Show Me Your Criminal’s License!

Would it have helped if he had a license?

It was inevitable.

Mindless, reflexive calls for the abridgment of the Second Amend rights of law-abiding Americans arise like dandelions in spring, right after a high-profile shooting. It’s time to get uncivil (that means, “honest”) and call these proposals what they are.

They are fraudulent, unconstitutional efforts to limit the possession of firearms to government-approved persons, and to disarm citizens. While most of these proposed laws will make it more difficult to own or carry a handgun legally, they will do nothing to limit the use of handguns in the commission of crimes. The gun-control fetishists  know this, and it doesn’t matter to them. Making the lawful possession of firearms by citizens impossible is exactly what they intend.

Here’s my counter-proposal to these useless measures.

Let’s license violent criminals. Any criminal must obtain a picture ID from the federal government that certifies he (or she, or “other” —  let’s be inclusive) is a government-licensed criminal.

Before committing any violent crime involving a firearm, the criminal must present a valid Criminal’s License to the intended victim. Failure to do so would subject the criminal (if caught, if prosecuted, and if convicted) to severe penalties, such as denial of all but basic cable service while in prison.

Skeptics will heap scorn on my proposal.

They will call it naive.

Why would a violent criminal go to the trouble to obtain a license to commit crimes, when he (or she, or “other,” of course) is completely capable of committing crimes without it? Why would a criminal intentionally incriminate himself (or herself) by applying to the government for a license to commit crimes?

Why would any criminal, even a complete idiot, tip his (or her) hand to his intended victim(s) by presenting his (or her)criminal credentials before his attack?

I submit that any criminal stupid enough to abide by burdensome gun laws is stupid enough to apply for a criminal’s license. Law-abiding people will not commit crimes, because they are — well — non-criminals.

A restriction on the Second Amendment has nothing to do with “fighting crime,” and everything to do with depriving non-criminals of the right of self-defense, which is neither granted by, nor can be revoked by, government.

What happens when the federal government decides to quit pussyfooting around, and makes any private citizen without government connections a criminal, simply because he or she owns a (formerly) legal firearm? Why, all the local law enforcement agency has to do is print out a list of gun owners, and send the SWAT team out to knock on your door.

If you don’t answer your door, and let the troops walk off with your firearms, they can kill you, put your spouse in prison, condemn your house and auction it off, and put your children in (“gun-free”) foster homes.

Why? Because you’re a criminal. And, an unlicensed criminal, to boot.

The panting opportunists and jackals who want to capitalize on the Arizona massacre to curtail our rights are contemptible.

They should be scorned and defeated at every opportunity.

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“Compassionate Conservatism,” and Other Reasons Why the Republicans Lost in ’08

THE DUNCEPHANT -- Proud symbol of the compassionate conservative, big-tent, self-defeating, Stupid Party

Compassionate Conservatism

“I call my philosophy and approach compassionate conservatism. It is compassionate to actively help our fellow citizens in need. It is conservative to insist on responsibility and results. And with this hopeful approach, we will make a real difference in people’s lives.”

President George W. Bush

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/04/20020430.html

Let’s get this out of the way up front. The Republicans got their heads handed to them in the 2008 presidential election because they deserved to. And it had nothing to do with the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s vice presidential candidate. In fact, that was the lone, good decision anyone in the Republican brain trust has managed to make in years, notwithstanding the snide remarks and lies told by the scuttling rats inside the McCain organization and their sycophantic hangers-on in the pundit class.

No, the Republicans put a lot of effort into defeating themselves, and it started long before Sarah Palin killed her first moose. They walked away from the conservative ideals that got Ronald Reagan elected twice in landslides, and won them a congressional majority in 1994. Why? Because the Republican “leadership” never really believed in those ideals. You see, at its core, the Republican Party is a bunch of spineless whores.

Yes, I said whores, and I meant it — exactly in the sense P. J. O’Rourke used the term, in the best American political science textbook ever written, his PARLIAMENT OF WHORES – a Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire US Government.

The spineless Republican retreads who guide the party’s destiny will sell their allegiance to any interest that promises to get them reelected – and this is the sad part — whether or not a rational person would see the slightest chance that it would work.

Like a beaten, bleeding hooker who refuses to file an assault complaint against her abusive pimp, because he “really loves her,” even after he has beaten her to a pulp for the umpteenth time, this core of Republicans returns to courting “moderates” and “undecideds,” and “reaching across the aisle,” even after two runaway victories with Reagan, and after winning back a majority in the House and Senate in the abortive “Republican Revolution” of 1994.

