Friday, November 9, 2012
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
No Matter Who Wins, The Next President Will – Without Question – Be an Interventionist War President by Michael Scheuer
No Matter Who Wins, The Next President Will – Without Question – Be an Interventionist War President by Michael Scheuer
Having listened to a campaign in which Governor Romney explained how he would fix the U.S. economy and carry a big stick around the world, and President Obama continually blame George W. Bush for all our economic problems and try to depict Romney as the evil-millionaire Mr. Potter from Frank Capra’s, It’s a Wonderful Life, voters can take their pick on Tuesday. But when doing so they must realize that no matter who wins, the next president’s biggest problem will be fighting wars overseas with a war weary populace and an undermanned and ill-equipped military. And no matter who is elected, the new president will only have himself and his interventionist party to blame.
With our war against Islamist militants now two months into its seventeenth year and with those forces still scoring victories over America – note their win in Benghazi – both parties continue to pursue a foreign policy that is increasingly suicidal. Both support Israel without qualm or respect for genuine U.S. interests – Obama just wants the Iran war after 6 November – and both approve of surrendering in Afghanistan, in the wake of our surrender in Iraq. You can bet the lesson of how easy it was to defeat the American superpower in both places will not be lost on the Islamists. We also continue to protect and champion the Saudi tyranny and the other Gulf despots as "good U.S. allies," thereby making sure oil flows but building an ever greater hatred among ordinary Muslims for the states that oppress them and their U.S. protectors. (NB: Let’s hope that if Romney wins he keep his word and pushes for energy self-sufficiency, ending Obama’s reality-defying energy policy which has kept the Gulf tyrannies in high clover; American families extorted at the pump; and America locked in an endless war with Islam.)
Worst and most war-causing of all, both Obama and Romney are pro-Israel, interventionist democracy crusaders. Both men, for example, are awash with pro-Israel bribes – commonly known as "campaign contributions" – and are surrounded by war-mongering Neoconservatives, although those on the Democratic side are more quietly malign. Both men also buy into the lethal nonsense of American "exceptionalism" and the equally demented idea that the world is thirsting for Washington’s leadership and instruction on how to be good Westerners. They are cultural warriors to the core and men who are intent on using their rhetoric and your taxes to remake the world – especially the Muslim world – in their image. And if that does not do the trick, they will use U.S. military power to try to accomplish their policy of international cleansing and social/political/religious remodeling.
This said, it seems that facts, analysis, and substantive debate go largely unheeded in contemporary America. Whether you agree or disagree with the foregoing, though, there is a way to test my argument in a manner that seems more palatable to Americans; that is graphically. Given my at-best minimal computer skills, I cannot provide the graphics for you, but all it really takes to get a picture of reality is to imagine two simple political maps of the world, one for September, 2001, and the other for November 2012. What would be seen on these maps?
– The Map of September 2001:
– 1.) Al-Qaeda and its allies had only Taleban-governed Afghanistan as a major base in which to train, store weaponry, plot, launch attacks, and meet other Islamists from around the world. Yes, al-Qaeda and its allies had so-called cells in dozens of other countries around the world – and they still do – but only in Afghanistan could they operate openly and – thanks to the Clinton administration’s profound disregard for U.S. lives and interests – with little concern about being attacked while they prepared for 9/11 and what was to come. (NB: Interestingly, many Americans seem to have forgotten that in October, 2000, Clinton refused to defend America and Americans after the near sinking of the USS COLE, just as Obama has refused to do anything during or after the mujahedin’s recent easy victory in Benghazi. Both men clearly were more concerned with their party’s presidential prospects than with defending American lives and security.)
– The Map of November 2011:
– 1.) After more than decade of successfully resisting the U.S.-led invasion and occupation, the Taleban and its allies will in the next 18 months return to power in Afghanistan. Whether that new regime in Kabul is called the Taleban or not is irrelevant. It will be a Pakistani-and-Saudi-backed Islamist regime and it will welcome al-Qaeda and its allies to remain in its territories to train, plan, rearm, etc. The new Islamist Afghan regime also will have unprecedented access to and influence over the eastern third of Pakistan. Ironically, the Islamist Afghan state will be much larger, better organized, and better armed in 2014 than it was in 2001.
