Consuming my normal diet of leftish media has been pretty tough lately, I don’t mind telling you. I hate to sound like a whiner, but it’s a real downer when journalists, columnists, and even comedians that you like and respect keep talking as though you’re a nutjob. Watching The Daily Show in particular has been wearing on me, and Thursday’s episode was just depressing as hell.
Here’s the thing: I do read The New Republic. And The Atlantic, and Salon, and Slate, and Talking Points Memo, every day. This means that every day for the last month I’ve had to choke down articles by writers that I admire and respect who believe that my thoughts on gun control make me some sort of foaming-at-the-mouth NRA asshole sockpuppet, and I’m just about at the end of my rope. So yeah, when we combine the president’s statement that he shoots skeet “all the time” at Camp David with the fact that the White House routinely releases photos of him doing everything short of going to the bathroom, the fact that there are no pictures of him shooting skeet and the White House refuses to release any kinda pisses me off.
I don’t actually care whether or not the president has ever fired a gun. I’m pretty sure that he hasn’t, and I’m pretty sure that if he tried it’d be the bowling fiasco all over again. What bugs me is this; if he does shoot skeet all the time, he ought not to be ashamed of it. There should be pictures. There should be amusing anecdotes about him meeting the editor of Field & Stream and having a conversation about chokes that made him late for a meeting. If I have to hear about the president’s NCAA bracket, I ought to also hear about how he shot 20/25 the other day and is pissed that he whiffed the last five.
The fact that I have neither seen nor heard anything about the president’s gun-related hobby before now means either a) it is a politically expedient fiction, and I am being lied to and, worse, patronized, or b) he genuinely does enjoy shooting sports but doesn’t have the courage to be up front about that fact. The first is infuriating. The second is just depressing, because I think Stewart couldn’t be more wrong about the reaction if President Obama came out as a sport shooter.
Update: Welp, he wasn’t lying!