Rod Blagojevich (D)

[Urbane Guerrilla]

A damning quote from Janet Reno, demonstrating why the NRA-ILA didn't like her at all:

"Nobody should be owning a gun which does not have a sporting purpose."

(I shouldn't have any trouble coming up with a date and place for this, which was a result of mere minutes on the 'Net.)

This is how, if you successfully sweep up all the rifles with automatic transmissions, as it were, you sharply cut the citizenry's physical ability to tell the government to close up shop and go the hell home because its legitimacy is at an end. (The Clinton Administration and its First Lady were really into that sharp cutting away!) Cut that ability far enough and you no longer have a Republic, which is all about the broadest distribution of power. You have, instead, a replay of Nazi Germany. What, once wasn't enough? Learn from history. The power of life and death is about as powerful as power gets, by a force like natural law, not so?

Do you not keep a republic by checks and balances on the government as well as within it? This checking and balancing of the government as a whole is an essential every conservative knows about and readily acknowledges, and it remains functional regardless of anything that may go on within the government. We conservatives don't trust government to stay good all the time -- history is positively rife with examples of republics gone bad, and all of these controlled guns, too. There are also numerous examples of monarchies, not very republican at all, having quite the liberal society in encouraging gun possession among the citizenry. There are shades of class differences in every national example of this in Europe, but the classical liberal tenet that a limited monarchy greatly improves over an absolutist one may be borne out by the contrasting governmental philosophies of England and France -- Magna Carta versus "L'état, c'est moi." Seek not to allow the government say in every aspect of your life, says the conservative. Thus you retain the necessary power to do something about a government gone rotten.

Liberals always pooh-pooh this -- until they go to the camps and get extinguished. Where are their pooh-poohs then? The great government crime is the crime of genocide -- and its targets NEVER see genocide coming, for it is invariably an ambush. They have no clue at all what they should be concerned about, and this is what makes them die in a hecatomb.

But an armed electorate doesn't get herded into the ovens so cheaply. And that is a thing of virtue. A good Jew, I think, would be one who practices that virtue, along with those other 168 Talmudic ones.

If you're going to be skeptical about the government, your skepticism had better have teeth, should it not? No government responds properly to mental masturbation, and no guns for you means no attention paid to you. Unresponsiveness to the citizen and his proper rights is the very definition of a tyranny.

I contend the well-armed electorate is the nongovernmental reason it can't happen here. Confining the killing tools to the government only is the reason the genocides happened elsewhere. Have checks and balances independent of the government, and the libertarian says have all things independent of the government. In this the libertarian so much resembles the average conservative that it is clear libertarianism is fundamentally a conservative philosophy.

UG....I'm not interested in debating gun control with you. That was not the issue.

You made some nebulus charge about "suborning of the Department of Justice under Janet Reno" and offered as an example that Reno did not defend the Second Amendment from that Administration's encroachments in the 94 Crime Bill.

The fact remains that there was nothing unconstitional in the 94 crime bill when it was proposed and enacted, including the AWB (using the vernacular of the time).

So your charge is bogus.

[TGRR]

Gah! Janet Reno. The ugliest Nazi in history. Seriously, she made Goering look like a hottie.

Fact: She was the Queen-Hell gun-grabber.

Fact: Her answer to EVERYTHING was to send in goons with submachine guns (Waco, Elian Gonzales, etc).

Fact: She was a freedom-hating old hag who regularly used the constitution for shit rag when she couldn't find an orphan. I won't really rest easy until they bury the old bitch...and I hope someone remembers to drive a stake through her heart, first.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Yeah but do you like her or not?

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Yeah but do you like her or not?

No. As much as I appreciate Doom, and like a good psychotic now and then, there ARE limits.

[xoxoxoBruce]

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Redux

UG....I'm not interested in debating gun control with you. That was not the issue.

You made some nebulus charge about "suborning of the Department of Justice under Janet Reno" and offered as an example that Reno did not defend the Second Amendment from that Administration's encroachments in the 94 Crime Bill.

The fact remains that there was nothing unconstitional in the 94 crime bill when it was proposed and enacted, including the AWB (using the vernacular of the time).

So your charge is bogus.

No, I just haven't assembled the research yet... that was merely a taste, the merest smallest start. Be patient. This thread will come to the top of the page again in due course.

"Assault weapon" is not a term used by the knowledgeable in discussing arms. It is quite without specific meaning, yet it's flung around as a bogeyman: there is nothing in the term to distinguish a big wet rock from a stone axe from a musket from a revolver from a lead pipe from a stick from a.... this is the idea you have hitherto not grasped. The people pushing the "assault weapon" idea were relying on the ignorance of persons who hadn't a knowledge of the matter.

