Some ferrets talk smack about Rudy G:
There was a time when I used to buy the line that ferrets don’t make good pets, before I’d ever gotten to know any. But in recent years my sister has had a couple of ferrets and they’ve been wonderful companion animals — friendly, happy, gentle, and very strongly attached to the human beings in their household. The bottom line is that a lot of people mistakenly believe that ferrets are wild animals, but they aren’t — ferrets are completely domesticated, and have been for a long time. (Possibly going as far back as 1500 BC.)
The phone caller in the famous radio show argument with Giuliani (which you can listen to here) is understandably emotional because the city is trying to take away people’s pets and have them destroyed. Any cat or dog lover would react the same way if their own pet were in danger of being impounded and killed.
But where does Giuliani’s emotion come from in this exchange? Why does he get so agitated about ferrets, and why does he believe anyone who keeps a ferret as a pet needs therapy? You start to wonder how many other animals he has issues with.
This Majikthise post from last fall provides some additional context, and one commenter thinks Giuliani’s role in the NYC ferret ban says a lot about his approach to governing:
“This should really be a lesson about rudy for all the people who don’t think his presidency will be that bad … He is an authoritarian prick who seeks to dominate every aspect of the lives of the people he’s supposed to care for. He will try to decide what food we can eat, what pets he deems acceptable, what sort of entertainment we should be allowed to see. He does not believe in individual freedom. He does not believe in privacy. He doesn’t even believe in human rights.
… Ferret bans might sound silly. But taken with the totality of everything he did as mayor, it’s impossible to ignore. The overriding goal of his political career has been to establish as totalitarian a system as he possibly can everywhere he goes.”
Republicans are always claiming that they want to get government off of people’s backs, but their actions belie this again and again. Republicans want to regulate who people can marry, what they do in their own bedrooms, what health decisions can be made during a pregnancy, how teachers educate children in classrooms, what we can and can’t see on television and in movies, and even what pets we’re allowed to have.
In fact, the only thing Republicans don’t want to regulate is big business. Corporations can screw people over whenever and however they want; it’s just actual human beings that have to be careful what we say and do.
And via another commenter on that post, Rudy apparently has a history of accusing anyone who disagrees with him of being mentally ill.
Related:
• The NYFerrets for Freedom page on MySpace
• More info on the NYC ferret ban and its history
(h/t Towleroad for the video link.)
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UPDATE: I cross-posted this at DKos (where it actually made the Friday Diary Rescue list!), and a commenter there noticed that the Ferrets for Freedom video got deleted from YouTube. I have no idea why YouTube did that, but what a shame. Fortunately, I discovered that there’s also an NY Ferrets for Freedom MySpace page, and the video is still up and running there as of this writing (Sat. 3:01 a.m.) So I’ve swapped out the YouTube links for MySpace links, and hopefully those will last a little longer.
I was about to ask what difference it makes to Giuliani whether people keep ferrets in the privacy of their own homes–then I saw the comment about his wanting to control every aspect of people’s lives. Some people would no doubt pervert that attribute enough to call it “vigilance–something that we need in this, our new age of terror.” Never mind that taking people’s voices and freedoms away sows the seeds of that very terrorism. (While we were busy bombing Afghanistan, did we bother learning anything about its history at all?!)
He should spend more time worrying about his prostate, and his growing stable of ex-wives, and leave citizens to pursue their own happiness without his interference.
It just occurred to me this morning that I wrote that whole thing about ferrets…I really must get a life!
I had the same thoughts the first time I heard that clip, I believe on This American Life. His emotion in that exchange is far more disconcerting. I don’t even like ferrets, but to care so much about whether other people do is old skool fucked up.