– 2.) In addition to soon controlling an expanded Afghan state, the international spread of the Islamists’ presence and power since 9/11 has been impressive. While Americans and their media have been bore-sighted on the willfully lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the politically motivated silence of the Islamist-empowering Obama administration has allowed the creation of a half-dozen Afghan-like Islamist bastions to go mostly unnoticed. Soon after 9/11, Osama bin Laden began dispersing his forces from South Asia – and he helpfully told us what he was up to in a public statement – with the result being that today Islamist military bastions are firmly established in Yemen, throughout the North Caucasus, in East Africa, across North Africa, and reaching from the latter down into Mali and toward southern Africa. There are also the Islamist-redoubts that are growing and solidifying via al-Qaeda’s startling and forceful turn to Iraq, as well as in Libya and Syria where Mrs. Clinton’s and Senator McCain’s "freedom fighters" are in the process of installing Islamist regimes with the military aid of our Gulf "allies" and al-Qaeda.
– 3.) While the sheer geographical dimensions of the mujahedin’s growth is very impressive, the places where they have ensconced themselves are even more impressive and strategically dangerous to U.S. interests. As al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks were designed to lure the U.S. military into Afghanistan – it being easier to kill soldiers and Marines there than in America – the post-2001 expansion of al-Qaeda and its allies is meant, among other things, to force the United States to fight in places where it has genuine, life-and-death national interests – not the nonsense of fighting for democracy and women’s rights. This becomes especially clear after a review of the activities of Al-Qaeda-in-the-Islamic-Mahgreb (AQIM), Al-Qaeda-in-the-Arab Peninsula (AQAP); Somalia’s Al-Shabab – which the West foolishly thinks is fully beaten after a series of tactical defeats – and Nigeria’s Boko Haram. The strategic bottom line for America is simple and clear: these four groups, with minimal inter-group cooperation, are near-to-threatening free U.S. and Western access to the Niger Delta’s oil resources and West Africa’s rich deposits of uranium and strategic minerals. The mujahedin also sit astride vital sea lanes off both coasts of Africa, at the Suez Canal, and in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Free and reliable access to all of these are indispensable to the economic welfare of the United States and as they become increasingly threatened we will have to fight for them. This is, incidentally, why the brief discussion of U.S. naval power during the presidential debate should have been prolonged. The protection of maritime commerce and offshore resource production is a ship-intensive activity; numbers do matter – perhaps more than military punch each ship packs – and the number of U.S. Navy ships now available is simply inadequate to the potential requirements for them. The method of operation of Al-Qaeda and its allies is today what it has long been: spread out U.S. military assets so as to sap their reserves and flexibility. This is a strategy that might well work as effectively at sea as it has on land.
– 4.) Perhaps the most important development in the U.S.-Islamist war in the last few years also has gone largely unmarked. The fall of Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Qadhafi has greatly eased the operational environment for Islamist groups and movements not only in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, but also in other Muslim states whose regimes have a tenuous hold on power. Think especially of Jordan in the latter regard. Where three years ago Islamists in all these places were constantly hunted by Arab security services and killed, incarcerated, or turned over to U.S. authorities, today they operate freely with little concern for local security forces so long as they do not attack within the country; nowhere is this more true than in Egypt. From the Pakistan-India border to Morocco’s Atlantic coast, the Islamists are encountering a freedom of movement and a degree of personal safety that they have never before enjoyed. The Islamist are also much better armed than ever before, thanks largely to the looting of military arsenals in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and Libya during the opening of the Pandora‘s box known as the Arab Spring.
So before voting, take a minute and imagine each of these maps and compare them. Then vote for whoever you want, but vote with the certainty that all Americans are joining you in voting for a president whose interventionism will bring all of us more war
Having listened to a campaign in which Governor Romney explained how he would fix the U.S. economy and carry a big stick around the world, and President Obama continually blame George W. Bush for all our economic problems and try to depict Romney as the evil-millionaire Mr. Potter from Frank Capra’s, It’s a Wonderful Life, voters can take their pick on Tuesday. But when doing so they must realize that no matter who wins, the next president’s biggest problem will be fighting wars overseas with a war weary populace and an undermanned and ill-equipped military. And no matter who is elected, the new president will only have himself and his interventionist party to blame.
