Saturday, April 21, 2007

Giuliani's Bathetic Blather about Virginia Tech Massacre

Rudolph Giuliani beat his chest about the Virginia Tech massacre yesterday. The upshot was he wanted the dead killer to know that when he attacks people, he attacks "all of us." Apparently that punishes the dead killer, and deters others.
Except that it was precisely the intent of Cho (and other such sociopaths) to attack "all of us." If anything, such pointless bluster provokes and reinforces the anti-social impulses of such killers. They want to feel they are striking a blow against everybody else.
But apparently Giuliani is so confident in the power of his personal moral revulsion that his attitude alone can defeat evildoers, a la some adolescent comic book superhero.
As far as offering any actual possible solution or action to do something about the problem, Giuliani offered nothing. The Old Giuliani would have offered gun control. The New Giuliani, running for the reactionary vote outside NYC, is silent.
Not that I'm a knee-jerk gun banner. It's true that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. Esp. in a country with over 100 million guns already. Perhaps having more people armed is the answer. Instead of hundreds of people being like helpless sleep being slaughtered by one asshole, people could fight back. The downside would be more suicides, more murders, more road rage assholes shooting people. Whether the trade off would be worth it would be a worthy topic of intelligent debate. But there is no intelligent debate presented to the public at large in America.
By the way, I'm not buddies with Giuliani, so unlike the U.S. corporate media, which always promotes right-wing pols, I don't call him "Rudy." He's not a "regular guy." Of course, "Rudolph" is a weird name in a U.S. context. What are the associations? Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer; Rudolph Hess, the Nazi. (Although Giuliani personally is not like Hess, he's like Mussolini.)
I leave it to his "buddies" in the press to call him "Rudy."

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