Ruh roh. You know it’s getting bad out there when Jon Stewart, one of the premier forgers of what passes for conventional wisdom, starts crumpling paper and screaming MOTHERF****R! Repeatedly. Last week we asked if the burden of handling the cascading scandals the Obama administration is now juggling means they’ll be too busy dodging suddenly pointed inquiries from their former fluffers in the the White House press corps to have Double Barrel Joe Biden flying around recruiting cannon fodder for another crack at gun control legislation. The consensus of the Armed Intelligentsia was, well, mixed. But Stewart doesn’t really sound optimistic . . .

Actually, Jon seems a little wee-wee’d up. Most of it is, of course, just mugging for the camera. And if your patience is short, the discussion of guns in particular starts at about the 4:30 mark in the clip above. But credit where it’s due. Stewy manages to boil down all those snickers and patronizing head-pats delivered by those who loved to ridicule pro-gunners’ fears of enhanced background checks leading to a nation gun registry succinctly into this new reality:

This has, in one seismic moment, shifted the burden of proof from the tin foil behatted to the government.

And that pronouncement apparently pre-dates the latest revelations that it wasn’t just the AP. The DOJ had been rifling through a Fox News reporter’s private emails, too. For months. And tracking his comings and goings. And that’s just what’s come out so far.

So does Stewart’s monologue mean the scales are really falling from MSM members’ eyes? Probably not. Statists have a virtually inexhaustible well of faith in the benevolence and good intentions of big government, decades of experience to the contrary. But in realpolitik terms, this whole mess won’t make the Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex’s job any easier. And they know it.

Just ask Joe Manchin, the pride of West Virginny. Ever since Manchin-Toomey went down in flames, he’d been telling anyone who’d listen that rumors of the death of his hard-won compromise were greatly exaggerated. And that he planned to reintroduce it just as soon as possible.

But that was before Benghazi/IRS/AP/Fox. Senator Joe was interviewed on a home state radio show late last week. He’s starting to sound a little less than fully confident.

Isn’t it more understandable, asked host Hoppy Kercheval, that people who fear more government intrusion or influence would now have some of those fears stoked after the revelations in the past week?

“Absolutely – I agree 1,000 percent,” Mr. Manchin said on MetroNews’ “Talkline.” “People are saying, ‘Joe, we read your legislation, it makes all the sense in the world and we’re for that legislation – we’re just afraid government won’t stop there.’”

So…gun control? Doesn’t seem likely. Not on the federal level anyway. Not that vigilance isn’t still warranted. As ever.

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81 COMMENTS

  1. Always vigilant. Support the pro 2a groups and vote. It’s been my mantra for a life time now and it will continue to be so.

  2. The real action shifted to the state level months ago, anyway. The vigorously organized, well-funded lobbying groups gave up on the Feinstein axis of the Federal push back in (I think) late February or so, once Harry Reid signaled that he’d be structuring the handling of Feinstein-type bills like a free-for-all melee at a Roman Coliseum.

    • Yes, and the Democratic supermajority in CA is moving to screw over its residents even further. As has NY, NJ, MD, RI, etc.

      • Our real hope is the courts. The constitution should be the same regardless of our zip code.

        • jwm, the states were meant to be sovereign entities in the Constitution.

          During the writing of the Constitution there was a constant battle between the Federalists (who wanted a strong central government) and the Anti-Federalists.

          The Federal government is extremely limited in what it is allowed to do under a strict interpretation of the Constitution. There are studies that suggest over 90% of what the fed gov does today is unconstitutional.

          For you to remark that “[t]he constitution should be the same regardless of our zip code” would be heresy to the Anti-Federalists. I guess States’ rights mean nothing?

  4. The scandals are going to resolve themselves, one way or another, and the administration is still going to be in place. With all the single-minded resolve they put to killed-multiple-times Obamacare, they will come at civilian disarmament *again*. They have to for their vision of future America.

    • Inevitably. 2A rights always have been and will be and endless fight, but they’re worth fighting for.

      Also, I just had a funny mental image:
      “And civilian armament will come back at them.”

      • The Second will always be under attack because it it the only veto held by the people.

        • Money quote!! I’m writing this down! Meanwhile, sir, copyright it & publish it. Best single sentence I’ve ever read on the subject of gun control! Here, let me condense it a little:

          “The Second Amendment is the only veto held by the people.”

          Proclaim it, sir!

