FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

My favorite version. (Explanation.)

•   Maybe you saw that story about a drone with a gun on it, and maybe you didn't think that was awesome because you're not 12 or a conservative. But Hot Air's Taylor Millard negs to differ:

Government, others freak after CT teen makes cool flying gun 

The government and others are going nuts over a Connecticut teen’s pretty cool invention: a drone with a gun. Austin Haughwout posted YouTube video on July 10th, showing the drone firing a semiautomatic handgun. 

Cue government outrage. Clinton police are up in arms (pun intended) over Haughwout’s invention, with one officer saying it’s obvious technology is surpassing legislation. They’re now actively trying to figure out if they can charge the teen, even though the gun was fired on private property...

The ACLU of Connecticut, the organization that claims to want the government to stop using drones in surveillance, is now calling on the government to push through comprehensive regulations for drones.

They don't want freelance assassins or the government to shoot people by remote control -- What a bunch of hypocrites!

People need to remember drones are amoral tools. They can all be used for good or evil, depending on how the person operating said tool acts. South Park had a pretty good episode on drones last year....

Yeah, we could stop paying attention right there, but it's Friday, let's give him a minute:

Those wanting to seriously regulate drones, armed or not, are forgetting how they can be used for good. Ranchers can use them to patrol their fields. Hunters could use them on tough to find predators. People who prefer not to go outside at night could use an armed drone to detect prowlers.

Hi, our car broke down, is anybody BLAM!

Plus, there’s always the simplest solution: take a shotgun to the offending drone. Problem solved.

This is what their ideal world looks like: Everyone tiptoeing around locked and loaded, like Elmer Fudd in search of Bugs Bunny. Only with lots of blood.

•   Oh yeah, Mytheos Holt:

At the time, my thesis was mocked by liberals, some of whom even thought the article might have been a stealth parody. After Pao’s resignation [from Reddit], I expect these people don’t think this idea is quite so funny.

On the contrary! I mentioned last week the idea that a website owner controlling the content on his own site equals censorship is ridiculous, and it remains so. Holt also says the "Left hates Internet freedom," in defense of which proposition he expands the definition of the Left to include the U.S. Department of Justice and major movie studios, and portrays Gamergate, that rat's nest of harassment and crap writing, as proof that conservatives love internet freedom. (Remember when The Well was the poster child for the power of internet freedom? Sigh, me too. And I don't recall the members driving anyone out of her home, either.) I hope Holt can promote this POV sufficiently that some Republican debate moderator has to make Jeb Bush prove his right-wing bona fides by agreeing Anita Sakeesian had it coming. In closing, here's my favorite paragraph:

Even social conservatives have changed from being smugly self-assured about their own “Silent Majority”-style dominance to an embattled approach personified by Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option,” while blatantly anti-political correctness neoreactionaries like Pax Dickinson and Curtis Yarvin are being cast less as cranks and more like brave, countercultural heroes. One can quarrel with the wisdom of this iconoclastic turn, but no one would ever accuse today’s Right of being defined by its reverence for established pieties.

That'll light a prairie fire, alright. The people will march, just as soon as you explain to them what the hell you're talking about.

WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS BY POINTING GUNS AT THEM.

The Christian Science Monitor explores the "etiquette" of America's open-carry-mania. Some gun enthusiasts believe, or at least pretend to believe, that if they act like the loaded weapon they're twirling at Arby's is no big deal, ordinary citizens will get accustomed to living in a dystopian novel instead of modern civilization and we'll soon be one be one happy, bloody shoot-'em-up society. CSM even hears from Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds, who says, "This is what lefties have done for decades, and it works" -- a cryptic statement, perhaps meaning that since liberals created feminism by letting their women go around without bras, it stands to reason that a bunch of crackers playing "Guess Whether I'm Going To Kill You And Everyone Else Here" at the Chuck E. Cheese will usher in the Groovy Second Amendment Revolution.

Some of the brethren are more hardcore:

“The idea that we must be more ‘polite,’ lest we frighten [the 46 percent of Americans who are seen as persuadable on gun rights,] ignores the nature of the right we are fighting for,” writes Kurt Hofmann on the website Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. “We must be ‘frightening,’ because the people who would trample our rights will only lose interest in doing so if they perceive a very personal risk to themselves in continuing on that course.”

