The Blind Leading the Stupid

Now this one is truly mind boggling, and I owe much thanks to Obi for pointing it out to me – sorry it took me so long to deal with it, I have just been in denial I guess. Being confronted with such incredibly heinous stupidity just causes my mind to vapor-lock sometimes. I should probably tell the rest of you what I am speaking of, but before I do that…

If you’ve ever listened to Alice’s Restaurant (I wore my copy out) you may recall the part where, after dumping the garbage from the church and getting arrested for it, Arlo and friends are in court waiting for the judge to look at the 27 8x10 color glossy pictures (with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one…), and the judge walks in with a seeing-eye dog. He describes it as a typical case of American blind justice. Lest we forget, the judiciary is only one of the three branches of our governmental system, and this story concerns the second of those three.

I suppose you could file this under “only in Texas” but you would hope even they would have more sense. As you may or may not be aware, hunting in Texas is enormously popular. Why even our Vice President has been known to go out and shoot (with) a few friends. But wait, there’s more. There is a new bill in the Texas legislature specifically for improving the sporting lives of blind hunters in Texas.

I should just stop right there – BLIND HUNTERS – it says it all. These are two words that should never be next to each other in the same sentence let alone in the same piece of legislation… but they are. In the realm of truly bad ideas this ranks right up there with blind Indy car racers or blind mohels or blind bomb disposal technicians.

Anyway, you can read the article for yourself at the following link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6173535.stm

This bill would allow blind hunters to use laser-sighted rifles to hunt animals in Texas. The article appeared in the BBC news some weeks back, so once again the good old US of A is the laughing stock of the entire civilized world, confirming their opinion of us as a bunch of violence-loving barbarians.