This one is bad. Basically Couric asks a gun group: if you don’t have background checks, how do you prevent felons and terrorists from getting guns? Then the gun group is shown silent for several seconds, looking at each other blankly, and putting their heads down as if ashamed of their lack of an answer. Only — you guessed it! — the footage of them being silent was spliced in. The audio proves they had responses. Check it out at The Free Beacon — and all hail the power of New Media!

[guest post by JVW]

As we count down the final months of the odious, loathsome, execrable, Congressional career of Senator Harry Reid — or, as he is often styled here, Hairy Reed — we have plenty of opportunities to lament the ugliness that this vile and cantankerous blowhard jerkwad worm has unleashed into our body politic. It’s not just that Reid is notoriously corrupt, a low-down liar, and a bigoted race-hustler who thinks nothing of bullying private citizens for the imaginary crime of participating in the political process and who has never managed to satisfactorily prove that he is not a pederast. No, the real problem with Reid is that he combines his numbskull demagoguery with shamelessly self-serving partisan tactics. He is such an awful character that even his home exercise equipment appears to rightfully loathe him.

So it was earlier today, as we mark our calendars to reflect that we only have eight more months of suffering through this pompous ass’s malodorous contribution to the debased political culture of these times, that Reid took to the Senate floor to whine about a Defense Appropriations bill which he claims was crafted in secret by Senator John McCain and is laden with earmarks. Reid’s ugly grandstanding proved too much for freshman Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, who took to the floor to deliver a withering broadside against the despicable Nevadan. Watch it in its glorious entirety.

The traditional phony comity in the Senate is archaic, hypocritical, and disgusting. Indeed, following Cotton’s woodshedding of Reid, the Senate Minority Leader took to the floor to refer to Sen. McCain as “my friend” and to laud his service to the country and otherwise regurgitate all the other usual insincere banalities that are the coin of the realm in that chamber. This country needs less of that sort of pro forma pageantry and more of the honest and direct assessment of Congressional dysfunction that Sen. Cotton provided. That’s not to argue that we should devolve into the crude and mindless insults that have become common this election season, it’s merely to suggest that where a truly horrendous colleague like Harry Reid is concerned, Senators need to put aside the Emily Post and start to channel their inner Juvenal: “What can you do when the man himself / Is more dreadful and dire than any accusation you can bring?”

– JVW