by Mike Shea on 23 April 2008
I hate Pennsylvania. We never hear anything about these people and all of a sudden they're the pivoting point in the future of the world. Then they blow it by voting the wrong way because of out-of-context quotes pushed by media jackals.
Clinton not yet getting pushed out of her corrupt candidacy was only the first piece of bad news I heard today. The second was a note I received from ParentTV.org regarding Grand Theft Auto IV. They're "putting retailers on notice", telling parents to tell retailers "To reconsider any decisions to sell Grand Theft Auto IV: Liberty City." How is that protecting children? Why is it that any form of censorship is acceptable if they hold up a little baby and start screaming? Why do these groups want to take on parental responsibility for themselves and simply cut off anything to which they do not approve?
If Clinton gets into office, we can expect the worst with this sort of thing. As a New York senator, she pushed for a bill and a 90 million dollar study to study the effect of violent video games on kids. Of course, being a good scientist, she started with an objective hypothesis that states "Children are playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them". That's very scientific.
The great irony here is that this whole controversy came up with the "Hot Coffee Mod" which showed horrifying scenes of sexual intercourse in a game that lets you kill just about anyone with just about anything. Considering it was the Clintons who had cigar-porn pushed to every piece of media in the planet for about six months, I think they're hardly the ones to complain about pushing smut to children.
Maybe your a parent. Maybe you really could give a damn about video games. Maybe you find what you hear about them to be repulsive. That's fine. Don't buy it. Don't let your kid buy it. Just remember that some people, a lot of people, like it and they're not going after your copies of Readers Digest or Forbes or the Bible. The point is, leave other people to their own hobbies. Just because you have an opinion doesn't give you the right to force it on everyone else.
So now the good news.
The 90 million dollar study never went anywhere. The whole idea of the study was to push the typical left-wing parental protection agenda another notch further to protect our poor children from nipples and descriptions of oral sex outside of the oval office.
Second, GTA IV is probably going to sell 10 million copies by the end of the year regardless of any bullshit the Parents TV assholes might try. People love these games. They love violent movies, violent books, violent comics and other violent games. It may scare the shit out of people, and maybe it should, but its here to stay. I lived through the death of the Comic Code Authority, letting me read comics like Sea of Red, and I will live through this too. When it becomes mainstream, nothing can stop a good game from getting into our hands.
Still, Clinton is a threat to our entertainment and her drive to steal away freedom to protect proverbial children can damage us badly. So what can we do?
Vote for Obama as often as we can. To all my Indiana friends out there, go vote for Obama in the primary. Even if you hate democrats and really plan to vote for McCain, go vote for Obama anyway.
Write to Parents TV and tell them to stay away from your right as a parent.
Go buy your copy of GTA IV and have fun.