon and got him to stop bawling; Irving eating steaks and sausages with Mrs. M and me in Buenos Aires; saving us from a faulty tram in Santiago by walking nearly a mile on the highwire and repairing the facility's motor; lunching with the extended Smith family in Capri, after playing engineer on the funicular up the hill from the water; and the time he met us all in the Black Forest and gorged on the "farmhouse snack," which consisted of head cheese and other gristly and jellied pig parts that even I couldn't stomach. There was an incident in Switzerland where Irving and a clockmaker got into a ruckus; lots of wine-guzzling on the Rhine and the communist cabby in Manila who tried to rob me until you-know-who showed up. And of course there was the time when Irving was speeding in a van in North Baltimore, got stopped by a cop and promptly chomped off his foot. That particular story was MUGGER III's favorite.
As for Brill's Content itself, the self-righteous monthly lumbers along, putting most readers to sleep, save those who look for the contradictions in Brill's strict journalistic code of ethics that he applies so stringently to the media the magazine covers, but doesn't concern itself with. Brill's current editor, Eric Effron, who sullies his boss every time he commits words to print, was worse than usual in his "Letter From the Editor" in the June issue. "A small yelp of joy could be heard around the offices of this magazine when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in April was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. It's not that we're friends of hers or even that we were rooting for her. It's just that we had already decided to make senior writer Gay Jervey's probing profile of Dowd our cover story, and Dowd's Pulitzer win only serves to place in sharp relief many of the questions about Dowd's work that Jervey addresses."
Oh, Jesus, but that was hard to swallow. I'm sure the Brill's staff was rooting for Dowd; it would no doubt increase sales by a hundred copies or so. As for the article itself, it wasn't much: a love letter to Dowd written in the fawning style of a college intern who's desperately trying to curry favor with a New York Times player. Jervey's piece, headlined "In Search of Maureen Dowd," is the longest take I've read about the columnist, but she doesn't reveal much new. It's the same stuff: Dowd is "mysterious," shy and private; single; fiercely loyal to her Irish-Catholic family; a "must-read" at the White House; one of the few pundits who refuses to supplement her newspaper salary by appearing on talk shows; is an "equal-opportunity skewer"; plays dumb with her sources to get them to open up; and doesn't understand why people think she's "mean."
Here's Jervey's idolatry: "[Friends] acknowledge that her desire for insularity does not inoculate her from the inquisitive. But for her sake they wish those of us who would pierce the veil of her privacy would go away.
"Well, we can't."
One familiar anecdote Jervey tosses in was even worse than her quoting some idiot describing reading Dowd's column as a "guilty pleasure" or the subhed in the piece that read "On to the Gray Lady." Dominick Dunne, the Vanity Fair writer who recently made a laughingstock of himself with his naive coverage of Bill Clinton's impeachment trial in that magazine, tells Jervey that Dowd, in 1993, was "hostile" to him at a cocktail party because she was about to review his new book A Season in Purgatory. Dunne said he was "very, very hurt." Poor dear. Then this winter, as the trial was going on, the two met up at a book party and Dowd apologized for her behavior back then. Dunne, apparently an easy mark, "was knocked out, stunned. I think it takes a lot of stuff to apologize like that. So I said 'Maureen, over, out, done!'" The author then says that the very next day it was raining and a cab pulled over and the passengers invited him in: and gosh darn it, it was Maureen, The Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt and the Times' Jill Abramson. Yikes, thank God I don't live in DC, where the insularity of journalism is even worse than Manhattan, if you can imagine that.
I've bashed Dowd in the past, as well as praised her, but there's no doubt that her Times column is well-read. Too bad it's so slight and schizophrenic: She can't decide whether she admires or reviles the Clintons, Ken Starr or former President George Bush. She imbues her "Liberties" pieces with too much pop culture; it's rare that a movie or sitcom isn't woven in to make some kind of trivial point.
In a throwaway column last Sunday, about how everyone in DC is mad at everyone else, Dowd writes: "The Clintons and Gores, whose '92 campaign was like a yuppie double date on a cross-country bus, are not so cozy now. That New Age communitarian spirit has been replaced with old-fashioned crankiness.
"Hillary is mad at Bill. Duh.
"...Bill is also mad at Al because there is one word Al never utters on the campaign trail: Bill. (Bill is not mad at himself, or course. He never is.)
"...Tipper is mad at Bill for continuing to make messes just as Al is trying to shake off Bill's dirt.
"Hillary is mad at Tipper for abruptly distancing herself, saying she'd be a very different kind of First Lady."
