Month: October 2017

Unprincipled Bigots

In the wake of the Las Vegas shooting I have seen a number of articles and social media posts suggesting how the US can implement more gun control with a Republican Congress and Executive.

The answer is: be unprincipled bigots.

You read that correctly.  Forget maintaining the pretense of fighting racism,  there are voices on the Left that want America to embrace bigotry as a means to an end.  In essence, become like they are.

Here are three examples which I believe are the zenith of this mentality.

First, from the New York Times writer Thomas Friedman, If Only Stephen Paddock Were a Muslim.

If only Stephen Paddock had been a Muslim … If only he had shouted “Allahu akbar” before he opened fire on all those concertgoers in Las Vegas … If only he had been a member of ISIS … If only we had a picture of him posing with a Quran in one hand and his semiautomatic rifle in another …

If all of that had happened, no one would be telling us not to dishonor the victims and “politicize” Paddock’s mass murder by talking about preventive remedies.

Really?  No one would politicize it?

Then there would be immediate calls for a commission of inquiry to see what new laws we need to put in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Then we’d be “weighing all options” against the country of origin.

But what happens when the country of origin is us?

What happens when the killer was only a disturbed American armed to the teeth with military-style weapons that he bought legally or acquired easily because of us and our crazy lax gun laws?

Then we know what happens: The president and the Republican Party go into overdrive to ensure that nothing happens. Then they insist — unlike with every ISIS-related terror attack — that the event must not be “politicized” by asking anyone, particularly themselves, to look in the mirror and rethink their opposition to common-sense gun laws.

This OpEd was completely disjointed, but if I understand his thesis, if Paddock were Muslim the GOP would “do something” because they hate Muslims but won’t because of Paddock wasn’t Muslim and the NRA.

On crushing ISIS, our president and his party are all in. On asking the N.R.A. for even the tiniest moderation, they are AWOL. No matter how many innocents are fatally shot — no matter even that one of their own congressional leaders was critically wounded playing baseball — it’s never time to discuss any serious policy measures to mitigate gun violence.

It’s also corrupt. Because it’s driven by money and greed — by gunmakers and gun sellers and oil and coal companies, and all the legislators and regulators they’ve bought and paid to keep silent. They know full well most Americans don’t want to take away people’s rights to hunt or defend themselves. All we want to take away is the right of someone to amass a military arsenal at home and in a hotel room and use it on innocent Americans when some crazy rage wells up inside him. But the N.R.A. has these cowardly legislators in a choke hold.

First of all, let’s remember just how hard these same people fought the “Muslim Travel Ban” which really restricted travel of non US citizens from nations that had little to no control over the terrorists active in their countries.  So while ISIS is taking lives all over the world (including in the US) we can’t stop people who have no Constitutionally protected civil liberties (non citizens in foreign lands) from entering our country.

In opposition to that, Friedman thinks that is Paddock were Muslim, GOP bigotry would cause Republicans to throw the idea of gun rights out the window.

He closes with some truth.

So there is only one remedy: Get power. If you are as fed up as I am, then register someone to vote or run for office yourself or donate money to someone running to replace these cowardly legislators with a majority for common-sense gun laws. This is about raw power, not persuasion. And the first chance we have to change the balance of power is the 2018 midterm elections.

Yep, it’s not about rights, it about using emotion to bully others and bend them to your will.

Then there is this Tweet.

Same thesis as the NYT article.  If only the 3 Million Muslims in the US bought guns, the Islamophobic US would abandon all of its principles and rush to ban guns.  Never mind that we didn’t do that after the Nidal Hassan shooting at Ft. Hood, or the 2015 Chattanooga Shootings, or the San Bernardino Shooting, or the Pulse Night Club Shooing.  We, literally, stuck to our guns and said that a few bad actors won’t cause us to change our mind on gun rights.  If law abiding Muslims* want to own guns, we’re still going to stick to our principles.

*Incidentally, doesn’t this Tweet imply that most of those Muslims are potential terrors who shouldn’t own guns?  So much for “not all Muslims.”

Leaving Islam alone, a writer for The Root decided to employ the same line of thought but using what he assumes is the GOP’s other target of hatred: black people.

5 Ways Black People Can Force Commonsense Gun Control.

They wouldn’t do it after the Las Vegas massacre. They wouldn’t do it after Gabby Giffords was shot. They wouldn’t even do it after Sandy Hook. Maybe there is no one who can break the toxic romance that America has with guns …

I bet black people could.

You know we have to do all the hard shit. We picked all the cotton. We created every iota of American music, dance and culture. We made this country an economic superpower. We fight disproportionately in every war. A black man gave this country universal health care. We invented the modern air conditioner. If it wasn’t for black people, this country would still consist of poor, backward hillbillies ballroom-dancing to Appalachian bluegrass tunes and sweating their asses off while coughing up phlegm.

You’re welcome, white people.

Sure… that’s not totally bigoted right there.

Since we have to do everything around here, I guess I’ll get up tomorrow and solve this whole gun issue. Here’s how I plan to do it.

What are his steps:

1. Get lots of black people to buy guns.
2. Call gun ownership a form of resistance.
3. Make it cool.
4. We might have to threaten the animals.
5. Lie.

He breaks off of these down, but in a nutshell: black people should buy a lot of guns to scare white people.  Then, because white people steal (appropriate) everything they like from black people, black people should make gun control cool and then white people will appropriate that too and implement it.

His last point, Lie, is the most telling of all.

I’ve learned that troglodyte, middle-American conservatives will believe anything if you say it loud enough and frequently enough. Somehow, fake facts seep into their porous brains, no matter how ridiculous it sounds.

Perhaps we could pay Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly to join our cause. Those bastards would do anything for money. They could tell their followers there is a little-known clause in Obamacare that allows people to trade abortions for banana clips. Maybe we could fool those idiots into putting their guns down by playing on their racism and fear of black dicks. We could just mention that there was a recent study that shows gunpowder makes white women prefer black penis, or tell them that every time someone uses the gun-show loophole, a black penis grows an inch.

As yes, white people are stupid racists with tiny penises.  From what I can tell, The Root is essentially the Daily Stormer for Black Lives Matter.

Really, this is turning the projection up to 11.  The unprincipled racists on the far Left want Republicans to act just like them, i.e., abandon any adherence to the Constitution in favor of using bigotry to justify the taking away of people’s rights.

Somehow this is the more moral position.

I think this meme sums up their belief the best.

Forgive me if I don’t want to embrace the hate and abandon my principles.