Frankly, if you take an antigun view (and no good Jew should take one unless he wants the Holocaust back, because it'll burn better if antigun laws and views are prevalent, for the State always has guns, and it was a State's guns that controlled European Jewry) you have absolutely no hope at all contending with me. The last guy to try it was Spexxvet, and he disgraced himself horribly, getting stared down by the entire Cellar when he lost it and began raving about "hoping someone buttfucks [UG] in the mouth" -- all his antigun ideas written into the thread got pulverized by a combination of me, radar, and xoxoxoBruce.

UG....this is not about gun control but rather your charge about "suborning of the Department of Justice under Janet Reno"...

But for the record, I am not anti-gun.

I thought the DC gun ban was far too restrictive and unconstitutional. I rarely agree with Scalia, but his decision in Heller works for me:

Held:
1) The Second Amendment protects an individual's right to posess a fireman unconnected with service in a milita, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home....

2) Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsover and for whatever purpose....

And I still find your comparisons to Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and China, etc. as fear-mongering.

The fact that we have an independent juidciary and a system of checks and balances, as demonstrated most recently by the Heller case, makes such comparisons a stretch of one's imagination to the point of paranoia.

Back to the issue at hand, please....examples of "suborning of the Department of Justice under Janet Reno"....

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

No, I just haven't assembled the research yet... that was merely a taste, the merest smallest start. Be patient. This thread will come to the top of the page again in due course.

I'm not here to defend the Clinton administratiobn...I'm just looking for you to provide examples that are comparable to the five examples of illegal or questionable actions by the Bush DoJ that I documented earlier.

Hit me with your best shot....fire away!

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Then let us make a small beginning with these:

Human Events, 29 Oct 1999:

“Something needs to be done about the U.S. Department of Justice. It is a corrupt organization. Columnists now refer to it as the "Justice (sic) Department" and the "Department of Injustice." The torrent of lies and false prosecutions that pour out of the DOJ cause even Mexicans to say that the "colossus of the North is more corrupt than we."

FBI agents testified before Congress 22 Sep 1999 that

a corrupt Justice Department blocked their investigation of the campaign-finance scandal in which the Chinese government purchased access to the Clinton Administration and our military secrets.
The agents told Congress that their DOJ supervisor, Laura Ingersoll, prevented them from using search warrants while critical evidence was destroyed by a Clinton crony.
Ingersoll claimed that the agents did not have "probable cause" for a warrant. This from a DOJ that routinely uses asset forfeiture laws to seize the homes of elderly grandparents on the "probable cause" that a grandchild might have had drugs in the house.

Complete text here.

We kept hearing about this kind of thing all through the Clinton Adminstration. This was just a late example. Impeachment proceedings, remember, were initiated about that Administation's distant relationship with veracity and its close relationship with perjury. When you're that kind of operator, having the Attorney General running interference for you is a handy thing to have.

From FrontPageMagazine.com, dated March 25, 2004, relating to a deportation proceeding that began in 1997. Mazen al-Najjar was Sami al-Arian's brother in law.

The Al-Najjar re-hearing was full of oddities. Defense attorneys held daily press conferences outside the court while the Reno DOJ essentially muzzled the prosecution side. There were strong indications that a senior DOJ adviser on Reno’s staff was in direct contact with one of Al-Najjar’s defense attorneys during the time the hearing was being conducted. The same Immigration Judge, after reviewing the same classified evidence he had reviewed in 1997 plus two weeks of other evidence, instead of rendering the same decision he rendered in 1997, issued a lengthy, convoluted decision releasing Al-Najjar on an $8,000 bond. The winds of political correctness had blown very hard.
Janet Reno, to her temporary credit, stayed the Immigration Judge’s order, as she legally could, until December 2000. Note, that was after the election. She then allowed the Immigration Judge’s decision to stand, without appeal, and Al-Najjar was released on the $8,000 bond. The Attorney General who, for three-and-a-half years had known fully well who and what Mazen Al-Najjar was -- even more so than the Immigration Judge, since she had been fully briefed on the Tampa PIJ case parameters -- decided to let the guy walk. Of course,L] she was about to walk herself, since her boss was out of a job.

FrontPageMag's item.

You may recall the Clinton Administration trying to tame the Internet. Wisely, the Bush Administration didn't take this Nanny State policy anywhere.

