I’m not part of the gun culture and I don’t know anything about it (although I do have a home in a corner of rural Red America where there is a gun culture—the local gunshop is called Big Toys for Boys—and many of the local men hunt: for food. The venison from one deer can go a long way to feeding a family).
Knowing nothing about them but their name, I have to say that “assault rifles” sound like overkill to me (no pun intended) when it comes to hunting. (I repeat: that’s how the term sounds. Hunting isn’t about “assaulting” animals. It’s about killing them.)

Now a once popular big-time outdoorsman/writer has been purged—overnight—for suggesting that assault rifles are “terrorist” weapons.

Modern hunters rarely become more famous than Jim Zumbo. A mustachioed, barrel-chested outdoors entrepreneur who lives in a log cabin near Yellowstone National Park, he has spent much of his life writing for prominent outdoors magazines, delivering lectures across the country and starring in cable TV shows about big-game hunting in the West.

Zumbo’s fame, however, has turned to black-bordered infamy within America’s gun culture — and his multimedia success has come undone. It all happened in the past week, after he publicly criticized the use of military-style assault rifles by hunters, especially those gunning for prairie dogs.

“Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity,” Zumbo wrote in his blog on the Outdoor Life Web site. The Feb. 16 posting has since been taken down. “As hunters, we don’t need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them. . . . I’ll go so far as to call them ‘terrorist’ rifles.”

The reaction — from tens of thousands of owners of assault rifles across the country, from media and manufacturers rooted in the gun business, and from the National Rifle Association — has been swift, severe and unforgiving. Despite a profuse public apology and a vow to go hunting soon with an assault weapon, Zumbo’s career appears to be over.

His top-rated weekly TV program on the Outdoor Channel, his longtime career with Outdoor Life magazine and his corporate ties to the biggest names in gunmaking, including Remington Arms Co., have been terminated or are on the ropes.

Now, someone tell me how powerful and influential the nefarious Israel Lobby is. I dare ya.

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos that will air tomorrow, Jimmy Carter endorses Al Gore for president.

Despite public pressure from Carter and others, the former President does not believe Gore will make a second bid for the White House saying, “I don’t think he will. I’ve put so much pressure on Al to run that he’s almost gotten aggravated with me.”

Carter told Stephanopoulos that he had not called Gore “lately” adding, “He almost told me, the last time I talked, ‘Don’t call me anymore.’”

Not that I think Al Gore will run in 08 (an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize should be consolation for any man—if he wins, of course). But I have a feeling Gore did tell Carter to get lost.

If you were a Democrat would you want Carter’s endorsement? Obviously not. He’s political poison—mostly because of his hard-ass anti-Israeli rhetoric, but not only because of that. He’s the prim, threadbare hectoring auntie of the Democratic party: an embarrassment.

He was shunted off to the side at Gerald Ford’s funeral. Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi all but banished him from the mainstream of the Democratic party after the publication of his recent book:

Pelosi: “With all due respect to former President Carter, he does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel. Democrats have been steadfast in their support of Israel from its birth, in part because we recognize that to do so is in the national security interests of the United States. We stand with Israel now and we stand with Israel forever.

“The Jewish people know what it means to be oppressed, discriminated against, and even condemned to death because of their religion. They have been leaders in the fight for human rights in the United States and throughout the world. It is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based oppression, and Democrats reject that allegation vigorously.”

I know what Carter wants to go on Stephanopoulos’s show: he’s desperate to rehabilitate himself, because he has tarnished his image irreparably by going around the world and cozying up to the world’s worst dictators while lecturing to Americans that they just aren’t good enough. His legacy is in tatters.
The question is: why is Stephanopoulos giving Carter airtime?