With our war against Islamist militants now two months into its seventeenth year and with those forces still scoring victories over America – note their win in Benghazi – both parties continue to pursue a foreign policy that is increasingly suicidal. Both support Israel without qualm or respect for genuine U.S. interests – Obama just wants the Iran war after 6 November – and both approve of surrendering in Afghanistan, in the wake of our surrender in Iraq. You can bet the lesson of how easy it was to defeat the American superpower in both places will not be lost on the Islamists. We also continue to protect and champion the Saudi tyranny and the other Gulf despots as "good U.S. allies," thereby making sure oil flows but building an ever greater hatred among ordinary Muslims for the states that oppress them and their U.S. protectors. (NB: Let’s hope that if Romney wins he keep his word and pushes for energy self-sufficiency, ending Obama’s reality-defying energy policy which has kept the Gulf tyrannies in high clover; American families extorted at the pump; and America locked in an endless war with Islam.)
Worst and most war-causing of all, both Obama and Romney are pro-Israel, interventionist democracy crusaders. Both men, for example, are awash with pro-Israel bribes – commonly known as "campaign contributions" – and are surrounded by war-mongering Neoconservatives, although those on the Democratic side are more quietly malign. Both men also buy into the lethal nonsense of American "exceptionalism" and the equally demented idea that the world is thirsting for Washington’s leadership and instruction on how to be good Westerners. They are cultural warriors to the core and men who are intent on using their rhetoric and your taxes to remake the world – especially the Muslim world – in their image. And if that does not do the trick, they will use U.S. military power to try to accomplish their policy of international cleansing and social/political/religious remodeling.
This said, it seems that facts, analysis, and substantive debate go largely unheeded in contemporary America. Whether you agree or disagree with the foregoing, though, there is a way to test my argument in a manner that seems more palatable to Americans; that is graphically. Given my at-best minimal computer skills, I cannot provide the graphics for you, but all it really takes to get a picture of reality is to imagine two simple political maps of the world, one for September, 2001, and the other for November 2012. What would be seen on these maps?
– The Map of September 2001:
– 1.) Al-Qaeda and its allies had only Taleban-governed Afghanistan as a major base in which to train, store weaponry, plot, launch attacks, and meet other Islamists from around the world. Yes, al-Qaeda and its allies had so-called cells in dozens of other countries around the world – and they still do – but only in Afghanistan could they operate openly and – thanks to the Clinton administration’s profound disregard for U.S. lives and interests – with little concern about being attacked while they prepared for 9/11 and what was to come. (NB: Interestingly, many Americans seem to have forgotten that in October, 2000, Clinton refused to defend America and Americans after the near sinking of the USS COLE, just as Obama has refused to do anything during or after the mujahedin’s recent easy victory in Benghazi. Both men clearly were more concerned with their party’s presidential prospects than with defending American lives and security.)
– The Map of November 2011:
– 1.) After more than decade of successfully resisting the U.S.-led invasion and occupation, the Taleban and its allies will in the next 18 months return to power in Afghanistan. Whether that new regime in Kabul is called the Taleban or not is irrelevant. It will be a Pakistani-and-Saudi-backed Islamist regime and it will welcome al-Qaeda and its allies to remain in its territories to train, plan, rearm, etc. The new Islamist Afghan regime also will have unprecedented access to and influence over the eastern third of Pakistan. Ironically, the Islamist Afghan state will be much larger, better organized, and better armed in 2014 than it was in 2001.
– 2.) In addition to soon controlling an expanded Afghan state, the international spread of the Islamists’ presence and power since 9/11 has been impressive. While Americans and their media have been bore-sighted on the willfully lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the politically motivated silence of the Islamist-empowering Obama administration has allowed the creation of a half-dozen Afghan-like Islamist bastions to go mostly unnoticed. Soon after 9/11, Osama bin Laden began dispersing his forces from South Asia – and he helpfully told us what he was up to in a public statement – with the result being that today Islamist military bastions are firmly established in Yemen, throughout the North Caucasus, in East Africa, across North Africa, and reaching from the latter down into Mali and toward southern Africa. There are also the Islamist-redoubts that are growing and solidifying via al-Qaeda’s startling and forceful turn to Iraq, as well as in Libya and Syria where Mrs. Clinton’s and Senator McCain’s "freedom fighters" are in the process of installing Islamist regimes with the military aid of our Gulf "allies" and al-Qaeda.
