A few days before the election, I read a column so pathetic and poorly reasoned; I’ll not even mention the author’s name. Suffice to say that I began reading his work nearly thirty years ago, at the tender age of twelve, and that the respect I’ve since developed for both the man and his opinions precludes naming him.
As he’s a genuine soldier, one who has worn his country’s uniform and shed both his own blood and that of his nation’s enemies in its service, I won’t pull the despicable neocon stunt of calling him a “turncoat” or otherwise insulting him; I leave that kind of shit-slinging (and it is shit-slinging; nothing more) to the Hannitys, O’Reillys, Krauthammers, Levins and other useless “talking heads” of that ilk. I question neither his patriotism nor his sincerity – only his judgment.
Like many freedom-lovers of our acquaintance, my wife and I saw this year’s election as a no-win situation. For us, choosing between McCain and Obama was tantamount to choosing between inoperable cancer and AIDS. Both candidates score off the charts in terms of narcissistic and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders. Both are incurable elitists with near-pathological senses of entitlement. Both have drunk deeply of a sick, toxic cocktail of mixed delusions (persecution and grandeur). And both were completely out of touch with the “little people” they aspired to rule – although Obama was ultimately more adept at feigning empathy, a la Clinton’s “I feel your pain.”
As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.
-- Proverbs 26:11
Being no fonder of vomit than of folly, we opted for write-ins, by way of protesting the “Tweedle Dee/Tweedle Dum” choice of candidates. When offered a choice between the lesser of two evils, we opted to reject evil, period: “Vade retro, Satana!”
To be sure, our decision was impractical. It was, however, principled, and we’d hoped that a larger slice of the electorate would vote on principle rather than personality, on conviction rather than compromise. We’d hoped that more people – given the pre-election nattering about “change”-- would say, “Not on my watch!”
But they didn’t.
Sadly, neither did the man whose column I’m lambasting.
If the Gentle Reader doesn’t understand that all government is dependent upon the use of force, he/she is cordially invited to stop breathing. Like it or not, the law is enforced by men with guns. The Constitution may “guarantee” certain rights, and the law may recognize certain rights. Both, however, are enforced by elected and appointed officials and the armed men they command. See the entire history of the human species for further clarification. This being the case, I refuse to give up my weapons or vote for anyone -- party affiliation notwithstanding -- who demands that I do so.
No individual, however well armed, can even hope to equal the destructive capability of a modern army and its weaponry. No individual in history has ever managed to equal the destructive capability of a demagogue and his followers, as our species’ dismal track record of conquest, slavery and genocide attests. The best he can do is “give as good as he gets” in the face of tyranny, which, by its very nature, is a government-owned monopoly.
This sad fact being self-evident to all but the most historically illiterate, it goes without saying that a man who seeks to disarm others has plans for them. Plans that aren’t necessarily in their best interests, and which necessitate rendering them defenseless. In short, he means to rule them rather than serve them.
Pardon my French, but fuck that. In my forty-one misspent years on this whirling chunk of rock, I’ve used a firearm to assert my “rights” to life, liberty and property no fewer than four times. Obama, to the best of my knowledge, has never faced the threat of direct physical violence. McCain, to the best of my knowledge, was at his best when dropping heavy-duty firepower on third-worlders from thousands of feet above their heads, but managed to fuck up despite his technological advantage. Pardon my redneck ass if that doesn’t exactly leave me all broke out with confidence in his overall judgment and threat-assessment capability…
Beyond opining that when either calls or votes for the wholesale disarmament of the American people; he speaks whereof he knows not, I’ll ask one simple question: If neither trusts me with my pistols and rifles, why should I trust either with the world’s largest nuclear/biological/chemical/radiological arsenal? If neither considers me fit to bear arms in my own defense in a dangerous world, why should I consider either fit to occupy the country’s highest elected office?
Apparently, my target hasn’t bothered to ask these simple questions, as he chose to endorse McCain. Worse still, he chose to abandon reason entirely and appeal to gut-level, lizard-brain fear in the process. Stopping just short of claiming an Obama presidency meant instant, nationwide gun confiscation, he neglected to mention that an attempt at instant, nationwide gun confiscation might very well result in the instant, nationwide deaths of any number of federal agents and/or National Guardsmen (the latter recently freed from the shackles of the inconvenient Posse Comitatus Act by a president whose policies he apparently supports).
