“Freedom has never needed our defense more than now,” LaPierre assured the packed house of conservative activists. “Almost everywhere you look, something has gone wrong. You feel it in your heart; you know it in your gut. Something in our country has gone wrong.”Sounds exactly like Glenn Beck stumping for overpriced gold coins, from freedom to gut to wrong.
It's not just that the nation is going to hell in a handbasket. It's that there's a nationwide conspiracy of "elites" that are orchestrating it. You know, the gubbermint. The media. Always reporting the latest murders of schoolchildren with NRA-touted weaponry, the bastards.
Please read more on this story below the fold.
The trouble, LaPierre explained, was the fault of elites who had cloaked the nation with “political dishonesty” and “media dishonesty,” which have “linked together.”So what is a decent American to do, if they want to survive this upcoming NRA-envisioned apocalypse? Buy [THE PRODUCT], of course. And that means guns. Lots and lots of guns, because that will give you peace of mind and show the plotting "elites" who is boss.“The media’s intentional corruption of the truth is an abomination,” he charged, as the crowd began to cheer, “and NRA members will never — and I mean never — submit or surrender to the national media.”
Putting forward a kind of condensed version of the entire address, LaPierre then said: “In this uncertain world, surrounded by lies and corruption everywhere you look, there is no greater freedom than the right to survive and protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns, and handguns we want!”Now that's some high-quality carnival barking. He could have sold them on purchasing fallout shelters with the same bit. He could have convinced the whole town to form a marching band to keep the kids out of trouble. He could have given the phone number to purchase these High Quality Collectable Gold Coins For Burying In Your Yard, and the audience would have been on their phones before he ever even left the stage. But the product of the day is finely crafted metal tubing, so finely crafted metal tubing it is.
Much of CPAC consists of the same stuff, probably because most of the people who sponsor CPAC, i.e. pay for this whole enterprise, are similarly dedicated entrepreneurs in the fine art of selling worthless crap to terrified customers. Usually it's just newsletters or the like, little tidbits of expensive advice from people who may or may not have been previously indicted for something, but the NRA has got the whole country wrapped around the notion that everyone will be killed unless they get ready to kill everyone else first, and lo and behold we just happen to have a select set of metalworking companies here that would be willing to help you out with that—for the right price.
There really is a sucker born every minute. They even have their own conventions.