        • Absolute elegance, sir! Eloquent and succinct. Give this man a double Internet and a fifth of Scotch.

          2A: The people’s veto.
          –“Sammy” on TTAG

          This is going on a bumper sticker, with full attribution.

  5. TO: Dan Zimmerman, et al.
    RE: Heh

    So…gun control? Doesn’t seem likely. Not on the federal level anyway. Not that vigilance isn’t still warranted. As ever. — Dan Zimmerman

    Eternal vigulance is the price of liberty. — Thomas Jefferson

    And….

    A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprise of an aspiring prince. — Gibbon

    As I’ve stated before, often here and elsewhere….

    Our ‘martial nobility’ is found in the officer corps of the US military.

    For the rest of US, WE are the ‘stubborn commons, possessed of arms and tenacious of property’.

    Regards,

    Chuck(le)
    [Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples’ liberty’s teeth. — George Washington]

    • Just FYI, that quote in your sig that’s attributed to Washington was not actually his; it appears to be a recent fake.

  6. Q. Mr. Holder so you recused yourself?

    A. Yes

    Q. When did you do this?

    A. I don’t remember…

    Q. Did you put it in writing?

    A. No, I did not.

    Q. Well, who did you tell?

    A. I can’t remember telling anyone…

    Q. Mr. Holder, if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there, does it make a sound?

  7. The top White House Counsel and ex career military man, Sgt. Schultz who served with distinction unter the famous Col. Klink regime said today “The President, VP, and the AGOTUS Mr. Witholder, knew NOTHING, NOTHING!” about whatever it is that are asking. Oh, and this letter came for you from the IRS”

  8. Stewart, the tool, went to the same college I did about 6-7 years after me. I was mortified a few years back when I learned that he was the commencement speaker. . .

    Here’s how he closed:

    “I was in New York on 9-11 when the towers came down. I lived 14 blocks from the twin towers. And when they came down, I thought that the world had ended. And I remember walking around in a daze for weeks. And Mayor Giuliani had said to the city, “You’ve got to get back to normal. We’ve got to show that things can change and get back to what they were.”

    And one day I was coming out of my building, and on my stoop, was a man who was crouched over, and he appeared to be in deep thought. And as I got closer to him I realized, he was playing with himself. And that’s when I thought, “You know what, we’re gonna be OK.”

    So, I take that to mean that if Stewart’s reduced to mentally playing with himself on television, “You know what, we’re gonna be OK.”

    • He is an excellent satirist. And from my view at least, he is an equal opportunity satirist. This particular piece demonstrates full well how important our freedoms are.

      • He was, but after his messiah got elected he shifted into worshipful fellatist mode and has been mostly unwatchable since.

    • Aristotle wrote, in Poetics, that comedy is “educated insolence.” Stewart is educated and he’s insolent, so he’s a comedian. The market for insolence is urban youth, so he leans their way. It gets old. He grew up in Princeton: Obviously he wasn’t smart enough to go to college there. “Experience keeps a dear school, and fools will learn from no other,” said Poor Richard. One day Jon will get mugged. Until then, insolence.

    • Jon Stewart is a clown, and not a particularly funny one. He is a one trick pony, and that trick has worn thin.

    • I agree, I used to watch DS & Colbert nightly… however, what disturbs me is people use these satire “news” shows as their only form of information. This clip is a perfect example, listen to the people laugh and cheer as he talks about some of the worst abuses of government power in decades.

  10. This is the press. This is the press on Ritalin. Any questions?

    P.S. 30 days from now In September when summer is over it will be a brand new thing and we will be back to more civilian disarmament.

  11. And that, in a nutshell, is why Stewart and Colbert are the only news sources worth watching on TV. They’re just about the only news media professionals left who are actually willing to hold both political parties and the whole plutocratic process up to the ridicule they deserve. And they’re not even journalists — at least not in the traditional way. Which is why they’re also just about the only mainstream media figures willing or able to expose modern journalism for the craptastic charade that it is. They don’t always get it right, and they may be “only” political comedians, but they put more thought into it and get it right far more often than anyone else.

    • “They’re just about the only news media professionals left who are actually willing to hold both political parties and the whole plutocratic process up to the ridicule they deserve.”

      BWAHAHAHAHAHAH!

      Are you serious? As someone who actually had some respect for Colbert and Stewart before the gun control push, they’ve always been pretty open about which side they’re favoring. They may throw token jabs at the current party in power but they generally view anything perceived as right wing or libertarian as anathema and always have.