He's refreshingly honest in a psychotic way. So is Michael Walsh at PJ Media, who responds to the article's concern with an armed nut who stalked an Atlanta airport thus:

Here you have the basic leftist argument: they “felt threatened” even though, in fact and in law, no one was actually threatening them. But the Left has long dwelled in a fantasy world, in which all manners of terrors — except real terrors– lurk just beyond the precinct of their psychiatrist’s office.

Liberals try to make loaded weapons look dangerous! Before they ruined everything, guns were as ubiquitous as cigarettes in America -- ordinary citizens in Anytown, U.S.A. always went around strapped, packed, and brandishing, whether at the PTA or the steel mill. Ask your grandparents -- and if they tell you different it's because LBJ brainwashed them! (If you've got some time we'll discuss how liberals censors cut the weaponry from shows like Leave It To Beaver and Ben Casey.)

Fashions in Second Amendment interpretation may come and go but, this being America, gun nuts will always be with us. The big change recently is that we're supposed to take them seriously in the sense of "accept their point of view as valid" rather than in the sense of "call the police."

DUMMITUDE.

The Charlie Hebdo case has given our usual suspects plenty of opportunity to cover themselves in glory. Charles C. W. Cooke finds a roundabout way to a what-France-needs-is-more-guns argument:

Certainly, things might have been different if the events had unfolded in heavily armed states such as Oklahoma or Texas — or, for that matter, if someone in an adjacent office had been possessed of a rifle of his own.

He's also pissed that New York City isn't flooded with Saturday Night Specials like in the old days -- then they'd be really safe! Cooke might like to study up on local history a little.

My favorite, though, is Cooke's colleague Matthew Continetti on the subject (h/t Adam Serwer):

Nor do I recall liberals standing up for the critics of global warming and evolutionary theory, of same-sex marriage and trans rights and women in combat, of riots in Ferguson and of Obama’s decision to amnesty millions of illegal immigrants. On the contrary: To dissent from the politically correct and conventional and fashionable is to invite rebuke, disdain, expulsion from polite society, to court the label of Islamophobe or denier or bigot or cisnormative or misogynist or racist or carrier of privilege and irredeemable micro-aggressor. For the right to offend to have any meaning, however, it cannot be limited to theistic religions. You must have the right to offend secular humanists, too.

These people have not been deprived of their "right to offend" -- they have been offensive, and the people they offended took offense. I don't remember any of these guys getting shot by black-masked liberals. They did get called names, but I'm not finding anything in the Constitution that protects them from that. Well, what can you expect from someone who wrote a whole book about the "persecution" of Sarah Palin by the "elite media," which left her begging for scraps at the side of the road.

I applaud the sentiments of the surviving Charlie Hebdo cartoonist and like to think Obama, in skipping (to the harrumphs of dumbbells) the Paris march headed by international free speech celebrities, has provided his own concurrence.

UPDATE. Commentary announces in a pouty headline that because Obama didn't go to Paris, he is "No Longer Leader of the Free World." Guess now it's Bibi Netanyahu, huh? Oh, who am I kidding -- for Commentary it was always Netanyahu.

UPDATE 2. The Crazy Jesus Lady snarls:

The march was, at bottom, a preening and only symbolic show? When has this White House ever shown an aversion to preening and symbolic shows?

Yeah, remember when he marched in Ferguson? Also, where's his flag pin?

UPDATE 3. As you might expect, Fedora of Freedom Roger L. Simon raises the crazy stakes:

Now I admit that was just a supposition. Just because I’ve never heard [Obama] link Islam and terror doesn’t mean in his heart of hearts he doesn’t. Though not a genius, he does have an IQ in triple digits and sees what’s right in front of his nose, I assume. He just interprets it differently. But why? 

Is someone whispering in his ear? 

Senator Dianne Feinstein has just informed us that, yes, there are Islamic terror sleeper cells in our midst in the USA. If that’s true, I wonder why Feinstein wasted so much of her time wounding the CIA during the last weeks of her tenure as Senate Intelligence Committee chair, but never mind. Could there be one of those cells in the White House?

And in case you were charitably disposed to think he's kidding --

I started this post thinking it was kind of funny...

Of course, "bullshitting" is not quite the same thing as kidding.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS: AN ENDLESS SERIES.

