If you think you’ve seen more than enough crazy from the Republicans since the election of Barack Obama, I have news for you. It’s about to get a lot crazier as the party’s most influential nut-jobs convene this morning at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC for the opening of CPAC 2009. One look at their agenda tells the story. You can attend Breakfast with Phyllis Schlafly: “Doing the Impossible”. You can join Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Rep. Connie Mack to answer the question: Will Congress Take Your Guns? You can attend a book signing with Jack Abramoff-fellow traveler Ralph Reed. You can attend three events with Newt Gingrich tomorrow alone. Don’t miss this: Bailing Out Big Business: Are We All Socialists Now?
And that’s just a taste of what’s available. If you want to soak in the wisdom of John Cornyn, Jim DeMint, Tom Coburn, or Ron Paul, there are stand-alone forums you can attend. Tomorrow night they’ll be awarding the Jeanne Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom and Ronald Reagan awards. You won’t want to miss that. Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina will perform the Keynote speech. The entertainment will be provided by Jim Worthing, who is described as an ‘accomplished songwriter in gospel and patriotic music.’
Settting aside the dismal lineup of speakers, the few substantive forums indicate that the Republicans are operating from a defensive crouch. They want to discuss how to avoid national health care, how to keep their guns, how to combat creeping socialism, how to prevent new taxes from killing entrepreneurship. They have whole forums to discuss mass delusions like: Al Franken and ACORN: How Liberals are Destroying the American Election System, hosted by (I shit you not), Hans von Spakovsky. That’s some serious crazy.
If you can make it through the full three days, you’ll be rewarded at the end when they wrap things up by awarding Rush Limbaugh with the Defender of the Constitution Award. Nuff said.
The Republicans are just indulging their own paranoia. There is nothing in this whole conference of any potential value to the conservative movement except a couple of forums on using new media and state/local organizing. Even on foreign policy, where they do have some ostensibly serious forums, they’re just going to frighten each other into spasms of pants-wetting. It’s going to be a sad, sad spectacle.
I continue to be amazed by the paranoia that the NRA and its fellow travelers have managed to instill in the gun-owning population about the Democrats.
No, Congress is not going to take your guns. We have far larger issues than gun regulation to deal with right now, and Democrats are a long way from being unified on that particular issue, anyway. Personally, I don’t care one way or another about the legal status of firearms, and I don’t know a whole lot of other Democrats for whom it is a major concern.
As an aside, I should explain why I am unconcerned about gun ownership. Having looked at several other countries with both tight gun restrictions and liberal gun ownership laws, there isn’t a consistent correlation between gun crime (or violent crime generally) and gun ownership. That is, there are countries with high rates of violent crime both with and without legal firearms, and countries with low crime rates both with and without legal firearms. The arguments of both the pro- and anti-gun factions regarding a relationship between gun ownership and crime are, therefore, not very compelling when the facts are examined.
The other major reason for gun ownership, that is, to resist an oppressive government, is similarly bullshit. A bunch of guys with assault rifles does not an army make. Anyone who thinks that a 19th century-style militia can hold out against a central government with a well-trained standing army, armor, air power, and modern command-and-control systems is smoking crack. The best they can do is run the kind of guerrilla resistance that has, granted, ground the US military to a standstill in Iraq, but which has also destroyed the country in the process.
So at the end of the day, while it’s true that I wouldn’t complain much if Congress took away the guns, mine included, I can think of thirty or forty things I’m going to write my congressman about before the subject of guns even comes up. Guns just don’t matter that much.
Don’t be so sure that the Obama administration is going to be hands-off on the guns. But, of course, all they’re talking about doing is reinstating the Assault Weapons Ban.
Jeebus, why would they even bother? Picking a fight that the House doesn’t want to have, that would get quashed in the Senate pretty quickly, and that has no real value as a law enforcement mechanism is crazy (the definition of “assault weapon” in the old assault weapons ban rendered useless – you might as well have called it “the scarier looking gun ban” since there were so many cracks and loopholes in it).
