Anne Coulter has never really been one for logic, primarily because it tends not to sell well with the target audiences of the drivel she normally tries to pass off as non-fiction. Her arguments tend to be saturated with so much hyperbole that they don't even resemble the things that she claims to be parodying, moreover the so-called "conservative" principles that she claims to stand for are anything but, unless one associates the term with "big government". But more importantly, she has been a consistent champion of losers of late, throwing the closest thing to an endorsement during the 2008 election to Hillary Clinton over McCain, and insisting that all Republicans coalesce behind Romney since so-called rising start turned New Jersey liberal Chris Christie was not running.
In keeping with her obviously ineffective methods and inability to find a decent face to put in front of her warped police-state ideology, the author of this blog wishes to thank her for boldly condemning Senator Rand Paul's potential run for president in 2016 in her usual idiotic form. Not only has she mercifully disassociated herself from arguably the only decent presidential candidate coming down the pike, but has also managed to bring Sean Hannity (of all people) all the closer to actually moderating his normally over-zealous War on Terror views. Granted, Hannity is more of a GOP creature than an ideologue of any level of consistency, but the fact that he has done a complete 180 on Paul the younger (compared to his vicious assaults on Ron Paul from 2 years ago) definitely opens up some potential for Rand's primary prospects.
Nevertheless, it is important to point out the problems with Anne Coulter's hyperbolic assertions regarding Rand Paul. The fact that he has argued for lighter sentences for non-violent crimes such as marijuana use and possession does not necessarily mean that he is pro-drug use, nor does his ideas for reforming America's immigration policy amount to Amnesty (this would imply that he would grant every undocumented person in this country instant citizenship, no questions asked). Similarly, when considering that Rand Paul and the Libertarian movement have spoke at length regarding such issues as foreign policy, civil liberties, gun ownership, monetary policy and the gargantuan debt that continues to rise despite disingenuous rhetoric about budget cuts by both Dems. and the GOP alike (baseline cuts are not cuts, a cut is when the actual amount of spending decreases).
Anyway, for those not bereft of the basic principle that 2+2=4, Coulter's idiocy in this is immediately obvious. But for all of the moronic people who insist that what Lindsey Graham and John McCain say is always true regardless of the facts, watch the video below and tell me who you find yourself agreeing with, Coulter or Hannity? This is one of those rare occasions where your normal inclination towards just backing the Republican won't help you make a decision and you'll actually have to dust off that section of your brain normally reserved for critical thinking. Though for me, every event is a chance to exercise my ability to determine the nuances and finer points of both the small and larger picture.
When inquiring about a political issue with an eye for logic, the first step is always detaching oneself from any emotional attachment to said subject. Gun control is perhaps the most emotionally charged of subjects, even when not dealing with some recent mass shooting that has tempers flaring and every righteous crusader armoring up to retake Jerusalem, thus the needed effort to being unmoved by the inevitable theatrics is quite daunting, and all the more valuable is the prize for persevering. But there is a more tragic victim to the inane squabbles that this issue brings about than that of one's right to an adequate self-defense, and that is man's respect for the art of statistics. I prefer to think that Mark Twain intended to point out that statistics, being as useful as they are, reflect the most heinous of dishonesty when manipulated for less than noble ends, but sadly most seem to take his famous quote of "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics" more by their letter than their spirit.
The author of this post naturally makes no secret of his views that a well-armed society is also a polite society, but this does not mean that there isn't some merit to certain objections made by the other side of the issue. Those reasonable people who support limiting guns to law abiding citizens by supporting criminal background checks do make a valid point (though unfortunately a good number of these people support violent criminals being able to vote, which is equally as dangerous as arming them in my opinion), and provided that their endgame is to concentrate on the truly criminal crowd (denying someone arms for smoking pot in their 20s is not criminal by the standards of any rational person, despite what Uncle Sam might say to the contrary) rather than seek to obfuscate standards that would lead to mass deprivation of arms to the public. Similarly, mandatory safety courses also make sense, though mandatory gun ownership in conjunction with this would make greater sense and deprive America of its greatest contributor to mass shootings, the gun-free zone.