David Remnick, TinaBrown's successor as The NewYorker's editor, much to my surprise, is producing a magazine as vibrant as any in circulation. I don't care for the weekly's politics, and the cartoons still suck, but there isn't a week I don't thumb through its pages, if only to get pissed off. For example, in its May 10 issue there was a long piece by Alex Ross on Bob Dylan that was quite remarkable, not only for the photo of Dylan that shaved at least 10 years off his age, but for the fact that it was written by someone who hadn't been born when the icon's first record was released. Granted, I had trouble with Ross' obligatory nod to Greil Marcus as "the most formidable of rock critics," and his obsession with Dylan's Blood on the Tracks (a fine recording, but definitely silver-age), but his perspective was fresh and enthusiastic.
Whereas so many jaded critics and fans have written Dylan off for almost a generation now, Ross embarked on a cross-country tour of the singer's concerts and emerged with unique observations. At the conclusion of his piece, Ross writes: "Dylan may be many things, but he is not a star: he can't control his image in the public eye. At the same time, he doesn't look, act, or sound like any great man that history records. He presents himself as a travelling musical salesman, like B.B. King or Ralph Stanley or Willie Nelson. He is generally unavailable to the media, but he is in no way a recluse, and reclusiveness is traditionally the zone in which American geniuses reside."
As a boomer who's followed Dylan since '62-true, I was only seven then, but with four older brothers in the house, I couldn't avoid being hooked-I had many quibbles with Ross' take on him, but I think it was a gutsy article, and certainly more original than any other recent piece I've read about the pop legend.
On the other hand, Jane Mayer's article about House Whip Tom DeLay in last week's New Yorker was so one-sided that it could've been dictated by Bill Clinton's brain-dead press secretary Joe Lockhart. Starting with a headline-"The Exterminator"-that's by now a cliche, Mayer writes a portrait of DeLay that's unfair, and utterly infused with the conventional wisdom about the man whom every DC insider journalist calls, with glee, "The Hammer." For example, Mayer writes that GOP Rep. Peter King "believes that DeLay never accepted the public's verdict that Clinton's lies and misdeeds did not merit removal from office." While polling did show that Americans were opposed to Clinton's impeachment, it wasn't their decision: It was up to Congress to ponder the felonious President's fate. DeLay did lobby hard to convince his colleagues to impeach the President; that was his prerogative. There are many aspects about DeLay I'm not comfortable with-his association with the Christian right, for starters-but his relentless work on impeachment was heroic.
Likewise, Mayer digs into DeLay's past and finds, according to people in Texas, that he "smoked, drank, and raised hell." In addition, he's had his share, like many politicians, of less-than-ethical campaign contributions. So what? The implication is that DeLay is a crook who was grossly hypocritical in his attacks on Clinton. That's absurd: First, Clinton is the president of the United States, and must be held to a higher standard; second, put Clinton's rap sheet next to DeLay's and you'll find the latter is a relative paragon of virtue.
Mayer is objectionable, but at least she's a rigorous reporter, unlike The New Yorker's other political columnist, Joe Klein, who appears to have been put out to pasture by Remnick.
(Stop the presses! As I write on Monday I'm assaulted by a Klein "Comment" in The New Yorker's May 31 issue. True to form, he has nothing much on his mind; so why not waste some space on Hillary Clinton's possible Senate race! That hasn't been in the news lately. Here's one of Klein's trenchant observations, which falls into the "no shit" category: "There is also a fair amount of Clinton fatigue abroad in the land... At this point, the self-involved Clintons seem like teenagers finally going off to college. Do we really want them to stay around for six more years?" Well, no, Joe, we don't: I wish you and other lazy columnists had done some research on Clinton back in '91 before you anointed him the Democratic nominee for the following year's election.)
Also in the May 24 issue was an awful media piece by Hendrik Hertzberg. Just the beginning of his first sentence makes a reader cringe: "A couple of years ago, after Mike Royko went to the big newsroom in the sky..." Does Hertzberg have a no-edit clause in his contract? In describing the late Chicago newspaperman's work, Hertzberg travels out of his own comfortable backyard, giving readers a primer on "soul-of-the-city" columnists; you know, those guys in the tabloids you read as a "guilty pleasure." So nods are given to Jimmy Breslin, Herb Caen, Pete Hamill-"the New York tabloid prince"-and the Daily News' Michael Daly, although his pedigree is somewhat tarnished by his Yale degree. Hertzberg reveals his ignorance, or carelessness, in this sentence about Mike Barnicle: "Mike Barnicle, defenestrated from the Boston Globe for making things up, freelances from a Middlesex County suburb, an internal exile." Apparently Hertzberg's tabloid reading doesn't extend to the Daily News, where Barnicle writes every Sunday.
