I remember being pretty disturbed by this when it occurred, perhaps still naively clinging to a vestigial remnant of a disposition born of previous times, when Republicans where overall "better" than Democrats. I had already long since stopped calling myself a Republican, and this only served to affirm that choice on a deeply personal level. It's one of the few times I've ever agreed with Democrats on anything, though for completely different reasons. The Democrats defended Dzhokhar because they benefit politically from the mass importation of foreign labor just as they did in the antebellum days. But the right position for the wrong reasons is still the right position. I opposed it because, unlike the inept shills of the GoP, I was looking beyond the exigencies of the moment, and contemplating in what such a precedent might ultimately culminate.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was not a citizen, and therefore not entitled to Constitutional protections, and also dead (so I didn't really care about him). Dzhokhar Tsarnaev however was a naturalized citizen. And under no circumstances, at the behest of either party or any party, should the government be empowered to arbitrarily revoke citizenship to exempt people from due process. The abject myopia on the part of Republicans in this instance was simply astounding. What will happen to Conservatives I asked then, if radical leftists who label anyone at odds with their platform "terrorists" of some kind, take control of a government empowered to revoke peoples' citizenship exempting them from due process? All they need do, certainly will do, is label dissidents, especially gun owners, "terrorists," whose citizenship may be rescinded and denied due process. And just recently, as is all too often the case (much to my disappointment), my concerns were vindicated.
This is the problem, and profound danger, of the myopic partisan prejudice that grips this nation. Who knows what might currently be happening to NRA members and gun owners had the GoP gotten its way, under a federal government that could revoke one's citizenship by declaring them an "enemy combatant," exempting them from due process and granting the state license to treat them like members of ISIS. Who among you can say men like Micheal Moore and Dannel Malloy would not use that power, abuse that power, to target, suppress, and/or eliminate dissidents and opponents to their political agenda; e.g., members of the NRA?
Some will argue, stupidly, that would never happen. But I tell you what the GoP was proposing in 2013 after Boston, and what Trump was proposing in 2018 after Parkland, is an integral step in getting from here to there. You cannot base your position on these matters solely on how the people for which you vote wield their power. You must also consider how the people your opponents elect would wield it. And if you would not trust the latter with a thing, then you should not trust the former with it, because all it takes is an election to redistribute it from the former to the latter. I don't know why people can't seem to understand that. If you give Donald Trump the power to suspend due process today, or the federal government the power to suspend due process by labeling people "enemy combatants," in 4-8 years Democrats will have that power. The very power you conferred to the state for protection from your enemies will be wielded against you by your enemies. And your appeals to justice will fall on ears as def as yours, when warned against doing so by those you dismissed.
The fact is leftists are already demanding that these shooters be designated and officially treated as terrorists. If you think it will stop there, and the criteria for what constitutes a terrorist won't be revised according to partisan whim and made increasingly broad in its application, eventually including gun owners, you're dangerously naive and shorthsighted. Moore and Malloy are all but declaring as much above. Simply making a threat without actually harming anyone is already grounds to be jailed for terrorizing.
The Republicans at the time were only pursuing the best interests of Americans in their minds; except they weren't. And likewise the Democrats above are only pursuing the best interests of Americans in their minds; except they're not. Both are doing the same thing, attacking liberty, under the pretext of making people safer. But if history teaches us anything, it's that we are least safe when we are least free, and the greatest threat to a society is its own government. "Official records show that 800,000 were shot in the Soviet Union between 1930 and 1952" under Russian Socialism. Under German Socialism the Einsatzgruppen "murdered around two million Jews in mass shootings in less than a year." In one solitary instance of state sanctioned mass murder "about 42,000 Jews were shot" in just two days.
But the left in America wants to revoke the right of gun ownership for all law abiding gun owners, reserving it exclusively to functionaries of the state and those loyal to them, because some reprobate killed 17 people. And maybe Trump's not calling for the disarmament of all law abiding citizens, because that would never be successful if presented thusly. But he's doing his part to make the pie of gun owners smaller, by removing whatever slice of it he can, in precisely the same fashion leftists have been both acutely and incrementally attacking the Second Amendment (2A) for decades. In the eyes of leftists some people disarmed is better than no people disarmed, and if they can't disarm us all at once they'll gladly disarm us a few at a time, in perpetuity, until they achieve the same end. Again, if you disarm 1% of the people 100 times, how many people get disarmed?