– 3.) While the sheer geographical dimensions of the mujahedin’s growth is very impressive, the places where they have ensconced themselves are even more impressive and strategically dangerous to U.S. interests. As al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks were designed to lure the U.S. military into Afghanistan – it being easier to kill soldiers and Marines there than in America – the post-2001 expansion of al-Qaeda and its allies is meant, among other things, to force the United States to fight in places where it has genuine, life-and-death national interests – not the nonsense of fighting for democracy and women’s rights. This becomes especially clear after a review of the activities of Al-Qaeda-in-the-Islamic-Mahgreb (AQIM), Al-Qaeda-in-the-Arab Peninsula (AQAP); Somalia’s Al-Shabab – which the West foolishly thinks is fully beaten after a series of tactical defeats – and Nigeria’s Boko Haram. The strategic bottom line for America is simple and clear: these four groups, with minimal inter-group cooperation, are near-to-threatening free U.S. and Western access to the Niger Delta’s oil resources and West Africa’s rich deposits of uranium and strategic minerals. The mujahedin also sit astride vital sea lanes off both coasts of Africa, at the Suez Canal, and in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Free and reliable access to all of these are indispensable to the economic welfare of the United States and as they become increasingly threatened we will have to fight for them. This is, incidentally, why the brief discussion of U.S. naval power during the presidential debate should have been prolonged. The protection of maritime commerce and offshore resource production is a ship-intensive activity; numbers do matter – perhaps more than military punch each ship packs – and the number of U.S. Navy ships now available is simply inadequate to the potential requirements for them. The method of operation of Al-Qaeda and its allies is today what it has long been: spread out U.S. military assets so as to sap their reserves and flexibility. This is a strategy that might well work as effectively at sea as it has on land.
– 4.) Perhaps the most important development in the U.S.-Islamist war in the last few years also has gone largely unmarked. The fall of Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Qadhafi has greatly eased the operational environment for Islamist groups and movements not only in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, but also in other Muslim states whose regimes have a tenuous hold on power. Think especially of Jordan in the latter regard. Where three years ago Islamists in all these places were constantly hunted by Arab security services and killed, incarcerated, or turned over to U.S. authorities, today they operate freely with little concern for local security forces so long as they do not attack within the country; nowhere is this more true than in Egypt. From the Pakistan-India border to Morocco’s Atlantic coast, the Islamists are encountering a freedom of movement and a degree of personal safety that they have never before enjoyed. The Islamist are also much better armed than ever before, thanks largely to the looting of military arsenals in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and Libya during the opening of the Pandora‘s box known as the Arab Spring.
So before voting, take a minute and imagine each of these maps and compare them. Then vote for whoever you want, but vote with the certainty that all Americans are joining you in voting for a president whose interventionism will bring all of us more war
Monday, November 5, 2012
Monday, October 8, 2012
Monday, September 17, 2012
To President Obama: The 2nd Amendment Is About Fighting Tyranny, Not Hunting Deer by Michael Scheuer
To President Obama: The 2nd Amendment Is About Fighting Tyranny, Not Hunting Deer by Michael Scheuer
Soon after the Denver shootings, President Obama said it was time to put stricter gun-control measures in place. With the failure of Attorney General Holder’s “Fast and Furious” ploy to void the 2nd Amendment, it seems Obama thought he might capitalize on the Denver shootings to further damage the Constitution. The negative public reaction to his words, however, sent Obama backtracking, and senior Democrats like Senator Reid and Representative Pelosi quickly made public remarks to bury the issue – for now.