Then there's the dishonesty factor: In Slate's "Summary Judgment," capsule reviews of books, films, etc., on Tuesday, Eliza Truitt says that many critics "carp about [the book's] weaknesses." She takes out of context a single line from Po Bronson's favorable review in the May 16 New York Times: "The limitation of a Zeitgeist novel is that an accurate portrait of today can quickly feel dated and lose all its kick by the time it's out in paperback." Yet immediately following that sentence Bronson writes: "Andersen has managed to hoodwink this trade-off. He's got a book chock-full of references to today that stick out like neon Post-It tags...yet he's infused it with so much inventive imagination that it transcends all that. This book's vision of next year will last a good five to seven years."
Why was Andersen completely fucked by Slate? I don't know editor Michael Kinsley, but I suspect the twisted darling of the Beltway (he may live in Seattle, but he's as much a slave of the ghastly Washington, DC, culture as Al Hunt), has it in for Andersen. After all, it wasn't that many years ago that Kinsley was offered the editorship of New York and ruminated back and forth before declining. Andersen took the post instead. Kinsley apparently regretted that decision, so I wouldn't be surprised if he harbors some weird grudge against the cofounder of Spy. But who can account for Kinsley's abhorrent behavior? It was just last summer that he made a jackass out of himself after similarly stroking his chin over whether to replace Tina Brown as The New Yorker's editor. When the offer was withdrawn, he immediately e-mailed the world about what an asshole Si Newhouse was.
Williams begins her critique on May 17 by writing that reading TOC is "so much like being locked in the longest cocktail party of your life; a little one-on-one conversation appeals to me as balm just now." She pays lip service to Andersen's intelligence, but claims the book is ultimately "decadent" and "creepy." Williams writes: "Clearly, [Andersen] has decanted into Turn of the Century every telling detail that ever caught his eye... On almost every other page...Andersen stops dead and clears his throat before delivering The Clever Thing I Always Thought About Headwaiters, or The Three Types of Men You Find in West-L.A. Restaurants. These pronouncements are almost always withering and funny, but not the kind of thing you want to read, back-to-back, for a 600-page stretch. It's like eating nothing but guacamole for dinner; before long, you think you never want to read a puckish aperçu again."
I suppose this would be the anticipated reaction to TOC from an earnest Washington journalist who'd have us believe she'd rather read books about arcane environmental theories. Still, it's fairly ironic that Williams, who writes hatchet jobs for Vanity Fair from her smug neoliberal nest in DC, is slagging Andersen for writing a novel with smart and prosperous protagonists that will be read by smart and prosperous people (unlike the majority of literary novels, which I suppose are read by steelworkers). "Decadent"? What does that mean? No need to spell it out: not enough poor people and straight-ahead left-wing, wimpy politics and cultural concerns. It goes without saying that Beltway journalists like Williams and her husband Noah aren't obsessed with the "status" that she ridicules Andersen's characters for.
Kinsley has no shame, but his hitjob on Andersen was disgraceful; I can't believe there are still people in the media who believe that the man has one scintilla of integrity.
Michael Wolff, in his May 31 New York "Media" column, uses Andersen's book-which I think he liked, sort of-as a vehicle for trashing all the smug "old media" poobahs who don't understand that a new information age is well under way. And they've missed the boat. He describes a forum he attended at "one of the schools where we aristocrats send our children," which included as panelists JannWenner, Steve Brill ("in dapper-don Mafia attire"), Vogue's Anna Wintour and Cathie Black, president of Hearst Magazines. He took a vicious shot at Jonathan Alter (not that I minded), the moderator: "Alter, who in his Newsweek column and television appearances has assumed the grandeur (and become a self-parody) of the public moralist-the last of a long line of would-be Walter Lippmans..."
Wolff's point was that these present-day titans are hopelessly self-satisfied, and can't begin to comprehend that the media world as they know it, and revel in, is over. And so they're over. He writes: "After a while, I started to think of that tin-ear sound of television and news magazines when they tried to get with the sixties. Joe Friday explaining marijuana to his partner, Bill Gannon, on Dragnet circa 1968. A suddenly groovy Frank Sinatra. The Mod Squad. Wenner, for instance, botching the explanation, tried to explain the difference between at T1 line and a cable modem to Brill, who kept insisting he knew the difference."
I'm registering some mild dissent on the Kurt Andersen interview. There was way too much banter and sparring in the first half. It didn't get good until the middle. And frankly, he did come off as a bit of a snoot. It was sort of a love-fest, but no reason is ever given why anyone would want to buy his book. Compare the Dorothy Rabinowitz interview with Kurt's. Good for you, bad for Kurt, I guess. I think he knows he didn't get what he was hoping for, besides owning your front cover. Rereading your 1988 Spy attack, it was just as well-written as the MUGGERs of today. It was brilliant, including your half-parodying of their style. I don't think even I appreciated it as much then.