They chose their most recent standard bearer, John McCain, because he is a faithful follower of this self-destructive tradition. He was perfect for the job.

But he was only the most recent keeper of the flame. Go back to 1992, to the modern roots of this pathetic legacy. George Herbert Walker Bush, who was elected in 1988 on Reagan’s conservative coattails, turned his back on his own, “no new taxes” promise. In the endless search for the Bigger Tent the Republican whores thought would win them a second term, GHWB bequeathed to us eight years of Clinton, Clinton, Gore & Co.

In an effort to keep the conservatives from drifting away, or worse, from fomenting an outright revolt, Republican campaign bosses told us throughout this dark period to give them our money and efforts, threatening us with the nightmare scenario of socialist utopias and Stalinist gulags if the Democrats got their way. Of course, those same brave, Republican soldiers were practicing “bipartisanship” the whole time, “reaching across the aisle” to the Democrat minority and Republican turncoats on anti-constitutional legislation and incompetent or evil judicial appointments.

Thanks to eight years of high-profile sleaze and transparent power-grabbing by the Clintons and their lawyer-thugs in expensive suits, the voters recoiled sufficiently at the prospect of Kerry and Gore to give us eight years of George W. Bush. Again, conservatives were told to give money, get out the vote, and — after each election — to sit down and shut up. Our reward was eight years of bloated spending and rampant federal bureaucratic expansion, under the brand name of “Compassionate Conservatism.”

Let me chase this cockroach of an idea out from under the refrigerator and stomp on it, once and for all.

George W. Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism” is to “conservatism” what “armed robbery” is to “charity.” Compassionate Conservatism is neither compassionate, nor conservative. Like calling the unrestricted right to kill unborn children “pro-choice,” Compassionate Conservatism is a marketing fraud. Why should the American people have been alarmed by Republican warnings that, if elected, Obama was going to “redistribute the wealth?” The Bush administration did that for two terms. Obama just turned on the afterburner.

Bush signed McCain-Feingold (AKA: The Incumbent Hacks Protection Act), ramrodded through No Child Left Behind, and championed a colossal prescription drug welfare program. All the while, he actively promoting a storm surge of illegal immigration that overwhelmed the health care and criminal justice systems, swamped government schools, and turned entire American communities into suburbs of the Third World.

The compassion actually shown by Compassionate Conservatism was restricted largely to Democrat ideologues, illegal aliens, government bureaucracies, Saudi petrocrats, pharmaceutical companies and teachers’ unions.

Conservatives who voiced disapproval of unfettered illegal immigration were accused of lacking compassion; of being un-Christian; of wanting to deprive international trespassers of “jobs Americans won’t do.” And, in a breathtaking display of ignorance and/or arrogance, our president called American citizens who stood on our national borders as witnesses to the violation of our laws and sovereignty, “vigilantes.” To add insult to insult to injury, John McCain looked down his nose at “quote, conservatives,” as he referred to us often, and reminded us, as if from the moral high ground, that illegal aliens are “God’s children, too.” Thanks for the reminder, Reverend John.

The one issue on which all conservatives are supposed to agree about Bush is that he prevented another 9/11. Really? Am I supposed to be grateful that, between administration-mandated sensitivity classes for FBI agents on “Islam, the Religion of Peace,” those agents had time to uncover several plots to blow things up and kill people in the United States? It is certainly no thanks to the Bush administration’s slavish obeisance to political correctness that some such plots have been discovered and thwarted. Thank God for individual initiative and integrity, some plotters’ incompetence, and some good fortune.

However, like the aforementioned cockroach under the refrigerator, for every plot discovered, how many plots remain undiscovered? How many Islamist sleeper cells have slipped across our negligently unprotected borders, or been allowed to enter on “student” visas by our negligent immigration bureaucracy, carrying the components of weapons of mass destruction past negligent Homeland Security bureaucrats, while those sensitivity training sessions were going on? How many plots have not been discovered because the perpetrators have simply not been called to become active — yet?

Are we “safe” from Islamist aggression thanks to lectures from our State Department on not using terms like “Islamist aggression” — or in spite of them? If “Palestinians” are not lobbing missiles into Israeli schools and blowing themselves up in Israeli pizza parlors for a few days, is it because Condi Rice has lectured Israel on which of its appendages it should chop off next, and offer it to the bombers and missile crews as a gesture of good will? Or is it because the “Palestinians” have temporarily run out of missiles and suicide bombers?