Before moving on, it is worth noting that Obama said gun laws must be changed but only in a way that protected Americans’ cherished tradition of hunting. Well, hunting game is not the central concern of the 2nd Amendment. What is central is that the 2nd Amendment protects the right of Americans to be armed in case they decide there is a need, in Jefferson’s words, “to alter or to abolish [the government]” and “to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
In creating the 2nd Amendment, the Founders – through James Madison‘s pen – took their cue from the British Bill of Rights (1689) which recognized that an unarmed populace could not protect its rights, liberty, and economic welfare against a king backed by a standing army, and so it allowed for an armed populace. The Founders also recalled that when London cracked down on New England’s resistance to the Crown, one of British General Thomas Gates’ first moves was to try to seize the munitions and ordnance the colonists had stockpiled around Boston. One reason for the British Army’s ill-fated expedition to Lexington and Concord in April, 1775, for example, was to capture the colonists’ stores of cannon, muskets, and munitions.
Even before Jefferson’s declaration, therefore, what in today’s parlance is called “gun control” was seen by Americans for what it was and is, a policy instituted by an oppressive government that fears its population and therefore aims at ensuring that citizens cannot arm to resist its will. The 2nd Amendment is meant, in part, to make sure that if the federal government created by the Constitution turns oppressive, Americans will have arms with which to defend their liberties and welfare.
And this right is much more important today than it was when the 2nd Amendment was drafted because the federal government has over time deliberately and probably unconstitutionally eradicated the 2nd Amendment’s other anti-oppression provision, the one that made sure the several state governments had well-regulated – that is, well-trained – militias at their command. The state militias were of course meant to assist the U.S. government’s standing army in case of foreign attack or domestic insurrection, but they also were meant to defend the states and their populations if the federal government used its standing army to willfully violate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, or acted in a manner harmful to the peoples’ security, economic welfare, and/or their society’s social cohesion.
Except for Alexander Hamilton and a few other of the Founders, both Federalists and Anti-Federalists were very wary of – indeed, many hated – the idea of maintaining a strong standing army in time of peace, seeing it as an all-too-easy-to-use tool of would-be tyrants. The 2nd Amendment took cognizance of this historically genuine danger and established two hedges against it, an armed citizenry and effective state militias. The much stronger hedge – state militias – is long gone, and only the weaker hedge of an armed citizenry remains. And there seems nothing outrageous about the idea that, as the 2nd Amendment allowed citizens to be ready to resist federal-government oppression by matching it musket-for-musket in the 1790s, today’s citizens ought to be free to face the same potential threat of tyranny assault rifle-for-assault rifle.
Now, in response to the foregoing, I am sure President Obama and other recent presidents, their administrations, and their media shills would argue there is no chance of the federal government ever acting in a manner so oppressive to the liberty and welfare of Americans that the latter would decide to take up arms against it. And they may well be right. I hope they are.
But just for the sake of argument, let us imagine a future circumstance – far off and wildly unlikely though it may be – in which the federal government did violate the Constitution, threaten the destruction of the U.S. economy, tore the fabric of American society, and made the American political system a cesspool of financial corruption. And to add to the unreality of our scenario, let us further imagine that these actions are much more substantively threatening than those which motivated the Founding Fathers to rebel against Britain and those that led to the creation of the Confederate States of America and a civil war.
Just imagine, for example,
1.) That a single unelected federal bureaucrat issues a mandate that clearly violates the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom for more than 70 million American Catholics, Jews, and Muslims.
2.) That multiple U.S. presidents take the United States to war without the formal declaration of war irrefutably demanded by the U.S. Constitution, and then intentionally fail to win the wars they start and so kill thousands of America‘s solider-children for nothing.
3.) That the federal government each year reaches into its citizens’ pockets and takes between $40 and $50 billion dollars and then gives it to foreigners, even in times when 25-percent of America’s youngsters are malnourished, more than 8 percent of Americans are unemployed, and the country’s critical infrastructure is crumbling.
4.) That senior elected officials in both parties, as well as senior federal bureaucrats constantly leak highly classified intelligence information to advance their partisan interests and thereby knowingly undermine U.S. national security.
5.) That presidents and attorney generals from both parties pick and choose what laws they will enforce, in direct and flagrant violation of the oath to execute all laws that the Constitution mandates they swear on taking office.
6.) That a long list of presidential administrations under both parties refuse to enforce laws designed to control U.S. borders, thereby knowingly compromising U.S. security and causing several U.S. states to have their economies damaged and social fabric weakened. In addition, imagine that those federal administrations also take legal action to prevent state governors from defending their populations.
