The Mysterious Redneck Renaissance

 
It finally occured to me that there's a serious glut of TV shows these days with a decidedly redneck slant to them. These are not confined to CMT or GAC, the standard country music oriented channels with shows like Redneck Island and My Big Fat Redneck Wedding and My Big Redneck Vacation. Not familiar with these? Redneck Island is like Survivor, but with rednecks and beer. The wedding show was hosted by Tom Arnold, of all people, and featured redneck couples around the nation putting on increasingly more bizarre and redneckier self-weddings. It started off funny and quickly became trite. I wrote about it back in 2008.  The vacation show was even worse, sending an entire extended clan to some exotic locale to get into pre-scripted contrived situations guaranteed to make Americans look like boorish oafs. As a man of Scots heritage, I especially cringed when this one group donned kilts to dine on haggis at a Scottish castle. Tartan was not meant to be worn like a beach towel accented by dilapidated work boots or Crocs and filthy socks.

Hosted by a pro-wrestler to give it credibility.

Wedding gifts include hubcaps for the house.

William Wallace is rolling in his grave.

Nowadays, if you scan the channels, at any given time of the day there are myriad shows extolling the virtues of rural living. One would think there's a Redneck Renaissance afoot, a hue and cry to a simpler life amongst the woods and streams and fresh air, tilling your garden and raising a family in a happy home.

Or not.

Certainly, no one can deny the glut of redneck-themed shows. However, I'm really starting to question the motivation behind the various networks in their mad rush to push out so many similar shows. Granted, a lot of it is pure greed and copycat lack of creativity. One network comes up with a show that's a money-maker and ratings winner, and the less creative competitors scramble to clone it with a twist. Explains why there are also a glut of home improvement/house flipping shows, talent competitions, and doing everything with the stars.

But (and there's always a but) I'm beginning to wonder how much of it is a concerted effort by the Lamestream Media and Big Hollyweird, controlled by elitist Liberal Leftist snobs and their ilk, to mock, marginalize, and portray the South and those akin to the traditional southern lifestyles as ignorant rubes and imbeciles.

Why? Because they are predominantly Red States that vote against Democrat candidates. They are folks in favor of the Second Amendment and the NRA. They are the folks who voted for Romney.

Think about it...look at the current crop of powerhouse Conservatives.....Rand Paul of Kentucky. Tim Scott and Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Ted Cruz of Texas. Marco Rubio of Florida. Most of the southern states have Republican governors now.

Republican governors in red....

So they'll flood the market with TV shows that by and large make southerners look so backwards and inbred that Leftist Sheeple will automatically discredit candidates for higher office who hail from the Sweet Tea Belt. And folks eat it right up, the dumber the better.

For example, MTV (long a brainwashing indoctrination channel for young liberals), they replaced Jersey Shore with the cracker-ass crackers of Buckwild.

There's the trailer park trash of Welcome to Myrtle Manor, embarrassingly filmed here in SC.

Nothing quite like grabbing giant catfish with your bare hands on Hillbilly Hand Fishin'...

And of course, the gene pool train wreck that is Honey Boo Boo and family. 'Nuff said.

In some cases though, the joke's on Hollywood. Take the guys from Duck Dynasty, for example. On the surface it looks like a passel of bearded cave men. However, they make money hand over fist from their duck calls in a business dominating their field since 1973. Patriarch Phil Roberston was a starting quarterback at Louisiana Tech, where his backup QB was some kid named Terry Bradshaw.

The gang from Swamp People are likewise laughing all the way to the bank, supplementing their haul of gators with year-long paid live appearances, hats, shirts, DVDs and other swag.

And while they may sound like they could barely tie their own shoes with their thick Alabama accents, the guys from Rocket City Rednecks are, indeed, true rocket scientists. Ringleader Travis S. Taylor holds a    B.E.E. in Electrical Engineering, from Auburn University, an M.S. in Physics from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, an M.S.E.in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, a Master's in Astronomy from the University of Western Sydney in Australia, a Ph.D. in Optical Science and Engineering from the University of Alabama, Huntsville and a second Ph.D. in Aerospace Systems Engineering from the University of Alabama, Huntsville. Last I checked, that was a Bachelor's, three Master's, and two doctorates. How many doctorates do you have?

Sorry to foil your plans, Hollywood. Undermining Conservatism by making Red Staters look stupid has backfired on you. Besides, half of us living in Red States escaped from Blue States and their failed socialist liberal regimes. Nice try, though.

Even more gun control idiocy and hypocrisy

When I was a student at the US Army's Military Police School, we had this one fun instructor who used the phrase "Save your watch. Your boots are lost ". When he said it, he raised his watch arm over his head. What he meant was the bullshit was getting so deep that your boots were already ruined but you could still save your watch.