      • That just means that they have their political beliefs, and are upfront about them. But the point he was making is different – that they’re not ignoring the BS (or rather what they perceive as such, which may not be the same as your assessment) that’s coming out of their own party, even when it hurts their side.

  12. “Stewart” (not his given name) has a formula for getting laughs from an audience possessed of the intellect of sea lions at Sea World.

    Most of the time, he wanders around in the soft, puffy, isolated world of the liberal “elite,” isolated from the rest of the country by their cloistered existence in very select neighborhoods on either coast, and he has no actual clue what is going on in the rest of the country. He’s just an echo of the DC/NYC media complex, with some obscenity tossed in to make him sound “hip.”

    He does realize, however, that his ratings are dependent upon fooling his audience into thinking that he’s more even-handed than the commentators on MSNBC, and that’s why he occasionally does bits like this one.

  13. People are saying, Joe, we read your legislation, it makes all the sense in the world

    Well call me a cynic, but I’ll bet that nobody, even Manchin’s gumare, ever uttered those words.

  14. Many in the press have battered wife syndrome, or whatever the equivalent is for battered lefties. They’d sooner slap the cop who pulled their abuser off of them. Those will go back to you-know-who. “It was all my fault,” they’ll say. “I should have been more understanding.”

    You can’t imagine how much I’d love to be wrong about this. Let’s just hope there are a few journalists, as in real ones, still around in this country.

  15. The thing that really makes me laugh is when leftists moan about the AP/Fox/IRS/Banghazi and Fast & Furious (it’s ba-ack) scandals making it harder for Obama to implement his agenda. Hey, dimwits, AP/Fox/IRS/Banghazi and Fast & Furious ARE his agenda.

    • the IRS was not Obama’s agenda, it was a bureaucratic policy enacted by a bush appointee. The IRS cracked down on the tea party because they were blatantly political front-groups for the GOP, and they flooded the IRS’s 501(c)(4) division after citizen’s united. And even THEN these blatantly political front groups got their tax exemption anyway. Yeah, my heart bleeds.

      The only similar thing would be if a bunch of occupy groups filed for 501(c)(4) tax exemptions, but almost none of them did. If anything, the deluge of highly organized applications just illustrates how astroturfed the tea party “movement” was to begin with.

      We are still a ways away from black helicopters yet.

      • Also, benghazi, F&F, etc are all just continuation of bush policy, which continued clinton and bush, sr. and reagan etc. Washington policy doesn’t actually change from regime to regime. There’s a whole apolitical, unelected bureaucracy behind the scenes that lurches forward constantly, and it’s incredibly naive to think that any one elected official, bush or obama, can change that trajectory too much.

      • Odd, though, that no Lefty, Progressive, Liberal advocacy groups are suing for being targeted, don’t you think? Oh, and they admitted targeting the Tea Party.

        As for black helicopters, ABC had a story on how reporters were led through the IRS office in Cincinnati (I believe) with armed police, and employees were threatened with their jobs if they talked. How far is “a ways away?”

        • “oddly enough” the only one actually denied funding was a democratic front group.

          Tell me, what “liberal, lefty, or progressive” organizations or collections of organizations swamped the IRS with tax exemption forms?

          (the answer is none)

        • Keep fvcking that chicken Templeton, I hear that glass of Kool Aid tastes great.

      • RTempleton: as we used to tell the Hare Krishnas dancing and chanting their way through Atlanta: “Get deprogrammed”!

        • I just knew rtempleton would arrive sooner or later to defend his idol. Now if truthy and lowbudget dave would show up it would be a real party.

      • rtempleton: my employees, my problem, even if the previous guy hired them. If your defense was that he was incompetent or out of touch with policy, sure never attribute to malice that explainable bt ineptness.

      • Commissioner Shulman is a life-long democrat. Bush only appointed him because his first choice got nixed by the Senate, and a neutral choice is customary: Policy for the IRS is made by the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Revenue. The “policy” was implemented by Sarah Hall Ingram, a democrat, who was director of the Tax-Exempts branch until she moved full time in 2012 to be head of the IRS Affordable Care (yeah…) Act Office. The cover-up player-in-chief is Lois Lerner, another life-long dem operative who’s going to plead the 5th tomorrow. You do not have the complete list of 501c4 applicants, so your statement of fact is a statement of hearsay. The wrong of the selective deep reviews was not denial of status, but a multi-year delay of fundraising until well after the election.

