Dear Diary: The 100-Year War started today.
That's just an old in-joke among historians.
Dear Diary: Bill, Jeff, and I just hit the little gun show down south a few miles and left a semi-serious sum of dollars with the dealers there.
That's a fact.
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They were merely looking for some good clean fun -- scrounging parts for those cockamamie old Marlins and Stevens they're wiggy for. I needed some .257 Roberts rounds and components and to see what's available in those omni-useful .30-06 shooters, but, like my buddies, with non-belligerent intent.
None of it had a thing to do with with the now-quotidian skinhead notion that President-elect Obama is laying plans for martial law. We just happen to prefer tinkering with (mostly old) guns to watching Whosis Dancing with Stars Literate Adults Never Heard Of.
Obama and whatever plans he has to raid my house for illegal steak knives or whatever were and are an afterthought, though, I must add, a real afterthought, however remote.
The evidence so far suggests Obama is primarily an empty suit (and a damned lucky one at that), selected to reign by a combination of neocon stupidities, Joe Sixpack's naive grasp of economics, and the compulsion of very young voters to annoy their elders.
His elevation represented change. I wanted it. So did you. So did most everyone from Ron Paul to Angela Davis. Too bad we let Obama off the hook by not insisting he define his terms.
Sadly, as understood by the national media, a differently pigmented Hand on the Button represented a sea change -- actual ideas being far too arcane for discussion between commercial breaks.
So the election of Barack Obama may have been a little flukey, and it does, I think, represent some marginally increased threat to social stability. But let's not over-worry about that.
The civil-Armageddon nightmares can be attenuated by a national good-sense drive, and we might begin by laughing into embarrassed silence the wannabe barroom revolutionaries -- the ones with unusually high tattoo/tooth ratios, the ones with even worse ideas for restoring national sanity than does the President-Elect, assuming they have any at all beyond the adolescent fantasy of leading their own ninja squads.
It's true enough that Nov. 4 gave us a man with no apparent care for civil liberties guaranteed in our Constitution, but he's not the first. Does anyone doubt he's scrambling for a way, on January 20, to say "....ask what you can do for your country" without sounding like he's copycatting a previous hero of the left-wing statists?
Obama's going to be bad. He's going to test our libertarian tempers. But I doubt the election burdened us with a man sufficiently insane to issue an executive order suspending all inconvenient wording in the Constitution and ordering the 82nd Airborne deployed to Peoria sidewalks.
And Obama probably isn't evil enough. It one way he's a well-known quantity -- the simple creature of Cook County, Illinois, politics elevated to high national policy.
His political cradle-culture holds that the power to ration driveway permits and the means to distribute Marlboros and Thunderbird on election day are adequate tools for social control and ballot-box success.
Posit a successful opponent who had yanked screeches of approval from Pat Robertson. That hopeful would have claimed a direct and exclusive line to the Almighty. That is frightening enough to make Obama look acceptable.
And even his sacred "change" is destined to be a disappearing concept. In two years he'll face his first indirect, off-year, challenge to his ineptitude. Two years later he'll confront it directly. And he'll be worried about that from Day One, probably enough to make predictable moves back to the politically safe and semi-authoriitarian "middle" we've endured for decades.
We can handle that.
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Still, it is troubling that Obama's pliant legislative majority faces only a disorganized and fractured opposition. He is thus positioned to impose extreme changes in American life, and that's what I mean by Nov. 4, 2008, as Day 1 in our Hundred-Year War.
In economics, the ghost of British playboy John Maynard Keynes will dictate the text of new market-destroying federal legislation.
Sen. Schumer will get his deepest wish in trying to create a Second- Amendment-hating Supreme Court. The rape of Amendments Four, Nine, and Ten will also be attempted.
We need to oppose that with last iota of our persuasive powers, and it could take a very long time, extending well beyond the point at which Obama has faded to an unpleasant memory.
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Back to our little gun show. I didn't and am not not anticipating racking up additional lethal instruments of the kind most likely to be immediately banned -- the ones that look kind of like assault weapons. Enough are already available around America, and I foresee no need to plan for their unusual use.
They'll continue to grace den walls as relics of our military history, examples of the machinists' and designers' arts, curiously enjoyable tools for an afternoon in the open.
Some who claim a place in the libertarian movement, including the author of a hugely popular and well-received piece on this site not long ago, disagree. Doomsday is at hand, they believe, and your survival depends on a stash of M1A's buried in your back yard.
The dissenters made reasonable points. Martial law requires soldiers, and most of them are our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. No General Strangelove could confidently predict the direction in which they would point their guns.
The same dissenters note we are already an armed citizenry, and any demented Oval Office Nero would think twice and more about burning his Rome -- the source of his power and his status -- in the face of even 50 million pitchforks, and it is a fact that more than 50 million citizens own at least one firearm.
Obama is undoubtedly not demented. Limited, yes. Arrogant, I think so. Unproven, absolutely. But not overly dangerous in the sense we're discussing..
Libertarian thinkers and activists need to -- and I am embarassed at the banality -- give this guy a chance, to support him when support is conscionably possible, to oppose his loopy locutions and ideas with better logic more persuasively expressed, and to keep a great distance between themselves and the "Left Behind" crowd.
Not ordinarily a praying man, I may acquire the habit of up-turned eyes, silently asking that that He endorse my analysis.
Then my part in the gun discussions can revert to my comfort zone -- just how many 117-grain boattails can I land in a one-inch circle printed on a piece of paper, 100 yards downrange? Can I put a pheasant in the pan tonight?
Things like that can be necessary survival tools and skills in a tyrannical society, but with decency, good sense, and some luck, tyranny can be headed off at the pass, long before the the guns need be drawn.
We realistically face problems as the new Washington rushes the nation to pure statism. The fates willing, we can oppose the statist tide with our minds alone.
Hope so, anyway.
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