A plea to protect America’s children from one of the country’s most famous vaccine skeptics. There’s no point in critiquing the vid, really. Political humor online is a tribal thing: You need to be very, very funny to make the other tribe laugh rather than sneer. But Carrey is very funny usually. Despite his cheap, stupid nastiness towards gun-rights supporters on Twitter, I figured this would be worth a few laughs. And it was — for 10 seconds, during the “Sam Elliott” cameo, which is mainly a sight gag. As for the song, it’s neither funny nor biting. It’s basically an extended dick joke of the sort that’s been thrown at gun owners for decades. If you’re not playing for laughs then presumably you’re playing for emotional impact, to hit your opponent hard — but he’s not playing for either here. It’s a pure novelty, almost to prove that Carrey’s capable of writing a serviceable country tune rather than to push an anti-gun message. (The Funny or Die website trumpets that the song’s available for download on iTunes.) The cultural references too are so dated that at times this feels like a lost “In Living Color” sketch. Heston’s been dead for five years and stepped down as NRA chief five years before that. “Hee Haw” has been off the air since the early 1990s. (Although, of course, some over-the-top dig at southern culture was to be expected here.) The guy couldn’t even work up a Wayne LaPierre impression for his big contribution to the gun debate? Knowing that he was kissing off a chunk of his base, you’d think he would have tried harder.

Elsewhere in gun-control news today, Tom Coburn predicts that some sort of bill on universal background checks will pass the Senate. The possible linchpin? John McCain. Gulp.