        • ropingdown, please do not use facts and logic to argue with a mindless slobbering Obamabot, it will do no good.

      • Bush has been out of the office for 5 years now. Being a liberal myself, I have to say: stop using that bullshit excuse. Obama is the President; he is responsible for the actions of his administration.

        Besides that, he also sucks as a liberal. About the only thing I can actually credit him with on those grounds is Obamacare, and even that was half-assed, him compromising precisely where this was not needed. On foreign policy, he’s very hawkish in Libya and Syria (and possibly also Yemen). On human rights inside the country, he’s just as bad as Bush, and worse in some aspects (warrantless wiretaps, war on drugs against states etc). If all that is supposed to liberal, then I’m a pink elephant.

  16. Ok, so at the federal level gun control may not be getting any traction in the near future barring any extraordinary events. Do we relax? Hell no. If the tide is in our favor, why aren’t we pushing to get some “unreasonable” gun laws repealed? Let’s keep the anti’s off balance and struggling for a change. Besides, there are some states going so much farther than the feds ever dreamt. The war’s not over, we’ve just fended off a minor skirmish.

  17. the one where unelected bureaucrats do the same thing regardless of who’s actually in office. IE the one not presented on fox news or newsmax, where democrats are PURE SATANIC EVIL and republicans are precious angels that fart rainbow dust.

    • Moveon.org is tax exempt. Not a Democrat front group?

      And if the IRS did nothing wrong, why did it feel the need to apologize?

      • Move-on’s “social welfare” group is a 501(c)(4), and karl rove’s american crossroads dark money front group is one as well. The whole system is broken.

        Again the key with those is that those were single organization applications, not a deluge of hundreds of applications with similar language to an overworked and underfunded and completely apathetic bureaucracy. You send hundreds of applications with the same mission statement language, and yeah, you are going to raise red flags. They apologized because they broke their own rules. They broke their own rules to save themselves time on paperwork. It is not a campaign of oppression and terror.

        You know what *was* done with the full consent of the Obama admin higher ups, the DOJ, the DHS, the mayors of several cities, and several cities police departments? The organized crackdown of all those “lefties, liberals and progressives” (and libertarians) at Occupy camps across the country. Where were the partisan screechers then? At home, watching fox news, I imagine.

        • ‘Overworked and underfunded’.
          Amazing.

          I have a solution. Abolish the IRS along with the ridiculous income tax. Then we might move away from being serfs who only receive a dollar the Feds allow us to have after they get their cut.

        • fantastic idea. Why don’t we also abolish schools and public roads and live in a glorious Freedomtopia?

          And yes, group that handles non-profits is hugely understaffed. And easily abused by political interests, dem or republican

        • No, the key is that these Republican groups were denied their tax exemptions before the election, making it impossible for them to raise money and campaign for their messages in a timely manner. And what does “flooding” with 501(c)(4) exemptions have to do with anything? What is sinister about this that requires an extra layer of delay and scrutiny?

          And a guy was already audited by the IRS for giving a donation to a Republican group.

        • 1.) we dont need the IRS or a income tax rtempleton. what did the US do before it? oh thats right…

          2.) I agree in regards to OWS.

  18. Gotta feel sorry for them, no feinswine holding an AR, no biden talking through his ass about shotguns, no obumination flapping his yap every fu.kin day about doing something. Sure is a shame the grabbers fell off the turnip truck, at least temporarily, Randy

  19. I don’t watch Jon Stewart but in this clip it looks like he morphed into Craig Furgeson. WTF?

  20. Ha. What is normal? So many lies it is hard to remember what the truth is. Been there done that. Have to quit and get away!

  21. Quick note for anyone who cares. The news media have reported that there was NO SURGE of applications for 501 status after the Citizens United SCOTUS decision. The “overwhelmed” claim was one more diversion by the IRS trying to cover its posterior.

    In my opinion, the federal government should in no way be passing judgement on what is or is not political speech. Anyone or any groups should be able to spend as much as they please to promote whatever agenda or policy they want. If I disagree with any of them, I can turn off their message.

    • That’s why it was almost like an saving grace that somebody else didn”t decide to try and beat Lanza’s “score” at Sandy Hook. If there would have been another big one like that before the senate vote, I think the gun grabbers may have gotten manchin toomey(schumer) through. Possibly even feinsteins nauseatingly 2a right restricting bill.

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