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Callum Borchers (courtesy callumborchers.wordpress.com)

“For political journalists, South Carolina was the center of the universe last week,” Callum Borchers [above] writes at washingtonpost.com. “The state hosted two presidential primary debates and trotted its governor into the national spotlight for a televised response to the president’s State of the Union address. But a Republican lawmaker there doesn’t think just anyone calling him or herself a journalist ought to be able to work in South Carolina. Only ‘responsible’ journalists — those who pay to be registered and vetted by the state — should be allowed to cover presidential politics or any other kind of news.” What an idiot . . .

Borchers — and other proponents of civilian disarmament — doesn’t even know when he’s being trolled. South Carolina Rep. Mike Pitts’ South Carolina Responsible Journalism Registry Law is a goof. He introduced the bill to make a point: the government has no more right to curtail Americans’ Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms than its does to trample on journalists’ First Amendment protection of free speech.

By taking the bill seriously, Borchers was punked. Or was he? His article links to The Post and Courier of Charleston. Which includes this bit:

Pitts told The Post and Courier his bill is . . . to stimulate discussion over how he sees Second Amendment rights being treated by the printed press and television news. He added that the bill is modeled directly after the “concealed weapons permitting law.”

“It strikes me as ironic that the first question is constitutionality from a press that has no problem demonizing firearms,” Pitts said. “With this statement I’m talking primarily about printed press and TV. The TV stations, the six o’clock news and the printed press has no qualms demonizing gun owners and gun ownership.”

So Borchers had to have known the bill’s intent and intentionally misrepresented it to WaPo readers. Unless . . . he didn’t read the article. Which means Borchers is either another despicable WaPo anti-gun journo, or just a really lazy bastard. Both? They say never ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, but given the WaPo’s anti-gun rights animus, I’m going with the former. You?

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46 COMMENTS

    • Completely amusing.

      What’s wrong with a little common sense journalism safety? For the children. No one is taking away your pens and word processors.

      • Tsk Tsk. The founders never could have imagined pens with high ink capacity or computerized publishing. They were referring to quills and actual movable-type Gutenberg presses. And they probably had reservations about that movable type thing … quick letter and case changes. Probably needs a character button.

        • Technically, the Founders probably never could have imagined the kind of media we have today, that can spin a story out of context and spread it and video footage of it around the world within seconds, and thus cause riots in the Muslim world that get people killed if they misreport on something like say soldiers using the Koran as toilet paper. Back then, news took days, weeks, months, years, or never, to spread around.

          If President Jefferson wanted to say something anti-Islam about the Tripoli pirates, they might as well have been living in the Andromeda galaxy in terms of the time it would take the news to reach them, if ever.

          Not that that justifies any infringement of speech, but just making a point.

      • If it keeps just one child from seeing something terrible on the news, or even worse, misreported, it will be worth it. The modern communications that a man off the street can just walk up and buy is astounding. He could buy a computer off the internet, have it shipped straight to his house, and immediately go to a coffee shop and slander HUNDREDS of people in minutes!

  1. “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

    ― George W. Bush

    • Was this before or after his Fudd-tastic import ban on ‘non-sporting’ gun barrels, or Operation Wide Receiver? Dubya was no fan to the gunnies, same as his daddy. He did at least tolerate us, though.

      • Bush the Younger passed the Abomination(Patriot) Act. And congress has continued renewing it and the USSC has said it is constitutional.

        Every single one of these corrupt and foul examples of sewer effluent should be tried with treason and as enemies of the constitution and of the American people..

  2. Constitution does not forbid SC from passing such a law. Congress, yes, (Congress shall make no law), SC legislature, no. That has been changed by unsupported SCOTUS rulings, now has the force of the constitution, but was not intended to. 2A is the opposite situation, state and local law is prohibited from infringing, but that has been, at least partially, changed by unsupported SCOTUS rulings.

    Would be a kick in the ass to see a state do that for real.

  3. Actually, the Founding Fathers never envisioned a time when the great unwashed would have access to technology like the Internet to foist their uniformed opinions off onto the public. This is a dangerous new development and obviously calls for sensible word control. When an OFWG in Kansas can buy an assault laptop online – without a background check! – and within minutes be publishing seditious prose to millions of potential readers, it’s time to act to protect the public.

  4. The WaPo comments section is gold.

    Though one wonders, does he know he’s being trolled and he’s trolling right back to make a honeypot to in hopes some gun owner says something he can use?

    Or is the troll who is trolling the troll getting trolled?

  5. But everyone knows that “freedom of the press” is a “collective” right and does not protect the individual right to publish news articles…. [/sarc]

  6. I read the article, and it’s painfully obvious — this guy is lazy and kind of dumb. And by attacking his subject’s character, he checks the maliciousness box, too.

    In other words, a standard-issue journalist.

  7. Techdirt.com had a rectal prolapse about this today.

    Interestingly, the comments section straightened them out. Gives me hope.

  8. I really can’t say enough bad things about WaPo, HuffPo, or any other LibPo.

    Anybody or any entity that wants to take my rights away is my enemy.

  9. Was that guy seriously taken in? Even when the author of the bill explained what he was doing? Given the personal attacks–well, it could still go either way I guess. Or both–venal and foolish.

  10. Most researchers don’t read their cited material. Just like most politicians don’t read proposals in their entirety. They’re lazy. And not very photogenic, as pictured above.

  11. The beautiful part about believing you’re right, is not having to read any of the tiresome, opposing arguments. Who cares if what you believe you know is inaccurate, no matter, you’re still right. Denial is an ugly, dangerous thing.

  12. That article was epic! To steal a quote one of the commenters from the article – he just swallowed that bait like a hungry large mouth bass.

    You could practically hear his indignant clenching his fists and stamping his feet as he wrote “My visceral reaction isn’t printable but can be summarized thusly: This is a naked attack on the First Amendment — you know, the one that says ‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.'”

    God that was a good read, I have never seen someone get trolled that badly before. I would be rolling on the floor laughing if it wasn’t so sad.

  13. “What an idiot . . .”

    Yep, pretty much.

    The liberal assault media has such a bad case of cranial rectal inversion that can’t even figure out when they’ve been had.

    Idjits, the lot of them.

  14. Looks like the collective intelligence of Wapo and Huffpo today is the same as a stalk of Broccoli. They had a dumb hit piece on the NRA’s tax return today. The comments section was filled with the usual, well regulated (20th century meaning), militia only, collective rights, join the National Guard because that’s what’s protected by the 2A types.

    • Yup. He needs someone to remind him to stop digging when he is in a hole. With WAPO’s big move to the new building, it looks like the interns are running the place. Or the adults aren’t there, having to also phone it in, from home, due to snow.

  15. The main thing here is to believe in your opinion and views. We had a case study where we had a similar situation and so we were told that one should have a strong believe and conviction in his or her own opinion.

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