Some will argue he's being deceived, or manipulated, as if that's somehow better. (That just means he's an idiot.) And my answer to that is I don't care. Whether done deliberately or out of ignorance is irrelevant. He's serving that agenda all the same. Your freedoms are no less lost by accident than volition, in much the same manner your house is no less lost to an accidental fire than intentional arson. Gone is gone. And once gone the "how" is of little immediate significance, having far more application for prevention than restoration.
There's simply a staggering degree of solipsistic ignorance on display in the two major parties, a culture of obscurantism pervading both, the members of which flaunt their sciolism at every opportunity. They know of and have learned nothing from the mistakes of the Weimar Republic, much less the plight and wisdom of the Founders of this country.
"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Franklin, Pennsylvania Assembly: Reply to the Governor, November 11, 1755.It seems a trite and germane notion, this quotation being so often bandied about, and often without good cause. But the thing about existential maxims is they always have relevance. This admonition has as much relevance today as it did then, and is as applicable to us here as it was the Weimer Germans, who traded liberty for security and ended up with neither. We find ourselves in the same situation now. Liberty eroding policies proposed by a kakistocratical cabal, are being facilitated by a credulous mob clamoring for safety from (largely imaginary) threats, and willing to trade liberty for the promise of it. What hope is there for a populace so ignorant it cannot recognize the most ostentatious threats to its freedom, or so physically, intellectually, and morally indolent it offers no meaningful resistance to such?
The farcically specious justifications for Trump's recent rhetoric and actions, and the equally farcical sophistry in defense of such from his supporters, is repugnant to any thinking, intellectually honest person, as is the abject hypocrisy on constant display from our glorious leader Comrade Trump.
Had Barack Obama said this, there would have been an immediate outcrying from GoP shills, warning of his impending dictatorship. But after 8 years of Republican conspiracy theories floating around social media, that Obama was going to abolish term limits and/or run for a third term, Republicans pass on this in virtual silence. They have nothing to say about it, and if they do, it's an explanation (as always) about how it's just meaningless banter; an excuse (he was only "joking") they'd have never accepted in regard to Obama.
Allegedly it was graphic imagery of the dead and wounded in Parkland that compelled Trump to take action on gun control, in a manner not dissimilar to that which moved him to bomb Syria after seeing images of dead Syrian children, in direct contradiction to his position under Obama and again with no Republican outcry of note whatsoever.
"A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to share private conversations, likened the president's reaction to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students to the impact Trump felt when he saw images of children's listless bodies after a chemical attack in Syria last April."
It's funny how tragedies only seem to induce the president to have "reaction(s)" to the left and never to the right. Seeing pictures of dead Syrian children caused him to react by unconstitutionally attacking another sovereign nation without congressional approval. Meeting with the families of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School victims causes him to react by attacking the Second Amendment. But images of the atrocities that occur every day in America's racist genocide mills apparently induce no reaction whatsoever.
Such imagery is readily available. Yet Planned Parenthood has not been bombed and remains funded. Trump calls no meetings with PP's executives to "discuss" racist genocide. One might be tempted to conclude from such inconsistencies that his moral indignation is selective and deliberately one directional. I mean, he did defend PP as an alleged "Conservative" candidate after all.
And this merely provides another example to illustrate how comprehensively stupid, or deceptive, Donald Trump is. If we should accept the death associated with PP because "we have to look at the positives" of its existence also, and because killing is "actually a fairly small part of what they do," then surely we should accept the deaths that result from AR-15 ownership which results in far, far, far fewer deaths. I mean, "we have to look at the positives also," and consider that gun homicide is "actually a fairly small part" of what AR-15 ownership represents, right? But that's not what we're seeing. He defends one (the much bigger killer) and attacks the other (the exponentially lesser killer). He is "shocked and distressed" by "the savagery of the wounds inflicted" by AR-15s, but babies thrown in trash cans, dismembered, and sold for parts, not so much.