"[Security] is not just a matter of centralizing a particular function in a particular office, it is a matter of developing technology to protect the technology," Reno commented during her press availability session last week. "We need the equipment, we need the expertise. We need cooperation from foreign governments to be able to trace these attacks. We need to cooperate with foreign governments to protect their infrastructure. We've got to design a system that....is secure, Reno said." At first glance Reno's statement might be mistaken for a wise admonition against rigid supervision and other elements of Big Government. But to read it that way, we have to answer the question of when, if ever, the Reno Department of Justice (DoJ) has acted to reduce government intrusions into the private lives of citizens. What Reno is responding to so strongly here is the horrifying thought that the FBI, and in some circumstances even the DoJ, might have to answer to ordinary non-combatants at OMB in matters of cyber-security. Furthermore, the cushy little partnership of mutual affection between the DoJ and the White House might find itself strained by a dour, skeptical chaperone.

From the The Register: biting the hand that feeds IT.

Nor would it end here. One simply sifts the conservative periodicals... and the pro-gun ones.

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Then let us make a small beginning with these:

Nor would it end here. One simply sifts the conservative periodicals... and the pro-gun ones.

LOL......conservative and pro-gun periodicals making charges about Clinton and Reno? What surprise!

Yet not one link or footnote in any of those publications to primary sources or any factual data to support their allegations. Another surprise...well, not really!

I provide facts and findings about Bush DoJ abuses and/or unlawful acts from primary sources, GAO and internal DoJ reports , and you provide undocumented allegations from periodicals with an anti-Cllinton agenda.

Hell, if I wanted to play that game, I could match your conseravtive periodicals and list pages of charges and allegations about the Bush administration from the ACLU, The Nation, or even MoveOn.org.

Facts, dude! Not unsubstantiated allegations.

[TheMercenary]

Well it sounds like these two guys have some pretty good credentials. I would tend to believe someone with known credentials over a nameless, faceless Redux. What are yours?

Bill West is a retired INS/ICE Supervisory Special Agent who ran organized crime and national security investigations. He is now a counter-terrorism consultant and freelance writer.

Paul Craig Roberts (born April 3, 1939, in Atlanta, Georgia) is an economist and a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the "Father of Reaganomics". He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service. He is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology and he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He was a post-graduate at the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States.

Roberts is seriously dismayed by what he considers the Republican Party's disregard for the US constitution. He has even voiced his regret that he ever worked for it, avowing that, had he known what it would become, he would never have contributed to the Reagan Revolution

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Well it sounds like these two guys have some pretty good credentials. I would tend to believe someone with known credentials over a nameless, faceless Redux. What are yours?

The issue should not be me or guys with credentials.

It should be documented facts (as in the five DoJ reports I cited) vs undocumented allegations (as in UGs conservative periodicals...lots of heresay, but not one primary source cited or footnoted).

Facts v Allegations!

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Redux

The issue should not be me or guys with credentials.

It should be documented facts (as in the five DoJ reports I cited) vs undocumented allegations (as in UGs conservative periodicals...lots of heresay, but not one primary source cited or footnoted).

Facts v Allegations!

We don't we hear people every day who say something and we have no choice but to take them on their word that they are right. Don't we do that with Obama? How about Pelosi and Reid telling us how the stimulus package is going to save our economy? Or how about the Republickins telling us all how it is a big giant bondoggle and nothing more than a special interest spending package? When the president stands up and says, "I did not have sex with that woman!" or the Chief of the CIA telling the president, "Slam Dunk!"? I think the credentials of the author have much to do with it.

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

We don't we hear people every day who say something and we have no choice but to take them on their word that they are right. Don't we do that with Obama? How about Pelosi and Reid telling us how the stimulus package is going to save our economy? Or how about the Republickins telling us all how it is a big giant bondoggle and nothing more than a special interest spending package? When the president stands up and says, "I did not have sex with that woman!" or the Chief of the CIA telling the president, "Slam Dunk!"? I think the credentials of the author have much to do with it.

Merc..its really quite simple.

UG made the claim that the Clinhton DoJ committed more unlawful acts than the Bsuh DoJ.

I simply asked for cites.....not opinions from conservative and/or gun periodicals, but something comparable to DOJ internal reprots or GAO reports.

Not that I really give a fuck.

If you and UG think the Clinton DoJ politicized the DoJ more than Bush...thats fine!

Its just not worth discussing with you.

If UG wants to continue, I'll look foward to seeing cites that resemble facts more than opinions.

[capnhowdy]

Damn. You guys are good. I envy you.