I'm embarrassed to admit I'm having trouble finding a recent picture of Sam. Dina says she will find me one and Sam is totally excited about having his picture in the paper. I'm going to do my best to write more but I've got a fuckload of cleaning/emptying out the house this weekend. I'm probably not going to be allowed to go to work.
I can't get away from how inept/stupid the Republicans have been lately. For their vote against gun screens at gun shows, they should be shot for both political and substantive reasons. They can own the reasonable middle ground on that issue. The National Review piece you forwarded to me hit it right on the head. They're lost.
May 17: Sorry I didn't get a chance to write, but I was lifting way too many boxes for someone my age. Didn't go in to work Saturday. Missed my Sunday morning run. Cleaned and hauled about eight hours each day, and it's not like I didn't have help. We filled a 15-yard dumpster with stuff, to the brim. All of our old playpens, swing-o-matics, high chairs, humidifiers and toys that didn't make the cut for Goodwill. Plus pink-eye medicine, boo-boo bunnies and 20 bottles of mostly used cough syrup. I love not having young children. I did find a note from Annie to the tooth fairy when she was about seven. It was a plea for a bigger payoff. At the bottom of the note it said "over." On the back it said "HI DAD!" Unquestionably the highlight of my cleanup weekend.
I personally hauled about 40 30-gallon bags of stuff to Goodwill, plus 25 bags of junk to the curb for the garbagemen to pick up, stuff we missed when the dumpster was at our house. I even vacuumed the attic, which was especially fun, given the mess that was there from the last squirrel invasion.
Besides the physical labor, the part I found most aggravating was that the cleaning people who we've been paying to clean our house don't know how to clean! I'm no Martha Stewart, or even Heloise, but when I see grease, I apply soap and water, scrub, and it comes off. Shelves and baseboards have not been dusted for years.
So, I haven't watched any news and have barely read the papers. I did notice that the Bosox had a piece of first place and the Orioles are playing .333 ball.
Is Clinton still president? I heard on the radio the Kosovo deal may be cut this week, and I saw the headline that perhaps 100,000 have been massacred there. If that's the case, this becomes Rwanda II, and shows how full of shit these world liberals are with their International Human Rights trials. They're willing to self-righteously prosecute people after they've committed unspeakable crimes, but they're not willing to take real risks to save the victims beforehand. We knew the massacres were going on in Rwanda, and I'm assuming we know what's going on in Kosovo, or we wouldn't be there bombing away. I think I'll clean my office.
There are 613 commandments for Jews in the Bible, and even the most religious Jews perform barely half. Many are related to animal sacrifice, which some crazies do want to bring back. Do they also want to bring back the death penalty for adultery or for not observing the Sabbath? Even though the death penalty is prescribed for many offenses in the Old Testament, the Rabbis in the Talmud considered it an abuse of the statute if more than one or two death sentences were carried out in a hundred years.
I always enjoy selective reading of the Bible. Lefties also abuse it. They like to quote "thou shalt not kill," even though it actually says thou shalt not murder, and the Bible is full of instances where execution and war are mandated. They then forget about the Bible when it comes to issues where the Bible diverges from their stands, like on homosexuality, masturbation, adultery...and pretty much everything else.
Remind me to write more about the Jenny Jones debate. Where is the media outcry when General Motors or Ford gets whacked in court for a couple hundred mil, even though hundreds of thousands of people have used the vehicles safely? Don't get me started.
Mrs. M: Great to hear from you. First, regarding my alleged lack of executive function, I had eight guys cleaning and hauling on Saturday. I have had two different cleaning services, employing as many as three people each in my house, every other day (it seems like). I'm not fixing anything. But trying to get a contractor out to your house is a chore in itself. As for this past weekend, the real estate agent is making us empty out 2/3 of all our stuff. We had to do the sorting and packaging. What am I supposed to do, tell my assistant, yes, let's recycle everything from Kurt Andersen's oeuvre, but for God's sake, put the Milton Friedman back on the shelf? After the hauling people left, we still had more and more stuff that had to be put away or trashed. I preferred to get it out of my house rather than trip over it for two days. Plus, you can't see what else needs to be done when there's so much clutter. And, I did make three runs to Goodwill myself, which in truth, could have been handled smarter.
