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Monday, March 26, 2018

The Second Amendment meets Musical Attorneys



The chairs keep revolving at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, like some horrible, warped Alice in Wonderland fantasy.  John Dowd quits, John Bolton the new national security adiviser and a new face appears, willing to attempt to tow the line for the boy king, now a caricature of himself.  Even Joseph de Genova, mob attorney, doesn't want to work for the sun king.

John Bolton aka Dr. Strangelove, wants to bomb North Korea preemptively and withdraw from the Iran deal is to be the new National Security Advisor.  No senate confirmation necessary.

Even the most conservative of Republicans are free traders.  The stock market gyrates, shakes and tumbles, resurging and gyrating, affected by the President's economic ignorance and fecklessness, him now busy with trying to bury the Muller investigation by demeaning the FBI, the CIA and the other national intelligence services, the heads of which, normally taciturn, are now speaking out against the scalawag President, the evil Chauncey Gardner inhabiting the office where the leader of the free world usually resides.  Stormy tells all on 60 Minutes.  Spanked the Donald, and told him not to blab about himself, and he shuts up and tells Stormy, "You are special."  Do you think that Evangelicals might care?  Probably not. Has our country been in worse trouble?  Yes.  We had a Civil War, a Cuban Missile crisis, 9/11, the Great Depression, World War II, Viet Nam and even Watergate.  John Dean, special counsel to the White House told Nixon that Watergate was a cancer growing on the Presidency.   And now, as an analyst for CNN says "that the Russia probe and Trump is Nixon on steroids and stilts."


At least during the Watergate crisis, involving all three branches of government, the Republicans in congress were represented by people like Howard Baker, and Lowell P. Weicker, who had a modicum of integrity and called for their President to resign or that they would have recommended impeachment.
Nixon knew the jig was up. but Trump, cannot see beyond his own mirror.  "Mirror, mirror on the wall, I am the smartest one of all. Only I can fix, fix for all.  Let's have a war with Iran or Rocket man."

Now, the pusillanimous Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, who fear Trump's wrath and the base that supports him, are cognitively dissonant remnants of  how America has changed since the 1970s.  Cultural diversity has incited a backlash of racism fueled by ignorance and fear, mobilized by Trump and his ilk, spouting hatred and a simplistic notion of how the world will be a better place if only immigrants and brown people were deported, making America white again.   Well it will not happen. "Get over it," to quote the late Antonin Scalia from an interview on 60 minutes when Lesley Stahl asked him whether he was bothered by the court throwing the election to George W. Bush, who ultimately invaded the wrong country, destabilized the middle east and ranks just above Trump on the Presidential scale of incompetence.   But at least he had some dignity, and is peacefully imitating his idol Winston Churchill by painting as a pastime, as encouraged by the great one's essay.  The comparison ends there, of course.
This circus has not been relived in my lifetime.  Young people, afraid to go to school march in Washington to the deafened ears of congressional acolytes of the NRA, their pockets bulging with cash from donations of gun toting miscreants who really believe that the second amendment allows them to carry assault rifles to go hunting, in this case, with human children and students as their quarry.

The second amendment should be repealed as argued by Bret Stevens, hardly a liberal, who writes that
"From a national-security standpoint, the Amendment’s suggestion that a “well-regulated militia” is “necessary to the security of a free State,” is quaint. The Minutemen that will deter Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are based in missile silos in Minot, N.D., not farmhouses in Lexington, Mass."
His essay also argues that regulating guns from a "prospective right" Constitutional guarantee than from a privilege point of view, such as a driver's license, is an easier task.  No one wants to stop legitimate hunters, and farmers from shooting rodents and hunting Bambi or protecting themselves in their homes.
Turning schools into shooting galleries does not seem a wise solution either.

The young people who march will soon be voters, hoping to chase from office those who insouciantly treat their lives as fodder for gun-toting lunatics.






 

1 comment:

  1. David,

    The problem is not Trump. It's those Congresspeople, who are afraid of Trump's base, and to whom it has not occurred that if those are the sentiments they represent, maybe they shouldn't want to represent them.

    As for the Second Amendment, Stephens is slightly right. But the Amendment is about civil defense. It has nothing to do with guns. Guns are never mentioned. It's true, as Stephens says, that owning muskets today would be quaint. So would owning assault weapons. The purpose of the Amendment is to enable militias, which were seen as necessary both to support the Union from outside invasion and to support the states from unreasonable domination by the (federal) Union. In the spirit of the Second Amendment, citizens should have whatever "arms" would be necessary to repel outside invaders and the federal government. They need far more than assault weapons. Once anyone agrees that citizens should not own hand grenades, flame-throwers, tanks, fighter jets, submarines, aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons, they have surrendered any meaning the Second Amendment had. And once we get there, it's time to repeal the Amendment. Which it now way past is.

    Fred

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