Bah. Wrap the NRA up in the flag and John Wayne and Moses and deer antlers and antigenocide righteousnes(!) all you want. I aint buying. It's a freakin' poltiical lobbying organization for arms manufacturers and a vehicle to promote a political wedge. Guns are getting too old fashioned these days for genocide, anyway. Will the NRA support my right to legally protect myself with a nice dirty bomb?

Ive found that staunch Libertarians are unrealistic, cultish, isolationist, and I think, foolish.

The NRA has never pretended to be anything but a lobbying organization. They are single-issue, as lobbying orgs tend to be. They are the counterpoint to HCI, et al, who seek to take away the right of law-abiding citizens to use weapons to defend themselves. These anti-gun lobbying organizations are no less extreme for their "what about the CHILDREN??" bullshit tactics and fake statistics. Yin and yang -- one is no more [insert cusswords here] than the other. I just hope my side wins; taking away my freedom won't make you any safer, but it will add decades to the lifespan of anyone who victimizes me or my family. Hope that makes you feel better.

No, that's the NNDBA. NRA only cares about guns.

So are Trekkies, Quakers, RPGers, programmers, muzzleloader enthusiasts, skydivers, and any other group worth its salt. :D

But how foolish is the "mainstream?" The real laugh comes from us. We crave government intervention in every aspect of our lives. We want government to provide for our needs while regulating what we eat, drink, or smoke (but not what we have sex with, or what we do with the result). We want them to protect speech that is hateful to one group, while outlawing speech that's hateful to another. We want police to be at our doorstep within seconds when we need them, but to be otherwise invisible.

We think we deserve to buy 50 cent per bale toilet paper from Warehouse R Us, but we don't want the people who own the joint to make any money. We think we deserve to drive cars, but don't want the oil. We don't want anyone cutting down forests, but we buy new houses instead of old ones. We don't want any "racial profiling" going on, so to stop 30-year-old Arab men from putting bombs on busses, we search 80-year-old white women.

Yeah, those libertarians are wacky.

Speaking of Coulter, here's a transcript of her and O'Reilly arguing about Iraq and Vietnam. Deconstruct.

The bitch is nuts. Or, if you prefer, I could summarize. :o

O'Reilly's nuts, too.

People who bank on either O'Reilly or Coulter being nuts end up perennially disappointed. Especially if they keep on believing that.

Study the gun material and the genocide material, Warch. I did, and now I know how to keep the Republic, and to keep genocide far away. Note, too, that I am not an isolationist.

Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership is a site you may find interesting.

Mr. Noodle, while the NRA has done lobbying, its fundamental purpose is still promoting expertise with firearms; that is its core. There is another branch of the NRA: the Institute for Legislative Action, or NRA-ILA. That's the lobbying arm and does all the lobby work. When all is said and done, what they promote is civil and human rights -- the right not to suffer criminal assault, the right not to suffer genocide, the right to resist tyranny. When or if all legal checks and balances fail, there is the seventy to eighty million people who can kill off as many government staffers as may be needed to head off government tyranny -- basically by making the machinery for it collapse from missing parts. The effect is multiplied by those citizens who are government staffers -- they too can stymie tyranny, by that very same method, and from within, yet. Having such a check and balance against the insensate power of government does a pretty darn good job of keeping government in its rightful place -- as the public's servant, not its master. The better armed the electorate is, the more likely their rights are to be secure. This is the rightful way to organize a genuine republic, and its record is one of success. Real republics set limits to power -- the pseudorepublics can be detected in their not doing so.

Undertoad, I guess I'd better find and finish reading my copy of Year Of The Rat. I put absolutely nothing beyond Clinton (and am very glad he never fooled me into voting for him), as I regard him as mildly sociopathic. He's got a wife to match.

Well, even if we confine it to just the topic of Vietnam, O'Reilly doesn't think we lost the war, and Coulter thinks Canada sent troops.

You're obviously a serious thinker, so IMO you must give up this kind of shorthand. Completely.

It does one good to earnestly test one's ideas. The biggest and most amazing breakthroughs can happen when you say "OK, I believe I'm right... but what if I'm wrong?"

Muster all your intelligence to question your own philosophy. If you come out the other side still believing as you do, you will be stronger. If you find cracks in it, and change your thinking, you will again be stronger.

And the key word is "earnestly". Even examine your givens. Never dismiss anything out of hand.

sigh. No one wants to talk about the interview or the topics raised therein? Name-calling is easy. I even empathize, since Michael Moore makes me physically ill every time I see his 10 chins dribble out another morsel of political feces. But come on. What about immigration? What about defining "success" in Iraq? How long should it take? They disagree, so one of them has to be right. Now you gotta pick :stickpoke

That's not necessarily true.

Toad, I appreciate your careful thinking here, though while I'm only going to address what I've snipped out for the Quote, you raise good philosophical points.

That's not a shorthand, that's the conclusion, arrived at after eight years of observation. The Clinton Administration literally couldn't do anything right -- and what went right wasn't something they actually did much about. There was that balanced budget, yes, but the reality of any Federal surplus during those years remains under contention. Meanwhile, a permanent gray cloud of scandal and misfeasance hung over the White House the whole time they were there, one scandal, felony, or fuckup after another after another, and such laws they passed! The Clintons were concerned only for the convenience of the Clintons, and the enlargement of Big Daddy Government, in accordance with the more execrable ideals of the socialist Democratic Party. Unlike the Bush Administration, the Clinton Administration treated the Bill of Rights not as a guide to their behavior, but as a stumbling block to their ambitions. What a damnable lot!

Except the only one that turned out to be true, after years of investigation and millions spent, was one that happened as a direct result of the investigation.

No, I mean completely. It's amazing what it changes.