Just the US is able to forbid online gambling

The odd and weakly chilling thing about the amazing expansion in the US Congress this week - “the Armageddon Scenario” as it’s recognized to the soon-to-be outlawed internet gaming companies - is that many of those most affected have no thought that it occurred at all.
Whether gambling live or on-line, no life form on this planet is quite so insulated as the poker gambler. Previous year the first day of the world tournaments in Las Vegas fell on 7 July, and noticing my hazy, red eyes, the woman to my right inquired why I was so exhausted.
It’s the London bombs, I clarified, leaving the “Durrrh” plain in tone of voice, I’ve been up the whole night watching CNN and anxiously attempting to get hold of my wife on the phone. “The London bombs?” she noted. “What, London, England?”
A few days after that I stated the poker room’s peaceful unawareness of, or at best studied un-interest in, the explosions to the most fabled and beloved of all poker gamblers. It didn’t shock him one bit, shrugged Doyle Brunson. A friend of his once questioned him what language they chat in England and also whether the Channel Islands were anywhere near water.
At the height of the Vietnam War, he said, this same person enquired as to what, exactly, Vietnam was. That friend, by the way, is a man named Dewey Tomko, and before turning into a poker professional he worked - I’m not making a word of this up - as a teacher.
So while the chat boxes on Poker Stars and Party Poker have rumored this week with the common whines of vinegary self-pity at the cracking of a pair of aces by a 7,9 off-suit, with weird acronymic expressions of gloating enjoyment at hitting a flush on the river and, with all the heavily asterisked cussing that concentrates these games, of the Congressional decision that will block them from these venues in nine months, not one word, to the knowledge of this internet poker junkie, has been said.
There might be those reading this that will summarize that saving mainly young adults from such dull self-absorption is no bad idea. Yet they would certainly grant the irony of the US, of all nations, treating narrowness as a punishable offence. It’s not only the old cliché, trotted out in the National Enquirer every year, of the countless millions of passportless oafs who could not establish their own country on a map of the world. More purposely, it is as the forbidding of internet gambling emerges to be in straight breaking of previous World Trade Organisation rulings on this subject.
Not, certainly, that the management that has so resolutely rejected to approve Kyoto will lose any sleep over that. No, as ever in the age of Messrs Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush, the public face of America is one of blithe apathy as to how this will look to the world beyond. And, as so frequently, the face of the world beyond is stiff with surprise as it gazes upon America.
How this latter-day ban was passed is a gently intriguing lesson in the workings of the US legislature, the important clause being tacked on to a major bipartisan anti-terrorism act called the Port Security Bill so that it first caught opponents unawares and then made it impossible for them to oppose it, because in to do so would be to oppose the the entire bill. So old and well-tried a trick of congressional hackery is the hiding of amendments within bills to which they are barely related at all that it features in The Simpsons episode when Krusty the Clown becomes a Congressman, and uses exactly this trick to ban planes from flying over Springfield.
The only supposed link between internet poker and terrorism shoots from maintains that the former is a system of cash laundering that allows the latter. Though, since the bigger firms concerned have been approved by the London Stock Exchange’s severe checks into the purity of their businesses, even this dispute doesn’t survive.
The true opposition from those who have pushed for this for years is formally a moral one, though - with the Republicans dreading tragedy in next month’s mid term elections and frantic to support the core hold from the religious right - the political incentive speaks more noisily for itself. In the meantime, since the entire internet venues are situated outside the USA, paying no taxes in it and using few Americans, and since any US inhabitants affected will be too busy gambling poker to go close to a polling booth, there were few votes to be lost.
Whatever the political basis, though, the natural paradox at gamble here is ridiculously obvious, and obviously ridiculous. The whole mythology of America is based on Wild West tales built around the twin activities of gambling cards and shooting each other, the one so often guides to the other that the two were long and inextricably intertwined in the public awareness.
Lately, though, they parted ways. Gun crime, as this week’s disgusting horror at the Amish school pointlessly tells us again, is an ever more potent danger. Poker, on the other hand, has develop into so clean that you no longer find smoke from cigarettes at the tables of Vegas, let alone from guns, while expert players in America, unlike here, pay profits tax on their winnings.
And now the same right-wing Republicans who are based by the gun lobby has engineered through a way to forbid a pastime which offers moderately undamaging enjoyment to millions of US inhabitants.
You would barely wait for George Bush, the President who rewarded Tony Blair for his loyalty with the steel tariffs from which British companies were not excused, to give much thought for British shareholders who will suffer from the overnight fall down in internet gaming stock prices. And, honestly, why should he?
Investing in the stock market depends greatly on skill and understanding of odds, but keeps enough random doubt to qualify as gambling. In this, it is exactly like poker - and in poker, none but him ever feels distantly sorry for the gambler who makes all the right decisions but still suffers what is recognized in the game as a bad beat.
The beat taken this week by what emerge to be completely legitimate firms is poorer than anyone probable or forecasted. But if the forbidding of online poker has exposed yet again America’s psychotic, bipolar advance to personal liberty, no one gambling Texas Hold