Silliness. A pointless waste of time and effort give the current makeup of the Congress and the Democratic Party. There’s no point in pushing for an assault weapons ban these days. It would be better to focus the efforts on getting law enforcement the tools they need to track the gun’s ownership when a gun crime is committed (and that’s the kind of “gun control” that gets a lot of support even in the sticks from everyone who isn’t a rabidly crazy gun nut).
My experience here locally is that the surge in gun interest by those whom I know, and particularly their desire to hoard ammunition and guns, is based on fear of a looming and inevitable Obama-inspired racial insurrection by blacks as much as anything. Yes, there are also fears of some kind of assault on their perceived Second Amendment rights, but what I see driving most people’s actions is white fear of an increasing racial marginalization.
On the political side of their arguments they and the NRA will almost always frame it as an argument about their Constitutional rights, but at ground level I believe it is primarily an overwhelming fear of non-white America. And they see the election of Obama as the catalyst which will give blacks their justification and cover to finally exact retribution against white people. In their mind, if they are to have any hope of preserving white culture and the white race, then guns are as essential to them as food and water.
I believe that once you barely scratch below the surface of a typical John Q. Gunowner, for all his bluster and blow about his “rights”, that is what you will find.
My experience up here in rural New York State with John Q. Conservative Gunowner matches yours.
However, a gun-totin’ leftist like myself would more than welcome far more restrictive weapons laws.
Probably because I couldn’t care less about the preservation of white supremacy. Let it meet the fate of all things. So what?
Well, I guess I consider myself a “gun-totin’ lefty” too. And I also don’t have a problem with serious consideration of restrictive weapons laws. And also restrictions regarding certain types of ammunition’s such as “cop killer” bullets.
But simply a reinstatement by Obama of the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban would just be a tremendous waste of political capital. The AWB as it was written was ineffective, poorly written and impossible to broadly enforce. It was nothing more than a political document. I think it would be a major effort in stupidity to just try and regurgitate that policy.
And after wasting capital on that, what would be next for Obama? The Fairness Doctrine? It would make just as much sense.
I can expect a bunch of “I told you so” e-mails to hit my in-box today from all my NRA friends. Expect the NRA coffers to start overflowing even more than they have been. Their fear of Obama as the “Gun Owner’s Boogeyman” is coming to pass. Expect their tin foil hats to be glowing bright red for the foreseeable future.
Regarding the resistance that has ‘destroyed’ Iraq, I believe they’ve had a little help with that.
It takes two to tango, as my second-grade teacher was fond of saying. The damage that has been done to Iraq post-invasion consists of either Iraqis attacking each other, or Iraqis attacking the American occupiers and triggering a disproportionate response.
I don’t mean to discount the damage the Americans have done. I do mean to point out that all the resistance has accomplished is to make things much, much worse. Yes, they’ve succeeded, at long last, in making the Americans start leaving, but the cost of doing so is a country that is in ruins and bitterly divided against itself.
It is my hope, in the fantastically improbable event that we are ever invaded and occupied, that we won’t have to suffer the dubious assistance of a resistance movement full of NRA nuts.
“Tomorrow night they’ll be awarding the Jeanne Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom and Ronald Reagan awards.”
I love how all of their heroes are dead. It really IS a zombie movement.
Will Rush defend the constitution with a dominican child prostitute impaled on his dick?
What, too far?
Rush’s ego is already too big to fit into the room. Will he be receiving his award outdoors?
right after his women’s summit.
whether that includes child prostitutes from the dominican republic who’ve tangled with rush’s viagra-inflated penis, I cannot say.
Hmmm…don’t you think this would be more fitting if was the discussion during any of the past 8 years? I really expected Karl Rove to be in on this panel, too. Sadly, he will be busy teaching more kids how to be lying scum.
they should have gone green and set up a tension structure on the mall…
much more fitting.
A hat tip would be nice.
it’s going to be comedy gold! paging max blumenthal …
is there a darwin award for political irrelevance?