7.) That the Congress and the Senate regularly and knowingly act to bankrupt and destroy such essential national institutions as the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Post Office by siphoning off their funds for other pet or less-important projects.
8.) That cabinet members and would-be cabinet members who do not file income tax returns, leak classified intelligence information, mislead Congress, and knowingly hire illegal aliens are never prosecuted.
9.) That the federal government so overspends the public treasury that the national debt can never be repaid, and that in funding the debt it also compromises U.S. independence and citizens’ economic well-being via massive borrowing from malign foreign powers and by exacting half-a-year’s wages from each American taxpayer.
10.) That the unaccountable U.S. Supreme Court interprets the Constitution in a way that makes the nation’s political system a cesspool of financial corruption, endorses the murder of more than 50 million-plus unborn U.S. citizens, and empowers the federal government to wage unrelenting war on religion, especially on Christianity.
11.) That the federal government’s executive and legislative branches permit multiple lobbies to act as agents of foreign powers to corrupt our political system; to influence our foreign policy in a manner destructive of U.S. security and leading to war; and then protects them by not making them register as agents of foreign powers and by passing “hate-speech laws” – the latter a clear violation of the 1st Amendment.
12.) That the federal education department ensures the school curriculum taught to U.S. children negatively distorts U.S. history, denigrates the Founding Fathers, and keeps students ignorant of the meaning and purposes of the country’s founding documents – such as the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
While it is hard, nay, nearly impossible to imagine that even one – let alone all – of these severely oppressive and destructive actions could be deliberately perpetrated by the federal government, we each learn over the course of a lifetime never to say never. And if the sorry day ever dawns when one or more of the above depredations occur, I would suggest Americans might well think about taking recourse to the arms guaranteed them by the 2nd Amendment, arms with which to defend their liberty, economic welfare, national independence, and their Constitution’s viability.
And who knows what the future will bring, some of the foregoing hard-to-imagine actions may not be all so far fetched. If one or more came to pass, I suppose the 2nd Amendment would be the last, best resort for Americans after, as Jefferson recommended, a patient and prolonged effort to peacefully undo the oppressive measures imposed on them. “Prudence, indeed,” Jefferson wrote, “will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
At day’s end, then, the 2nd Amendment exists to permit American citizens to perform the “duty” Jefferson describes by resisting and defeating with arms a federal government that knowingly produces a “train of abuses and usurpations” that is designed “to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” The 2nd Amendment should not be altered or diluted a whit, but should stand, as the Founders intended, as a stark reminder to all elected federal officials and their bureaucrats that, in extremis, the 2nd Amendment ensures that Americans have the right and the means with which to hunt down and remove those who use the federal government to oppress them.
http://lewrockwell.com/scheuer/scheuer15.1.html
http://non-intervention.com/
"Don't patronize the enemy. They mean business. They mean every word they say. They're killing us now. Their will is not broken, They mean it. ... If they're there, your job is to kill them all. I did not want to have them just retreat and have to fight them all over again."
Maj. Gen. James Mattis, USMC
Soon after the Denver shootings, President Obama said it was time to put stricter gun-control measures in place. With the failure of Attorney General Holder’s “Fast and Furious” ploy to void the 2nd Amendment, it seems Obama thought he might capitalize on the Denver shootings to further damage the Constitution. The negative public reaction to his words, however, sent Obama backtracking, and senior Democrats like Senator Reid and Representative Pelosi quickly made public remarks to bury the issue – for now.
Before moving on, it is worth noting that Obama said gun laws must be changed but only in a way that protected Americans’ cherished tradition of hunting. Well, hunting game is not the central concern of the 2nd Amendment. What is central is that the 2nd Amendment protects the right of Americans to be armed in case they decide there is a need, in Jefferson’s words, “to alter or to abolish [the government]” and “to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
In creating the 2nd Amendment, the Founders – through James Madison‘s pen – took their cue from the British Bill of Rights (1689) which recognized that an unarmed populace could not protect its rights, liberty, and economic welfare against a king backed by a standing army, and so it allowed for an armed populace. The Founders also recalled that when London cracked down on New England’s resistance to the Crown, one of British General Thomas Gates’ first moves was to try to seize the munitions and ordnance the colonists had stockpiled around Boston. One reason for the British Army’s ill-fated expedition to Lexington and Concord in April, 1775, for example, was to capture the colonists’ stores of cannon, muskets, and munitions.
