Telemarketers are good people.
Oh, they're just doing a job. So we should accommodate them when they interrupt our meals, our study time, and our peaceful, drooling, teddy bear-clutching slumber.
When telemarketers call every day to sell burial plots, light bulbs, long distance service, digital cable, tile flooring or better interest rates on home loans, we should be nice.
Telemarketers are good people -- just like us, right?
Wrong, you infidels! Telemarketers are the dark, hellish force of a thousand hairy-toothed demons with long, grody-to-the-max fingernails and whip-cracking, sulfur-spouting, forked tongues of flame!
At least that's what I heard on Fox News.
On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Nottingham ruled the national do-not-call registry unconstitutional just days before its launch -- a move that prompted thousands to interrupt their own dinners, television viewing and family time (whatever that is) and say, "Wha--?"
The registry, heralded in the home of John King as the single greatest moment in the history of telephony -- nay, the universe -- has been put on hold until the Federal Trade Commission can pick its jaw up off the floor and change its shorts.
Nottingham said the registry violates free speech provisions. But the First Amendment only protects speech that does not violate the rights of others.
So when telemarketers get your number from undisclosed sources (read: the phone company sold you out), and call you repeatedly, that's not a violation of your rights?
Aren't people entitled to privacy? Doesn't that privacy mean more than the freedom of telemarketers to call us in the middle of our four-hour afternoon naps?
Apparently, Nottingham likes his privacy, because his own office phone number is on the list, according to an Associated Press report.
I found Nottingham's home phone number publicly listed, though I presume not for long. (I can't print that number -- THAT would be a free speech violation.)
I'm above such spitefulness, but the idea of calling and offering him encyclopedias is funny. I'd imagine he wouldn't be laughing.
"Even President Bush weighed in Thursday, shortly after Congress had overwhelmingly approved a bill making it clear that the FTC has the authority to enforce a national do-not-call program," read one MSNBC report.
"Unwanted telemarketing calls are intrusive, annoying and all too common," Bush said in a statement. The president added that he looked forward to signing the measure, according to MSNBC.
This feeling of agreement with the president is strange and unearthly to me, akin to waking up in an episode of "Night Gallery," but nevertheless, our president is right.
Did I say that? What's going on? First a judge strikes down a perfectly great Federal Trade Commission effort, and now I'm agreeing with President Bush.
Has the whole world gone nuts?
Should Nottingham be the undoing of the do-not-call registry, telemarketers will be making millions of calls to people who didn't want to be bothered and said so by adding their numbers to the list.
If that list is undone, can you imagine the backlash?
No more will people politely hang up or scream, "Stop calling me, for God's sake," into the receiver. No more will adults put small, chatty children on the line to occupy solicitors.
The days of blowing whistles and firing guns near the phone will be over.
I shudder at the savagery to come.
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