Ariel Sharon, Dead at 85

Cue The Knack.

After seven or eight years in a coma, Ariel Sharon died a couple of days ago in a hospital in Tel Aviv.

Me?  I can't stand Charlie Rose.  But his is one of the few places where famous people are actually allowed to actually talk in an extended format with a minimum of partisan nonsense from the host.  So he gets props for that, surely.  He's just so fucking annoying.

Anyway, he did a show on Sharon the other night, the last half of which was comprised of clips of him interviewing the man himself from as far back as the mid 90s.  If Charlie Rose was interviewing guys like Ariel Sharon in the 90s, and has continued to do so, five nights a week, up to the present day, you can argue that Rose has had more interesting conversations with more interesting people than anybody in the history of the world.  Which is really something, no matter how annoying the guy is.

And although Sharon, by the 1990s, was a rolly-polly, jolly sort of a guy with a difficult accent, one can never forget the fact that if you put him at the head of a division of tanks and pointed him towards, say, Egypt, that he was right up there with George S. Patton in the meanest motherfucker on the planet category.

When it comes to Jews In Tanks I'll always be a Moshe Dayan guy.

But here's a nod to Ariel Sharon.  Who was the real deal, and who, it should also be noted, is the man in the photo with the bandaged head.

Attention must be paid.

Resources:

The Times has a nice obit here.  A bit more beef than I've provided.

Passages: Dick Metcalf Fired from Guns & Ammo

In an article in the October issue of the magazine Guns & Ammo, Dick Metcalf, a well-respected gun writer, wrote: "All constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be."  This was like waving a red flag in front of the bull that is the firearms industry and a month or so after that he lost his job.  And his television program.  And some other stuff.

All of which has caused a bit of a stir.  The quote of the day comes from Richard Venola, a former editor of the magazine.  "We are locked in a struggle with powerful forces in this country who will do anything to destroy the Second Amendment.  The time for ceding some rational points is gone."

Wow.

The two quotes I used above came from a fine piece in the New York Times by Ravi Somaiya.  You can read it here.  An excerpt of Metcalf's article itself reads "I don't think that requiring 16 hours of training to qualify for a concealed carry license is infringement [of the Second Amendment] in and of itself.  But that's just me."

And, since there are two sides to any story, a blog titled The Truth about Guns has this.

Here's a great photo of Mr. Metcalf, just to give you a sense ...

This is him shooting at the geese you see in the upper right hand corner of The National Obituary.

I'm amused at the name "The Truth About Guns."  It may, in fact, be an accurate statement, so I'm not going to judge; I'm just going to be amused.  But it reminds me of The Freedom Group, the conglomerate of gun manufacturers owned by Cerberus Capital Management, a hedge fund, of which the Remington Arms Company is a part.   I bring this up because it's been suggested that Remington was one of the manufacturers that put the squeeze on Guns & Ammo to do the deed.

Do you wonder why they thought Freedom Group was a good name for a bunch of gun manufacturers?  Because they believe, based no doubt in part on empirical evidence, that we're idiots.

Personal Aside:  I find it interesting that people so enamored with the Second Amendment are so unconcerned about the First.  Which is not really accurate, since firing writers because you don't like what they've written is not a First Amendment issue.  But somewhere in there, there's room for reflection.

Bonus historical content:  "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."  Thank you, Senator Barry Goldwater.