However, most sycophant politicians on the left side of the so-called gun debate in America don't stop at making these reasonable suggestions in hopes of curtailing violent criminal activity. On a daily basis many are treated to a deluge of extremely irrational appeals to emotion in the name of stopping gun violence, as typified by 2 particularly odious persons in Diane Feinstein and Charles Schumer. Considering that the states represented by these two offer up a massive chunk of those several thousand gun murders per year statistic that is often dishonestly contrasted with other countries with smaller and less heterogeneous populations, one might be inclined to inquire as to how much their proposed national policies have worked within their own states, particularly compared to less "progressive" parts of the country where these statistics tend to be lower.
But regardless of dishonesty on the part of a few key players on one side of the issue vs. the other, what is more perplexing is the odd fixation that guns have garnered, most particularly so-called "assault weapons", which account for far fewer deaths than the preferred hand gun of one type or another. Rather than dealing with other factors pertaining to motive and opportunity for each unfortunate case of murder, the discourse is usually limited to the means. What, pray tell, makes a gun death more horrible and contemptible than the massive knife violence problem in the UK, or even the too numerous to fathom statistics regarding vehicular death via negligence? My dispassion not withstanding, but if one were concerned only with violence or death, greater emphasis on driving courses and stricter standards for licensing would seem a more logical issue. But alas, there is no logic in politics.
By using simple deductive logic regarding American politics, one has to conclude that when statistics are abused in the name of promoting something that is also referred to as "common sense", red flags and suspicions of dishonest intent should arise. If the sheer number of gun related deaths is so unacceptable and must be redressed, what about those gun deaths that are perpetrated by Uncle Sam in the name of bringing democracy to the world? Granted, most opponents of gun control were big supporters of the War on Terror, but the pro-gun control crowd backing the Democratic Party are largely indifferent to this issue when it's one of their own pushing the button. Then again, the left's fetishism for Obama and its consequential toleration of his murderous drone policy in the Middle-East may suggest that blowing people up is noble, while putting a bullet in them is reprehensible (again, no logic in politics).
Ultimately, this is an issue like all others, it is only as good as the people who argue the prevailing points. And given that even in the height of grief and outrage over the unfortunate Sandy Hook tragedy one side failed miserably in getting their point across, a reasoning mind would rightly conclude that there must be a fatal flaw in their outlook that continues to stymie their efforts, and that is that their opponents have the stronger argument. With the endless monetary war chest and the bully pulpit at his disposal, Obama could theoretically run circles around the NRA and GOA. Then again, such an extended endeavor might take him away from his endless vacation binges. If the gun control debate is to have a reasonable conclusion, it needs reasonable people, ergo ones that respect the field of statistics enough not to misuse it for short-sighted political causes.
P.S. - Nothing cures irrationality like dispassionate research, and below are some good links to start with.
Perhaps one of the easiest ways to declare oneself as a radical is to challenge the perceived cliches rampant in a prevailing narrative, preferably in a manner that gives some semblance of art and intrigue. The author of this blog considers himself a radical insofar as the first standard is concerned, though he would like to leave it up to others as to how artful and intriguing the execution comes across. But contrary to what some might guess, the established narrative regarding the American political dialectic is not a uniform juggernaut that can be assaulted with a lone sling and stone, but a dense and confounded spiderweb that may appear as a uniform pattern from afar, but in actuality an elaborate system of points and counterpoints that somehow manage to land us right back where we started every time.
Case and point in this regard is famed Linguist and political radical Noam Chomsky, or at least the latter title is attributed to him by both the Mainstream Media and his legions of hipster cult followers. At first glance, what is viewed is an astute yet unconventional thinker challenging norms of thought and discourse, challenging the brutish politicians to justify their inane failures with regards to government policy. Indeed, Chomsky has spoken at length regarding the problem of concision in the media in his writings, as showcased in a soon-to-be-popular video with Ron Paul supporters on YouTube, by virtue of it being featured on www.dailypaul.com.
However, with the advent of the internet, the narrative is shifting a bit toward a less shallow and sound-byte driven affair into one where Chomsky's often verbose revelations of political corruption are now being subjected to the closer scrutiny that he complained about in his earlier years. Unfortunately, for a mind not prone to latch onto just any alternative voice without assessing a greater scope of its ramifications, this advent does not serve him as well as one would think. Instead of being vindicated as a long-standing dissident who has now gotten his chance at enlightening the masses, what is revealed is an elaborate game of wordplay (in keeping with his expertise in language) to put the political discourse in a box that is about as restraining and limited as the one presented on the idiot box.