Can we really credit George W. Bush with preventing another 9/11, when his administration could not even properly identify our enemies? Calling the struggle in which we find ourselves a “war on terror” is like calling World War II a “war on blitzkrieg,” or a “war on kamikaze.” Terror is a means to an end, not our enemy. Our self-declared enemy is the socio-political ideology of Islam, a fascist system whose adherents believe themselves to be superior to all who do not share their belief. They offer us three options: (1) Convert to Islam; (2) Live at the mercy of a dictator as a powerless underclass; or (3) Die in the war of conquest long ago declared against us. Unless we are Jews, of course, in which case our options are mostly narrowed to (3).

The Republicans’ political malpractice over the last few presidential terms has left us in debt up to our scalps, in danger of being overrun by illegal aliens, and in a fight for our lives with an enemy that our government cannot even identify, much less understand. It has left us in the hands of a devout socialist who is a “made man” product of Chicago machine politics, and a senate hack with not much going on underneath his hair plugs, other than the incubation of his next verbal gaffe.

If any of the Republican “leaders” who brought us this debacle are still in their positions of power and influence in Congress in 2012, we get the point. It will be an unambiguous indicator that the Republican Party is destined for obscurity, and deserving of nothing but contempt from the conservatives at the grassroots who have labored for decades to keep it alive.

The Stupid Party, that party of abused political hookers and back-stabbing weasels, will have made it clear to even the most loyal conservatives that we need to go elsewhere to find principled leadership.

Tom Cox

November 7, 2008

(Revised, March 5, 2011)

“Impeach Bush”? How Soon We Forget!

[Author’s Note: So, the big-shot Democrats want to impeach George Bush! Hey, I’m the last person to defend Bush, but if impeachment were ever deserved, Bill Clinton would have an entirely different place in history. I wrote this in August, 1998, at the height of the Clinton impeachment hearings.  Submitted for your consideration — a little historical perspective.]

The network news anchors were ecstatic. I was depressed. It was election night, 1991, and I was watching the beginning of the Clinton Presidency. It would be another Carter Administration, I suspected – scatterbrained, “Barney in a Blue Beret” foreign policy; self-righteous, sanctimonious, quasi-socialist domestic policy – in short, a conservative’s nightmare, with an Arkansas drawl, instead of a Georgia drawl.

I could not have been much more wrong. Bill Clinton’s bottomless, amoral appetites for power and sex made Jimmy Carter’s impotence before a crowd of Iranian thugs seem like a fond memory.  The news anchors are no longer ecstatic, but a small crowd of pathetic hangers-on still defends Bill Clinton. These sad people want us to overlook his bizarre “relationship” with a 21-year-old White House intern because it was “private.” Hmm. The president is president 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

He doesn’t punch a timeclock, because his responsibilities don’t wait for office hours. He lives in public housing, draws a government paycheck, and travels in government airplanes and limousines. He has some government employees around him constantly who are paid to step between him and a bullet, and others – very busy ones, these days — to step between him and a subpoena. So, tell me, how is a string of illicit sexual encounters in the Oval Office “private?”

Many private and public corporations have college interns. Suppose the chief executive officer of such a corporation carried on a sexual relationship with a young college intern, involving many meetings for sex in the CEO’s “private” office. Please, PLEASE, don’t ask me to believe that is “private” conduct, totally without overtones of sexual harassment and abuse of office. If the executive lies about that sexual relationship under oath in a civil suit, and lies about it again and again to his co-workers in private and to his stockholders in public, don’t ask me to dismiss that as “private” behavior.

Of course, the irony is that the sexual sleaze emanating from the White House is not the most important reason to be alarmed about the Clinton Administration. All of that pales compared to Bill Clinton’s enthusiastic support for selling military technology to the Communist Chinese, his  blatantly illegal use of thousands of confidential FBI files to dig for dirt on his political enemies, and his twin goals of stripping and plundering the military, while committing it to pointless overseas adventures under foreign command.

A complete list of his abuses and criminal behavior is simply too long to print here, but if any Congress in its right mind is looking for “high crimes and misdemeanors” on which to impeach this president, there are plenty of them. Pick ten or twenty of the most blatant, and get on with it.

Those who cannot bring themselves to admit how wrong they were to support Bill Clinton all this time get more strident and desperate with each passing day. They want us to forget their man promised us “the most ethical administration in history.”

They want us to believe tobacco money to finance a political campaign is evil, but that Chinese Communist money is OK.