Ladies and gentlemen, save your watches.

The gun control debate rages on unabated with more and more stupidity and ignorance coming from The Left. Would you expect any less?

Below we see a blow up of a picture that ran in the Chicago Tribune. You'd think that people that know Oh So Much about guns as the denizens of gun controlled Chicago, a place where you can't own a gun but is the gun crime capital of America, would know their nomenclature and gun anatomy.

My God, people. The piece circled is not the bayonet lug. It's the sling swivel. This allows you to mount the dreaded SLING to your weapon. You know, a shoulder strap for carrying it. I'm sure some left wing dipshit with no shooting experience will tell you a sling makes the assault rifle easier to handle on full automatic when spraying a school bus full of underprivileged crippled minority kids.

I like how the reporter says you can use a weapon equipped with a bayonet like a spear. Maybe you might get some distance throwing a seven pound weapon with all the flight characteristics of a brick. I can't.

Spear....aerodynamic, made to be thrown...

AR platform with bayonet...not aerodynamic...do not throw...

The other function, presumably, of this evil bayonet lug (which is actually just above the circle at the 11 o'clock position) is to attach a grenade launcher according to the author. Oh really, now? Please, do tell. How many people have you seen in greater Chicago with grenade launchers? Where the hell would one go to buy one? You guys love to claim that all us Neanderthal gun owners get field artillery pieces at WalMart for a dollar each, but I seem to have missed the endcap display selling the grenade launchers locally. Unlike you, Liberal Assclown, I do have a personal intimate knowledge of the M-203 grenade launcher, the type associated with the AR-15 family of rifles. I carried one for a couple years.

It's low-information morons spreading falsehoods and fallacies that make it easy for the Left to manipulate the masses. Half the people writing about how guns are evil have never even held one, let alone fired one.

The words "clip" and "magazine" get used interchangeably in the media. A clip is used to load a magazine. A magazine holds the rounds. I can't explain in in terms any simpler.

Of course, various weapons have differing features that, according to you, make it an assault rifle. Anything black & scary must be an assault rifle. Kids, we went through this already back in December. As you'll recall, the number one factor is a weapon being an assault rifle is the ability to fire fully automatic, something that civilian, military-styled sporting rifles cannot do unless illegally modified in a criminal fashion.

Over in the People's Democratic Republic of Colorado, the state legislature has been fighting a heated battle over a new law to ban high-capacity magazines. The zombie spearheading the bill is Democrat Rhonda Fields, grandstanding on the backs of the victims of the theater shooting in Aurora, which is the district she represents. Rhonda Fields is convinced that people will no longer be killed by firearms if they are limited to less than 15 rounds. Of course, she's a bit biased as her son was fatally shot in 2005.

Problem is, I simply refuse to have laws arbitrarily dictated to me by someone with a rap sheet. Seems Miz Fields plead guilty to writing bad checks in 1998. There's also a 1991 shoplifting bust and a larceny charge from 1976.  And, as gun control legislation is always about controlling the masses instead of ensuring public safety, don't forget that while Colorado Democrats are pushing their feel-good anti-gun agenda they're also proposing to reduce the minimum mandatory sentences for crimes committed with guns and have no intention of strengthening the penalties for convicted felons caught illegally possessing firearms. Still believe this is all about public safety?

Of course, the brass had barely finished tinkling on the classroom floors in Connecticut when the Left rolls out Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly to wave the anti-gun flag. I have trouble when a woman who was more or less pro gun until she got shot now wants to take away my guns rather than push for better mental health care and background checks, and her husband gets spotted buying the same sort of AR-15 they want to ban. He says he bought it to prove a point, that his background check took only a matter of minutes and it was too easy to buy it. Well, hell, chummy, if your record is clean and you have nothing to hide, shouldn't it only take a short time? But, and there's always a but...

Well, it turns out that the specific rifle that Kelley chose to buy isn’t so easy to buy after all. It was a used rifle taken in by the gun shop as a trade. Therefore, according to the gun shop, it takes longer for the purchase to be completed:

   "On March 5, 2013 Mr. Mark Kelly purchased a Sig Sauer .45 caliber pistol and a Sig Sauer M400 5.56 AR-style rifle from my company, Diamondback Police Supply Co. in Tucson, AZ. The rifle, having been purchased in trade from another customer, cannot be released to Mr. Kelly or any other customer for a minimum of 20 days in accordance with local ordinances. Mr. Kelly did not ask for any modifications to the rifle, nor are we making any. Once the hold period is up, Mr. Kelly must then show proper identification, complete the Federal Firearms Transfer Record (Form 4473) and successfully complete the NICS background check prior to his taking physical possession of the firearm."

