Muse Master Wherein Our Expert On All Things Pierces The Darkness Just For You. By Tom Danehy MUSIN'...ON A Thursday afternoon... I take back everything negative I've ever said about Graham County, Arizona, after angry residents there booted out absentee sheriff and national gun nut Richard Mack in last week's primary election. Mack, you may recall, made a national ass of himself by refusing to obey the law of the land. After the Brady Law went into effect, requiring background checks on people attempting to purchase guns, Mack said his office wouldn't go along. He tried to stand on some vague Constitutional ground, but no one actually believed Big Dick could read. Still, it made him a big hero with the gun nut/militia/skinhead crowd. Why, pretty soon he was goin' all over the country, giving fiery speeches to all-white crowds of which an inordinate number of people were named Earl. He was a big hero at the Gun Nut Orgy in Phoenix last year, when the National Rifle Association gathered to try to flex its atrophied political muscle and ended up electing Ted Nugent to a national post, instead. Anyway, Mack hit the jackpot on the speaker's circuit. He was in big demand. 'Course, in all fairness, it must be noted he was usually the third choice of most groups. Fortunately for Mack, the top two favorites were David Koresh, who lies a'smoldering in the grave, and Timothy McVeigh, who probably won't be able to speak in public for 70 years or so. It didn't seem to matter to Mack that while he was out speechifyin', real people were getting shot dead in his own county. At least one major murder case remains unsolved after two years. So Mack got stomped by one of his former deputies, Frank Hughes, whose campaign focused not on the gun issue, but on Mack's absentee status. The voters gave Hughes an astonishing 70 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary. Hughes' message was simple: Mack doesn't care about his job and the constituency which he swore to protect. It went over big. Mack is now free to speak full time. The Supreme Court will be slapping down his argument this fall, but that shouldn't stop the gun nuts. They're still going to see federal bogeymen behind every tree and Communists (like that was ever a threat!) massing along the Canadian border. No, losing this election won't hurt Mack at all. The only competition out there is Randy Weaver, and he tends to lose his audience after he starts every speech with, "So there I was, hiding up on a mountain to escape felony charges, using my wife as a human shield, and damned if those feds didn't shoot her..." CAN SOMEONE TELL me why former Clinton strategist Dick Morris was using inside information to try to impress a prostitute? Isn't that usually just a cash transaction? Wasn't the money good enough? OVER THE YEARS I've heard many definitions of Hell. But how's this one? REO Speedwagon and Eddie Money, in concert. At Ft. Huachuca. CALL ME CRAZY, but I think it's premature to count Ed Moore out of the November general election. This dude's been declared dead more times than Jason in the Friday the 13th movie series, but he keeps coming back. Sure, he's probably running third right now, but I'd be willing to bet he doesn't finish third in November. That's going to be a fun race to watch. DEFINITION OF HELL, Pt. II: All those lame-ass white folks singing "I'm A Dole Man" at Republican rallies. This is the same political party whose idea of an R&B group is the 5th Dimension. I HAVE TRIED MY absolute hardest, but I just can't listen to that guy Ferrell on sports-talk radio 1490-AM. He sounds like he's gargling glass, and it appears his core constituency is beer-drinking hockey fans (if you'll pardon the redundancy). I actually like sports-talk radio. It can be a lot of fun, but this guy spends way too much time talking about beer, cigars, hockey and what an outlaw he is. WHAT ARE WE supposed to think in the shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur? Certainly I don't wish anyone harm or death, but this guy was an industrial strength asshole. He was convicted of rape, bragged about shooting police, and had damaged young minds with his glorification of hard-core gangsta bullshit. He was shot four times in the chest in a drive-by (how ironic) in Las Vegas. Doctors had to remove one of his lungs, but he died anyway. He'd been carrying on a feud with East Coast rapper The Notorious B.I.G., and had even accused B.I.G. of setting up a previous shooting incident on a recent album. Unfortunately, rappers who lead that gangsta lifestyle actually gain credibility in the eyes of their stupid-ass fans. Snoop Doggy Dog recently went on trial for murder (it was a hung jury) and so his followers think he knows of which he raps. (Snoop and Shakur were recently together on the MTV Awards, with Shakur extolling the virtues of Kiss. Maybe that's why they shot his ass.) Now that Shakur has croaked, B.I.G.'s sagging career gets a weird boost. Too sick. This sort of thing never happened when I was growing up. Just think if Gary Lewis and the Playboys had a feud with Paul Revere and the Raiders. It would've been a bloodbath.

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