They want us to believe it should be legal to kill an innocent child inches and seconds from birth, but that any political power grab is fine if it is in the name of “our nation’s children.”

They want us to believe that Kenneth Starr, an independent prosecutor appointed by Democrat Attorney General Janet Reno, is Satan Incarnate, because he is doing the job he was appointed to do.

Please, Congress, ignore this shrill, desperate, and dwindling crowd of Clinton defenders. Forget the network anchors and the pollsters, and do what’s right, for a change. Find your backbones, obey your oaths of office, and impeach this man.

SILRL (Search for INTELLIGENT Life in the Republican Leadership): Mission Failed

[Author’s Note: The following, although written in July, 2003, is distressingly relevant. Change a few names and titles, and the truth is still true.]

What the heck is a SILRL Project? SILRL stands for Search for Intelligent Life in the Republican Leadership. It was my ongoing effort to discover some guiding intelligence in what passes for leadership in the Republican Party. I’m not talking about the kind of “intelligence” that Hollywood celebrities and Bill Clinton have — the mindless instinct for self-preservation and self-promotion based on saying what one thinks people want to hear. I’m talking about wisdom based on established principles, as enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

I have reluctantly concluded that there is no intelligence to be found in the Republican leadership, and that further searching is a waste. The SILRL Project is now officially over, a failure.

Sometime in 1997, it became clear that the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 was more cosmetic than revolutionary. There is a disappointing pattern to Republican behavior at the leadership level. The umpteenth time I heard a Republican big shot on conservative talk radio say, “When we have a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress, we’ll (abolish the Education Department, rein in the IRS, impeach traitorous judges, protect unborn children, re-establish Constitutional law, etc.),” I realized I was listening to a fund-raising ploy, and nothing more.

The only time the spineless fat cats in the Republican leadership make conservative noises is when they need money and time from us conservative grassroots types to get themselves re-elected. Between campaign seasons, we are noisy, unsophisticated bumpkins, who naively insist on adherence to some obscure historical document called the Constitution.

The Big Elephants cluck their tongues at us, and mutter about how we don’t seem to understand that, “politics is the art of the possible.” Translated into everyday English, that means, “Politics is the art of saying and doing what we need to say and do to get re-elected. What’s right and Constitutional is, well, ‘relative.’ Relatively unimportant, compared to getting re-elected.”

There are about a dozen, real, Constitutional conservatives among national Republican officeholders and party leaders, and the rest might as well be Democrats, or Socialists, for that matter. There is little, practical difference.

Ronald Reagan, while discussing why he left the Democratic Party of his youth, said something like, “I didn’t really leave them; they left me.” The old-time champions of the “little guy,” the everyday American, had become the New Deal, big-government socialists, with the apparent intent to federalize just about everything, from first-grade textbooks to flush toilets. They turned the act of killing unborn children from murder into a civil right, stripped the right of self-defense from individual citizens, and made institutionalized racism a federal policy to make up for decades of institutionalized racism. With few exceptions, the Republican minority carped, but went along.

Most establishment Republicans seem to want what the socialist Democrats want, but, more slowly, and with less overt impact on the stock market. In recent decades, the Republican party has become “democrat socialist lite.”

The enormous expansion of the Department of Education, usurping the control of schools from communities and addicting them to federal funds, while doing nothing to improve the quality of education, is but one example of Republican statism. The recent spasm of effort to subsidize prescription drugs with taxpayers’ money, in exchange for the votes of “seniors,” will increase dramatically the cost of health care, while reducing quality and stifling innovation. With a few exceptions, Republicans are on board, if only because (they hope) they will get more polite treatment, along with a few campaign dollars, from the AARP crowd.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has turned out to be every bit as spineless and ineffectual as Trent Lott, and at least as willing to sacrifice principle for political success as Bob Dole. For a chance to appear on camera back-slapping with flatulent hacks like Byrd and Kennedy, and starry-eyed socialist utopians like Boxer and Clinton, Frist is willing to pledge our future incomes to the World Bank and our property rights to the Sierra Club.

This is the big jackpot the Republican leadership promised grassroots conservatives back in ’94. We who are not overjoyed are just being ingrates.

America is now becoming a socialist state, where individual freedom and responsibility, along with property rights and the sanctity of life, are anachronisms — obstacles on the road to “sustainable development” and “social justice.” And the Republican leadership is showing us the way. The Search for Intelligent Life in the Republican Leadership has been abandoned, because there is none to find. I’m taking my search to the right wing of the Libertarian party, next.