The local ordinances delay purchases of second-hand weapons by almost three weeks. This raises the obvious question: Why did Mark Kelly choose to buy a rifle that it would take 20 days to buy, if his intent was really to show how easy it is to buy that rifle?

I'm no astronaut but even I can see the BS factor here.  By the way, an armed bystander helped subdue the guy who shot her...

And of course we have lunatic imbecile Joe Biden...how does he even tie his own shoes, let alone get to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency? Uncle Joe just wants you to indiscriminately blow holes in your doors with shotguns, or just fire off a couple blasts into the air off your balcony to scare off attackers. There you go, Joe...Fire through the door without identifying what's on the other side if you get scared. And I'm sure those pellets you suggest we fire in the air will just evaporate before coming back down like lead rain?

Careful, Joe; we might accidentally shoot down a drone.

Assault PopTarts and other lunacy

I was born in the nation's capital and spent my first 14 years in Maryland. I'm not proud of either. The District of Columbia is a cesspit of idiocy that celebrates the fact they are taxed without even having true Congressional representation. They have no Senators and just a delegate in the House, not a true Representative. The delegate has no voting rights on the House floor. Their license plate proclaims "Taxation Without Representation" like it's a point of pride. Didn't we fight the Revolutionary War over that?

They sent a Mayor, Marion Barry, to prison for being a crackhead and then reelected him after he got out. They had a decent mayor in Adrian Fenty, a Republican, and sent him packing after one term to replace him with yet another corrupt Democrat in Vincent Gray. I guess improved schools and higher graduation rates, lower homicide rates, better retention of social workers to help ease the backlog of investigations at Chile Protective Services, improved delivery of EMS services, expanded healthcare for the uninsured and the legalization of same-sex marriage was too much for liberals to handle.

But back to the license plates. They have a huge list of banned personalized plates. The full list is here. Oddly, in the nation's capital, you are not allowed to have a plate that says FREEDOM. Or VETERAN. Or SOCEUR, which is Special Operations Command Europe. Or RONPAUL. Or AUH2O (Goldwater, a Republican). Or REPBLCN. Or RGTWING.

Now, over in Maryland, as you may recall back in January I wrote about how 3 different kids were suspended for making a finger-gun gesture. The dreaded Assault Finger. Well, now Maryland has managed to further embarrass itself. Seven year old Josh Welch, a second-grader at Park Elementary in Baltimore, was suspended for biting his Pop Tart into the shape of a gun.

Yes. You read that correctly. Digest that morsel a second, will you?

Stanley Kubrick presents FULL METAL BREAKFAST

The Insidious Assault Pastry. I shit you not. And it gets even more insane. They actually sent home a letter to parents offering counseling for kids traumatized by catching a glimpse of the weaponized breakfast item. The full letter is here, but the gist is this:

During breakfast this morning, one of our students used food to make inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class. While no physical threats were made and no one was harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom....

If your children express that they are troubled by today’s incident, please talk with them and help them share their feelings. Our school counselor is available to meet with any students who have the need to do so next week.

But is it fully automatic? And where's the bayonet lug?

Meanwhile, over in Arizona, a high schooler was suspended for...wait for it.....having a picture of a gun on his laptop.

Daniel McClaine Jr., a freshman at Poston Butte High School in Florence, said he saved the picture, which shows an AK-47 on a flag, as his desktop background on his school-issued computer. A teacher noticed it and turned him in, likely receiving praise from administrators for thwarting an armed insurrection.

Since the laptop belongs to the school, the district policy states students are prohibited from “sending or displaying offensive messages or pictures,” and cannot access, send, create or forward pictures that are considered “harassing, threatening, or illegal.”

McClaine said he read the guidelines but does not consider the picture threatening to anyone.

“This gun wallpaper does not show anything that’s violent. It’s not showing anybody getting shot in any way. It’s just a picture of a gun. It’s nothing — nobody getting shot, nobody getting it pointed at them, it’s nothing,” said McClaine.

Daniel McClaine , obviously plotting your demise before algebra

McClaine, who is interested in joining the military after graduation, says he found the picture online and that the weapon is not his.

Dana Hawman, a spokesperson for the Florence Unified School District, released the following statement:

Although we cannot specifically discuss student discipline, we can certainly agree that violence in schools is a sensitive and timely issue. Students, parents and staff are on edge, and the daily news delivers more reasons for caution. All of us must work together to protect our kids and to cultivate an environment that is conducive to learning.

Learning, my ass. We will not tolerate anything interfering with the Liberal Indoctrination of the Masses is more like it.

Beware of things that even remotely resemble a gun...

The Army Explained