(How I love “conservatives,” by the way! One moment, they preach the virtues of integrity and individual responsibility. The next, though, they invoke the “Nuernberg Defense,” especially when men who’ve sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution “morph” into jackbooted thugs on command…)
As he’s getting up in years, I can attribute his inability to “think deeply on this” to age. I can’t, however, account for his refusal to bring elementary reasoning into play. If he can still write coherent sentences, he can still put two and two together and arrive at four.
In his argument, this gent conceded that McCain’s voting record on firearms issues left something to be desired. Kudos for that, although it’s tantamount to saying that Pol Pot’s human rights record left something to be desired -- “Ye need not stop work to tell us. We knew it many seasons before.” Unfortunately, our boy also sank to the level of noting that Sarah Palin was staunchly pro-gun.
Pardon my French once again, but big fuckin’ deal.
When last I read the Constitution, the Vice President’s responsibilities were rather limited. The President and the President alone was legally empowered to pass or veto legislation -- period. Even the Vice President’s role as president pro tempore of the Senate doesn’t mean shit in this case, as (see article I, section 3, paragraph 4) he/she/it “…shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”
To anyone even remotely acquainted with contemporary politics and the current Tweedle Dee/Tweedle Dum ratio on Capitol Hill, the chance of the Senate being equally divided on the issue of gun control – or any other, for that matter -- is as likely as Sean Hannity reading the Downing Street Memo or the first three pages of the patriot act on the air. The Democrats hold the majority of Senate seats – end of discussion. Palin as tie-breaker under those circumstances?
Nice try. Unfortunately, the argument is as full of holes as the Branch Davidians.
The next item that rankled me – and rankled me badly – was the mention of appointments to the Supreme Court. Apparently, many Republicans and conservatives believe that a Republican presidency is an absolute guarantee of strict constructionist appointees to our once-great nation’s highest court. (And a “high” court it is, indeed. If empirical evidence is anything to go on, the “Nine Unknown Men[tal Cases]” spend more time getting high than the combined populations of Atlanta’s and Chicago’s southsides…)
Once again, he completely ignores McCain’s voting record. Unlike him, I’m inclined to wonder why a believer in a “flexible” Constitution would do any such thing. If McCain, as the talk-radio pundits have repeatedly (one might say reflexively) assured us, is a man of principle, why would any rational human being expect him to abandon his anti-gun and anti-liberty principles (i.e., his “flexibility,” the antithesis of principle, ironically enough) when appointing Supreme Court justices?
I’ll allow for the possibility of my target hoping McCain would be elected and then abruptly snuff it, leaving Palin in the driver’s seat. If so, I applaud his sentiments -- if not his rational faculty. It is, after all, equally possible that I’ll commence to shittin’ rose-scented gold bullion and pissin’ cancer-curing sody-pop on the morrow. I’m not counting on near-miracles of that sort, though, and if the author of the offending article was, he should have said so in the first place. Millions like me would almost certainly have cautioned him against taking such a precarious position, but that’s neither here nor there.
No, my guess is that a McCain presidency would have seen the appointment of justices who share McCain’s views. He isn’t a constructionist by any stretch of the imagination, so the likelihood of his appointing strict constructionists to the bench was minimal, at best.
My distaste for fear tactics and shoddy reasoning of this kind notwithstanding, I have to give the column’s author credit for mentioning the Second Amendment, period. In this year’s election, it was hardly an issue at all; a fact that annoyed me to no end. To the Republicans, the only issues worth addressing were the so-called “war on terror” (which has somehow become synonymous with the occupation of Iraq), the ever-undefined matter of “national security” and the prospect of higher taxes.
Anyone with different concerns was summarily dismissed as a crackpot or branded a “liberal,” a “turncoat,” or “unpatriotic.” (The irony of Northeastern, second- and third-generation Americans hurling such verbal brickbats at 9th-14th-generation “Old Americans” like me -- direct descendants of the earliest British colonists, our ancestors having arrived between 1607 and 1775 -- is as delicious as it is offensive, by the way.)
And my concerns were very different indeed. The ability to protect my family and myself was first and foremost among them. As the alleged nationwide drop-off in violent crime seems to have skipped my hometown, this is a very real concern. My wife works just off Holcomb Bridge Road (known to local LEOs as “the Holcomb Bridge drug corridor”), and for years, I worked the graveyard shift in an area increasingly “enriched” by immigration. To me, then, ready access to a firearm has nothing to do with hunting, target shooting or dick-waving; and everything to do with remaining alive, unharmed and un-robbed. Unlike Obama, McCain and the other nattering nabobs of the political class, I don’t have a 24-7 circle of bodyguards with ballistic vests and submachineguns standing between me and the “hard working” illegal aliens they so adore.