But enough about my aggravation. Gas is absolutely the way to go, though you may want to make sure your building doesn't have restrictions against propane tanks. I have a nice $500 Weber grill, which is great. However, I bought Donna [Al's business partner] as a combination wedding/housewarming gift an all-stainless infrared gas grill that is really jizzed. It is absolutely the way to go. It is the same kind of cooking surface that the best steakhouses use. It cooks at 900 degrees. It's very fast. It burns so hot, it vaporizes all the grease and dirt, so there's virtually no cleaning to the grill. It sears meat big time. It's just as safe as a regular gas grill. And it is fast. It costs about $1700. The bad news/good news is Donna thinks her building has a ban on propane; she might have to give me the grill to "hold." I can't remember the brand name. I'll call Donna and get it and send it later. I don't know anything about the brand, anyway, it was recommended by the salesguy. The only limitation with the grill is it's not great for slow cooking. On a gas grill Weber you can slow-cook (10 hours) a rubbed brisket or pork shoulder and have great barbecue. But how often are you going to do that?
The kids are great. Annie leaves for Israel Monday for two weeks with her class. No playing cards allowed. I read MUGGER, so I think I'm up to speed on the boys.
Write for more consults when needed.
May 21: The NYPress website looks nice. Didn't notice any of the things Rodrigue did. When's the "construction" going to be over? I assume it'll be up in a couple days. Will there be more graphics throughout? It's a shame to not use your lead graphics. I know about the space/loading issues, but otherwise, your pages will look like all the other Web mags.
I love the outrage that comes from the media when they are wronged. The media are so fallible, it's only when you're written about, directly (remember how The Washington Post butchered the story about Jeff Stein in '82?), that you realize how inaccurate and biased the media almost always is. GTG.
May 24: I read the Starr/Steele piece in Slate. It's interesting, but ultimately just a reminder that Clinton skillfully obstructed justice. (If I were Ben Stein, I'd say it made me sad). But it really is ancient history at this point. Clinton more and more seems like a peripheral figure again, like he was from the '94 elections until his successful budget showdown with Congress.
I was going to write you about how crazy the media reaction was to the Jenny Jones trial was, but that too seems like ancient history. It was post-Columbine, wasn't it?
The media commentators were obsessed once again with the potentially chilling effect of the decision. This decision illustrates not the vulnerability of free speech but the regular flow of crazy awards made by juries on a routine basis. Did Jenny's show set this guy up for humiliation? Absolutely. Did that contribute to the murder? Definitely. Should the fellow humiliated have known that going on a show like Jenny Jones carries that kind of risk? Of course. Should the show have liability for the murder? Absolutely not.
The episode has much more in common with what governments are trying to do with guns and cigarettes. For the record, I hate cigarettes and I hate guns (though I'm glad the police carry them). But the state and federal governments are suing tobacco makers for products that carry a clear warning label, and from which these same governments profit handsomely in the form of billions in annual tax revenues. If they were really so bad, why not legislate them out of business? Because it's a lot easier to do it in court than in the legislature, and the bottom line is, it's a way to exact another huge tax increase on the backs of the lower-middle-class and poor while you're telling them it's for their own good.
As for guns, I think the Republican performance in the Senate was a disgrace. Aside from giving Gore a nice political coup, Republican antipathy to sensible gun regulation is bad policy and bad politics. I'm as anti-big government as the next guy, but I like the fact, for example, that an inspector is keeping an eye on the processing plant where the chicken I eat is slaughtered. I'm also happy that 12-year-olds can't buy guns, that people have to go through a criminal background check to buy one, etc. I'm glad people can't go to Wal-Mart and buy mortars. To fight all gun regulation is as stupid.
Now that cities (including Baltimore) and states are suing, or planning to sue gun manufacturers in Tobacco II, the sequel, the governments themselves are promoting the abuse of our tort system while simultaneously trying to further their policy ends (and get more taxes at the same time). It's a disgrace.
Whatever happened to individual responsibility, both for kids and the parents? When we as a society say you smoked for 40 years and you're dying of cancer, but it's not your fault, what message are we sending? Gun ownership in this country has been huge since its founding. Do the guns now operate on their own? Little by little, our society erodes the principle of individual responsibility.
The question is, are we as a country no longer willing to rely on the judgment of our fellow citizens as individuals to organize our day-to-day life? Every time you take a curve in your car at 50 mph, you're counting on the other guy in the opposite direction taking that curve as well (which is why, I think, liberals love mass transit). The problem is, we live in an era when nothing bad is supposed to happen, just as long as no one's freedoms are in the smallest way impinged (thank you ACLU and the gun lobby). We're supposed to live in a no-risk world where we still get everything we want.
So as for Kosovo, the outcome will be a face-saving settlement for us, and then we'll sue the bastard.
MAY 24