Here in Oz, we have this show called The Gruen Transfer, a panel show with advertising execs, on which they deconstruct ads. It’s pretty good stuff. Anyway, they have a segment called The Pitch, where they give two competing firms an ‘impossible brief’. Tonight, it was selling gun control to the US… one of the ads was a bit lame; something about melting down guns to make statues honouring veterans or whatever, but this other one fucking kicked arse.
This should totally be a thing.
Sure. Let’s just enshrine lobbying with money into the process. Then we can drop the pretense of this whole democracy thing and buy the laws we want.
That is goddamned brilliant. Also totally plausible now that the saying ‘money talks’ can be taken literally thanks to the Citiizens United decision.
It also misidentifies the problem. It isn’t that gun lobbies give them money. They give them a drop in the bucket as campaign contributions go. The problem is a combination of old fashioned electoral republican (small R) politics and putting poison pills in legislation. I maintain that the Dems squandered an opportunity when they sat-in in Congress by tying gun control to a terrorist watchlist. That was bound to poke a lot of people’s squick.
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