Much of this began to come to light when dissidents demanding answers regarding the less than adequate investigation of the 9/11 attacks and the enshrining of preemptive war and found a Noam Chomsky who was parroting the same nonsense one might hear on Fox News. He wrote in response to the question regarding CIA support for Osama Bin Laden as saying "CIA support for bin Laden (which is not quite accurate)
or the Taliban (also not quite accurate) doesn't seem to me remotely relevant." If one assumes Bin Laden to have been the head of the organization that murdered more than 3,000 Americans, this author would argue that any support that this nation's government agencies are quite relevant.
Interestingly enough, Chomsky has made it a regular practice of playing interference for the CIA, claiming it to be little more than a scapegoat agency for abuse of executive power. In his book "Understanding Power", Chomsky writes "There's very little evidence-in fact, I don't know
of any-that the C.I.A. is some kind of rogue elephant, you know, off on
its own doing things. What the record shows is that the C.I.A. is just
an agency of the White House, which sometimes carries out operations for
which the Executive branch wants what's called "plausible deniability";
in other words, if something goes wrong, we don't want it to look like
we did, those guys in the C.I.A. did it, and we can throw some of them
to the wolves if we need to. That's basically the role of the C.I.A.,
along with mostly just a collection of information". Would anyone be curious as to why a tenured professor at a prestigious institute has no knowledge regarding Operation Mockingbird, MK ULTRA/Project Paperclip, or any number of other CIA experiments and yet this information is readily available via declassified government documents?
Are these views regarding clandestine activity really in keeping with a so-called radical? Similarly, would it come across as rational that a man who decries so-called government abuse also thinks that only government officials should be allowed firearms? According to this esteemed thinker in his book "Secrets, Lies, and Democracy", professor Chomsky obfuscates with the best of them, "It’s pretty clear that, taken literally, the
Second Amendment doesn't permit people to have guns. But laws are never
taken literally, including amendments to the Constitution or constitutional
rights. Laws permit what the tenor of the times interprets them as permitting." In a parallel universe where tyrants such as Mao, Stalin and Hitler were not proponents of exclusive rights to weapons by government thugs, this mode of thinking might appear unconventional, but in reality it is little more than classical Fabian Socialism with a wordier exterior and an American PHD. Similarly, one can't help but be astounded that an alleged great mind cannot grasp the notion that words have a clear and specific meaning, particularly when spelled out in such a declarative way in the words of "shall not be infringed".
The rabbit-hole naturally goes a good bit deeper regarding Chomsky, though in the interest of brevity this will suffice for this excursion. However, one thing is quite clear from the limited information presented here, and that is that the underlying message of this so-called radical is one that is all too conventional, and one that has misdirected a great multitude of would-be radicals into regurgitating modified versions of existing cliches in the present political discourse. There is nothing substantially different between what Chomsky writes in his books and what is preached by the mainstream Democratic Party, and any dissent on his part with belligerent policies initiated by the Obama administration is, at best, hypocritical. Chomsky complains about not being invited onto Nightline during his formative years as a radical, but this eventuality appears to be less an issue of substance and more one of style, assuming that Chomsky is really deemed an outsider by the MSM, which wouldn't be logical, but as this newly born blog states so plainly, there is no logic in politics.
For further reading on Chomsky's oddly conventional yet confused rhetoric:
1. An in-depth analysis of Chomsky's many contradictory statements on a whole host of issues. Some may not like the conspiracy theory tilt of the article, but the facts are well documented.
2. An article critical of Chomsky's blind support of Israel, in direct contradiction to his opposition to American foreign policy that is heavily the product of AIPAC lobbyists and the governing Likud Party.
4. A long diatribe by Chomsky slamming Obama that, while appearing admirable given Obama's heavily tyrannical policies, showcases the MIT professor to be slower on the uptake the so-called conspiracy theory types that he derided during both the Bush administration and the lead up to Obama's election.