And never mind the fact Trump apparently got the idea to raise the age requirement AR-15s from his unambiguously leftist friend and journalist Geraldo Rivera.
"Television personality Geraldo Rivera, who dined with the president and his two oldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, arrived with a pitch: ban people under age 21 from buying assault-type weapons. Trump took the idea 'under advisement,' Rivera, a Fox contributor, wrote in an email. And as days passed by, consideration turned into full-blown support."So apparently national gun policy under Donald Trump is being dictated by outspoken illegal immigration supporter Geraldo, and children, whose appeals for federal intervention Trump "studied [...] on cable news." So yeah, as you can see we're so much better off under Trump, than had Hilary won. Trump is pushing law based upon the input of leftists who didn't even vote for him as opposed to his constituency.
So again, just to be clear, just to really emphasize what's going on here, just to really hammer it home, gun law in this country is being dictated by Donald Trump's leftist friends and kids. The abject rancid stupidity permeating the GoP base is enough to gag a maggot, more befitting a Monty Python skit, than the Republic bequeathed us by our Founders and party of Lincoln. It's simply astonishing to see how gullible, hypocritical, and dishonest these people are. Every day, literally every day, I see Republicans defending a guy pushing Geraldo Rivera's gun policy across the nation.
HOW THE HELL IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT THIS!? The great negotiator, master of the "art of the deal," has dinner with a commie and meets with some emotional kids and comes out it pushing gun control? Need I ask the obvious question? What other policy positions, if any, are derived from Trump's leftist friends? Is this why Obamacare is not repealed, Hillary's not in jail, and there's no wall yet? Perhaps it was Hillary, over brunch, that convinced him not to investigate Hillary.
And perhaps most amazing of all, this trickle down stupidity is working. A leftist manipulated the laughably capricious and facile Trump, and Trump in turn is manipulating the equally capricious and facile GoP base, and even many in congress. It's already worked in Florida (seen in a previous installment), and continues to spread.
"What we need is a tactically trained school resource officer, or two of them, assigned to every public school in America."We don't "need" that actually. We don't "need" any of the things currently being proposed by bureaucrats. Because the school shooting epidemic is a completely leftist/media manufactured crisis. It simply doesn't exist. The media induced perception and the numerical reality tell two completely different stories. Based upon the CDC's death figures for 2015, the Florida school shooting comprised 0.0006% of all deaths in the United States. Based upon the same data your child is 222000% more likely to die in transit to or from school (automobile fatality). So where's the demand for one or two trained resource officers in every car, and a "nationwide cultural change," to keep ours kids safe from automobiles?
Republicans, just like Democrats, want to change state and even national policy based upon an incident that killed 0.000005% of the country's population and less than .5% percent of all deaths in 2015. Meanwhile a practice that comprised more than 40% of all deaths in 2015 (abortion) is of no concern to any of them (or any of the people that voted for them); they couldn't care less. Far from Republicans opposing tyranny, as they would have you believe, they're complicit and even leading the charge for new/more firearm regulation and government oversight.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, coming from Higgins. Louisiana has a conspicuous penchant for electing leftists, with the report cards to prove it, who call themselves "Republicans."
Louisiana's representatives beautifully illustrate that Republican red and Socialist red are growing ever more indistinguishable by the day. D's and F's abound in this collage of leftist Republican garbage. Only one, one, has a respectable score. Is it any wonder well known leftist Donald Trump, buddy of Hillary Clinton and Geraldo Rivera, won the Republican nomination, the presidency on the GoP ticket, and continues to enjoy wide scale Republican support? Republicans love big government leftists; provided they have the right branding. They elect them, and reelect them, again and again. And when presented with these facts, they respond just like leftists/Democrats do, with denial, subterfuge, and intransigently clinging to their delusions.
America is doomed. Freedom is dying, and Republicans are killing it, all the while believing themselves freedom fighters like every other Socialist.
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