Back when Gabby Giffords was shot and some liberals gave Sarah Palin and other conservatives a hard time about their incendiary rhetoric before the fact, I wrote this:

To be fair, we can imagine a reasonable answer to [these liberals’] argument. And we have to imagine it, as no one is actually making it. (Those who come closest are actually milquetoast liberals like the New York Times' Matt Bai who, in our current, debased political discourse, take the role once filled by moderate Republicans back when such creatures existed.) 

What we got instead was less reasonable, because once a connection had been suggested between the sainted Palin and an actual, horrific act of violence -- worse, a connection that such Americans as can remember back a few news cycles might actually grasp -- the necessity of severing that connection became stronger for rightbloggers than any faint impulses they might have had toward decorum, logic, or common sense. 

For example, when leftblogger Matthew Yglesias cited Congressnut Michele Bachmann's 2009 "armed and dangerous" comments as an example of violent rightwing lunacy, the Daily Caller's John Guardiano said it wasn't as bad as it sounded: "Bachmann clearly was using 'armed and dangerous' in a metaphorical and political, not literal and violent, sense," he said…

Etc. Now some of these same conservatives who defended themselves after the Giffords shooting are scapegoating like crazy after the murder of two cops in Brooklyn last weekend, claiming that protesters and officials who disputed the handling of the Eric Garner case are to blame for it. In fact, here’s Guardiano himself on Twitter: “Obama, Holder & de Blasio R to the mob today what Pontius Pilate was to the mob in Jesus’ time: weak-willed enablers.” Etc. etc.

It's tu quoque, I guess, but conservatives alway manage to be quoqueier than anyone else -- they whine such a lot about the flak they take (Jonah Goldberg even complained it was unfair to conservatives that Giffords continued to appear in public after her shooting) that it makes their viciousness when it's time to grandstand even more repulsive. Now they're circulating their clip of some knuckleheads shouting for “dead cops” at a New York protest and implying that all the tens of thousands who protested the Brown and Garner cases across the country were calling for assassinations.

Some of them put a lot of apparently wasted effort into trying to look reasonable -- like Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary, who every few paragraphs assures us that "conservatives know very well that attempts to politicize violence on the part of the mentally ill is deeply unfair" and such like, but keeps spinning around and coming back with convoluted quasi-accusations such as this:

If there is any reproach today that should be laid at the feet of Obama, Holder, and de Blasio, it is that by helping to foster one false set of assumptions they have now left themselves vulnerable to questions about their own willingness to accept and exploit calumnies against the police and the justice system.

This grammatical cloverleaf is not improved when you read the whole thing and realize that by “false set of assumptions” Tobin means the idea that police sometimes treat black people unfairly. (He also says "narrative" about 70 times, which is wingnut shorthand for "who ya gonna believe, me or your own lying eyes?") More forthrightly absurd is New York Post harrumpher Bob McManus:

Nobody knows what was in the shooter’s mind, of course; happily, he relieved society of the ­responsibility of trying to find out with a well-placed bullet to his own head. 

But anybody who thinks he wasn’t emboldened by City Hall’s placidity in the face of nihilistic, bloodthirsty incantations is delusional.

“Wow, a liberal Democrat is in office!” cried the psycho career criminal; “Now’s my chance!”

At National Review, Jim Geraghty says hopefully that “police shootings will do for the anti-police movement what the Oklahoma City bombing did to the militia movement.” This will sound weird to ordinary people, but it’s perfect in a way: Conservatives tend to think of Oklahoma City as a propaganda put-up job to make them look bad — you seldom hear them talk about what a shame it was those people were killed, and mostly hear them explaining, as Byron York did a 2011 column, “How Clinton Exploited Oklahoma City For Political Gain.” That’s really how they think about the Brooklyn shootings — it’s not life and death to them, and certainly not right or wrong: It’s just a way to get back at people who made them look bad.

Another point: This shows how big a fraud the vaunted libertarian-conservative harmonic convergence really is. Conservative columnists recently had a brief libertarian-flavored fling of police criticism over the Mike Brown case -- remember National Review's "It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police"? You won't be seeing anything like that for a while, now that their old lawn-order avatars Rudolph Giuliani and George Pataki are tugging the leash. Mutual respect between the governed and the government might be alright for a weekend fling, but when the party's over it's time to go back home to authoritarianism.