Storm Bill? A Good Gun Owner? Torture & Osama?

Tues. Jan. 16, 2013:

Today, 3 different subjects.

1.  Take a close look at our Congress's legislative legerdemain -- i.e. sausage-making -- in its work on
a Storm Bill for NJ & NY after Hurricane Sandy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/nyregion/house-to-take-up-sandy-relief-bill-amid-battle-over-spending.html

[Maybe the Brits and/or the Chinese get things done better than our democratic republic?]


2.   One almost sympathizes with  western-New York gun rights advocates.
But the operative word is "almost."
Fuming at New York State's latest gun control laws, the coach of a high school rifle team says:

"It would outlaw most of the guns we shoot . . . What's so frustrating is the people who are here obeying the law are the ones who pay all the prices when these crazy things [Newtown, Aurora, etc.] happen."
[But the law they are "obeying" is buying guns that represent a hobby, not a necessity; bear-bating used to be legal, too, but that didn't mean you HAD to bear-bait just because it was your preferred hobby.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/nyregion/upstate-new-york-gun-owners-cast-a-cold-eye-on-new-laws.html

Popular Hobbies Over Time:  Bear-Baiting, and Target-Shooting With AR-15's & 30-Round Magazines

3.  Hollywood's current controversial film, Zero Dark Thirty, could easilly have sidestepped incredulity.
All it had to do was avoid suggesting that waterboarding & other torture yielded key details of Osama bin Laden's whereabouts.'
No one questions the right of story-tellers to narrate fiction -- even when spinning out renditions of actual historical events.  But when they deviate from known fact, are they not under an obligation to say so?
Otherwise, the effect is to deceive millions of gullible movie-viewers.

Get a load of the following rationalization, defending the film-makers' deviation from the truth: 

[From Neal Gabler, "Hard facts vs. big truths: Do artists have an obligation to get history right in films?"
in the Boston Globe, Sat. Jan. 12, 2013]

"Reporters and historians necessarily deal with facts, whether or not they also deal with truth.  We read them to learn what happened.  Artists don't necessarily deal with facts, even when they are purporting to show us history.  An artist's highest obligation isn't to 'getting it right.'  His or her obligation is to making us think, feel, and understand.

"Frankly, facts are immaterial to this mission, though we may need the distance of time to appreciate that.  No one would possibly chide Shakespeare for not being entirely faithful to the facts of Antony and Cleopatra or Henry IV or Henry V.  No one would scream that Falstaff was a fabrication.  That's because everyone understands that Shakespeare wasn't reporting facts.  He was finding truths, which is the very thing that makes him one of the great artists of all time.  Some 500 years later the facts don't seem to matter.  The art does."
_________________________________________________________________________________

DEAR READERS, WHAT IS WRONG WITH NEAL GABLER'S ARGUMENT, WHEN APPLIED TO ZERO DARK THIRTY'S SUGGESTION THAT "TORTURE HELPED FIND OSAMA BIN LADEN"?