I should also mention that if the threat of Islamic terrorism (I suppose the “Yellow Peril” and the “Red Threat” have been supplanted by the “Tan Terror”) is as great as McCain would have us believe, he’d want more armed Americans, not fewer. That, however, is another matter entirely.
And speaking of terrorists and foreigners (and bears, oh my!), there’s the matter of open borders and unlimited immigration. Only a “We create our own reality!” neocon could believe that an unsecured perimeter is conducive to national security. Only such a reality-challenged lunatic could believe that flooding the country with immigrants from countries with no tradition of individual responsibility or economic/social/political liberty is somehow good for the country as a whole. Admittedly, a permanent underclass of disenfranchised, unassimilated “semi-citizens” benefits the Democratic party (general happiness and prosperity would render them politically irrelevant, after all) and the Republican party’s corporate backers, with their seemingly unquenchable thirst for cheap labor – but it bodes ill for the rest of us.
My next concern is the unchecked growth of the Federal Government – courtesy of the Republicans. Not only was another cabinet-level department unnecessary and a waste of time and money; the shady, draconian, meta-constitutional powers conferred by patriot act I&II and the Continuity of Operations plan present a clearer and more present danger to my liberty than all the world’s terrorist organizations combined. This, needless to say, brings me full circle, to the matter of gun control.
When the Founding Fathers drafted the Second Amendment, they weren’t concerned with hunting, target shooting or producing Olympic gold medallists. Since the dark days of the Wilson administration, an entire specious school of “Constitutional scholarship” has grown up around the Second Amendment, but the founders’ intent remains clear, as expressed in their own words. Anti-Federalists considered standing armies injurious to liberty, and rightly so. Federalists conceded their point, but counter-argued that the militia – an armed populace, as later defined in the United States Militia Act (1792) – served to diminish the threat.
The Second Amendment, then, was a compromise between the two schools of thought. One of the shortest amendments in the Bill of Rights, it reads – plainly and simply: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” (Emphasis mine.)
When viewed in the context of The Federalist Papers – the Federalists’ “sales pitch” for foisting their proposed constitution upon the nation – the Second Amendment was the legal guarantee of a right asserted in the Declaration of Independence, the very raison d’etre of the American Revolution: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it…”
As the founders -- Federalist and Anti-Federalist alike -- understood, the common man and his weapons (i.e., me and my weapons and my countrymen and their weapons, in this day and age) were the “thin red line” between reasonable national security and outright despotism. In the sociopolitical context of the American Revolution and its immediate aftermath, then, the right to keep and bear arms implied far more than merely defending oneself and one’s country against Indians, outlaws and foreign oppressors -- it also implied defending oneself and one’s country against domestic tyranny.
My target once claimed to have been in accord with the English and French political thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the time, I believed him -- and still do, to a certain extent. Perhaps, in his own mind, he still is. Unfortunately, his decision to endorse a “stealth tyrant” (McCain) as the only alternative to a quasi-Hitlerian windup doll with an apparent messiah-complex and every symptom of narcissistic personality disorder (I thank God for merely saddling me with manic-depression, by the way – I truly got off with a “slap on the wrist”…) gives the lie to his professed convictions.
I chose to adhere to mine: I voted for neither.
The poison of tyranny, whether administered in homeopathic or allopathic doses, is still tyranny – and still poison. Like lead and similar toxins, literal or metaphoric, it accumulates in the body politic and inevitably leads to toxemia and death (both conditions neatly conforming to the definition of “change,” for the benefit of the the Obama-worshippers among us...). To me, the idea of voting for McCain because he was slightly less authoritarian than Obaba was utterly ludicrous; it amounted to choosing to take the smaller of two doses of poison.
Thanks, but no thanks. I chose neither.
Beyond the article’s apologist stance (“Yeah, McCain sucks, but he’s the best we’ve got to offer”), what saddened me most was its near-hysterical, yet vaguely threatening tone. Like so much Republican rhetoric of late, it reminded me of a frightened school bully demanding protection money from increasingly indifferent children, while screaming that a rival bully was even worse than himself. In the world of politics, as in the schoolyard, the weaker “children” will eventually give their lunch money to the bully’s rival -- just for a change of pace – while the stronger ones will tell both to go fuck themselves.
The implied threat (“Vote for us -- or else!”) was indicative of yet another fatal flaw in the Republicans’ collective character: a breathtakingly arrogant sense of entitlement.
