Holy Crap! The Republicans are going to turn me into a Republican

Wow, all the sudden I hate the Government.

Chris Walla, guitarist for Death Cab For Cutie (aka, Band I Don’t Care About) has recorded raw cuts for a solo album. He did them in Canada. He tried to send one of his employees into the US with copies of it on tape and on a hard drive. U.S. Homeland Security confiscated the hard drive.

Once news got out, everyone went ape shit, assuming it was the Bush administration trying to suppress his music. So MTV News finds the guy holding the hard drive, Mike Milne, a spokesperson with Homeland Security, and this is how he explains it:

“Our officers on the line are not politically motivated by what they do, they’re driven by the law … If you have recorded music — from a professional recording studio, from a professional musician, from a foreign country that’s being imported to the United States — there are certain import requirements. If it’s worth a certain amount of money, it requires a formal entry into the United States, which means a bond needs to be posted and there needs to be formal invoices presented. There are copyright and trademark ramifications in the music industry that we enforce as well. And there are certain places or ports in the United States that are designated as commercial ports, where that merchandise can be imported into the United States. Where this person tried to bring this commercial merchandise in is not a port that is designated to bring in commercial merchandise.”

Have you ever wanted anyone to shut up more in your life?

So what did we learn here? OK, it wasn’t politically motivated, you guys are just assholes. I mean, have you ever read worse bureaucratic shit? At the end of the day this “commercial merchandise” is a fucking recording. Non? Let’s say that it was something else. It still wasn’t going to be anything but data. It wouldn’t take any effort to figure that out, right? Oui.

But here’s the best part. Milne has this to say about a joke Walla made about his hard drive potentially getting waterboarded when media asked him what was going on:

“We followed standard operating procedure … and when you start talking about … Guantánamo Bay, you get my ire up. I go on Google News, and I see 125 different news stories out there with the headline ‘Homeland Security Seizes Musician’s Music,’ and it strikes me as unfair.

Oh, sorry, did he hurt your feelings? Guess what, asshole… jokes haven’t been banned yet. It’s immaterial. Shut up. You’re just digging yourself a hole. I mean, could this guy possibly rub a normal person further in the wrong way.

Guess what, whether or not what you did was fucked up, Walla’s legitimately pissed and the worst he does is make a crack and you’re going to cry about it?

The stupidest thing about it is this: there’s nothing that could possibly be on that hard drive that Walla couldn’t just have sent over the Internet anyway. Am I right? I’m right.

So again, I say: What. The. Fuck?

I’ll tell you what the fuck: rigid minded bureaucrats who need a mandatory blow-job and a spliff. Seriously, I don’t smoke pot but I don’t need it like this guy, either.