Granted, this country isn’t a democracy – thank God. All the same, the United States government “deriv[es] its just powers from the consent of the governed.” When a party and its candidates scoff at the will and values of its core constituency, said constituency can be expected to withdraw its consent at the ballot box. For nearly eight years now, the Republican Party has ignored the will of its voting-base and spit in their faces – but still has the audacity to demand their vote. This year, as in 2006, many of us ignored their demands.
In keeping with their ostensible “enemy’s” attempt to reduce us to crude, cartoonish stereotypes, we did indeed “cling to our guns and religion” – while letting go of the Republican Party by not voting for its candidates. And now, the “Party of Reagan” is angry with us, as if we were the ones who’d failed them and not the other way around.
We wanted reduced immigration and tightly controlled borders. They offered us McCain – an unabashed supporter of open borders and amnesty, and who never saw an H-1-B visa he didn’t like.
We wanted an end to wars against abstractions, tactics and nouns. They offered us McCain, who, not satisfied with the quagmire in Iraq and the unfinished business in Afghanistan, now wants to “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran,” in his own words.
We wanted to stop subsidizing abortions with our tax dollars. They offered us McCain, who is anything but pro-life.
And we wanted to preserve our right to keep and bear arms. They offered us McCain, whose anti-gun voting record rivals Schumer’s or Feinstein’s.
Predictably, they lost our support – and the election.
Unfortunately, that leaves us with Obama in the Whitehouse and Democrat majorities in the House and Senate. This means that my target’s fears are justified to a certain extent. A federal gun ban is a very real possibility. There are, however, an estimated 80,000,000 privately owned firearms in the United States. Even allowing for collectors, survivalists and hardcore “gun goons” and “gear queers,” most of whom own a minimum of three firearms (a rifle, a shotgun and a pistol or revolver) each, there are at least 10,000,000 gun owners in this once-great country. This makes the American public the second largest armed body on earth.
Does an Obama presidency, then, portend the complete disarmament of the American people, as my target asserted?
Let’s leave that up to those 10,000,000+ armed citizens. To paraphrase Jim Morrison: “They got the guns, but we got the numbers – and a few guns of our own.”
G’night and God bless.
Amen and glad to see you back posting. I agree with your ideas and sentiments, but I lack confidence in enough of those 10,000,000+ gun owners acting like armed citizens.
Posted by: Tim | November 14, 2008 at 09:22 AM
Unfortunately, voting in any presidential election since Reagan was near the end of his second term has come down to choosing the least of the evils. And just as unfortunately, voting none of the above is a real good way to get handed the worst evil, as we have seen in this last election.
Posted by: Trailmaster | November 15, 2008 at 04:32 PM
I wish above all matters that these shades of grey, and shades of nuanced findings about the world we live in, would be more stark.
Alas, they are not. I'm reminded of how that smartass leftyesque scribbler, David Sedaris put it in The New Yorker:
“I think of being on an airplane.
The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the delicately braised chicken, pan seared to perfection and absolutely scrumptious?’ she asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of SHIT with bits of broken glass in it?’
“To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask again how the chicken is cooked.”
So he thinks.
More fool him, and all the snobbish ignorance of the New Yorker; on probably more levels than this hopeless ass kicked, parley with reality.
I doubt the Vunderkinder, who is more the pasty faced Yorkshireman for his socialist milkwater pap for the masses and the guy who got huffy about his experience meter being merely two years of campaigning, is the chicken, to John McSAME/MILF (as per one bumper sticker on one of those HOPEMOBILE VWs placed the contrast).
More likely, our choices in politics, as with other blind avenues in life that lead to the dark alleys of scary people, is more akin to a stale cheese sandwhich vs. dry hotdog weenies with some flat cola.
Yes, my beamish boy, Dave, you've punctured this beast's perineal cavity with your usual tempered spanish steel.
McCain and Co. might be little more than a speed bump. We conservatives talk big and government needin' to get out of this and that and a couple of these, and yet we grow the government, health care is to be Canadianized, and the economy is more and more matching the Webster's definition of socialism all the while we jabber about free minds, free people, and supposedly free markets.
I'm quite sure Bear Stearns, the AIG lords who made Caligula look like Mother Teresa (on the public dime at that) and others case a query our way:
If they get to keep the corporate condo in Barbados on public money pulled from you and me--why the HELL not Miss Flossy get her home just off the access road in Plainville, USA?
Hmm. Good question.
Posted by: Wakefield Tolbert | December 02, 2008 at 07:02 PM