Even before Jefferson’s declaration, therefore, what in today’s parlance is called “gun control” was seen by Americans for what it was and is, a policy instituted by an oppressive government that fears its population and therefore aims at ensuring that citizens cannot arm to resist its will. The 2nd Amendment is meant, in part, to make sure that if the federal government created by the Constitution turns oppressive, Americans will have arms with which to defend their liberties and welfare.
And this right is much more important today than it was when the 2nd Amendment was drafted because the federal government has over time deliberately and probably unconstitutionally eradicated the 2nd Amendment’s other anti-oppression provision, the one that made sure the several state governments had well-regulated – that is, well-trained – militias at their command. The state militias were of course meant to assist the U.S. government’s standing army in case of foreign attack or domestic insurrection, but they also were meant to defend the states and their populations if the federal government used its standing army to willfully violate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, or acted in a manner harmful to the peoples’ security, economic welfare, and/or their society’s social cohesion.
Except for Alexander Hamilton and a few other of the Founders, both Federalists and Anti-Federalists were very wary of – indeed, many hated – the idea of maintaining a strong standing army in time of peace, seeing it as an all-too-easy-to-use tool of would-be tyrants. The 2nd Amendment took cognizance of this historically genuine danger and established two hedges against it, an armed citizenry and effective state militias. The much stronger hedge – state militias – is long gone, and only the weaker hedge of an armed citizenry remains. And there seems nothing outrageous about the idea that, as the 2nd Amendment allowed citizens to be ready to resist federal-government oppression by matching it musket-for-musket in the 1790s, today’s citizens ought to be free to face the same potential threat of tyranny assault rifle-for-assault rifle.
Now, in response to the foregoing, I am sure President Obama and other recent presidents, their administrations, and their media shills would argue there is no chance of the federal government ever acting in a manner so oppressive to the liberty and welfare of Americans that the latter would decide to take up arms against it. And they may well be right. I hope they are.
But just for the sake of argument, let us imagine a future circumstance – far off and wildly unlikely though it may be – in which the federal government did violate the Constitution, threaten the destruction of the U.S. economy, tore the fabric of American society, and made the American political system a cesspool of financial corruption. And to add to the unreality of our scenario, let us further imagine that these actions are much more substantively threatening than those which motivated the Founding Fathers to rebel against Britain and those that led to the creation of the Confederate States of America and a civil war.
Just imagine, for example,
1.) That a single unelected federal bureaucrat issues a mandate that clearly violates the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom for more than 70 million American Catholics, Jews, and Muslims.
2.) That multiple U.S. presidents take the United States to war without the formal declaration of war irrefutably demanded by the U.S. Constitution, and then intentionally fail to win the wars they start and so kill thousands of America‘s solider-children for nothing.
3.) That the federal government each year reaches into its citizens’ pockets and takes between $40 and $50 billion dollars and then gives it to foreigners, even in times when 25-percent of America’s youngsters are malnourished, more than 8 percent of Americans are unemployed, and the country’s critical infrastructure is crumbling.
4.) That senior elected officials in both parties, as well as senior federal bureaucrats constantly leak highly classified intelligence information to advance their partisan interests and thereby knowingly undermine U.S. national security.
5.) That presidents and attorney generals from both parties pick and choose what laws they will enforce, in direct and flagrant violation of the oath to execute all laws that the Constitution mandates they swear on taking office.
6.) That a long list of presidential administrations under both parties refuse to enforce laws designed to control U.S. borders, thereby knowingly compromising U.S. security and causing several U.S. states to have their economies damaged and social fabric weakened. In addition, imagine that those federal administrations also take legal action to prevent state governors from defending their populations.
7.) That the Congress and the Senate regularly and knowingly act to bankrupt and destroy such essential national institutions as the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Post Office by siphoning off their funds for other pet or less-important projects.
8.) That cabinet members and would-be cabinet members who do not file income tax returns, leak classified intelligence information, mislead Congress, and knowingly hire illegal aliens are never prosecuted.
9.) That the federal government so overspends the public treasury that the national debt can never be repaid, and that in funding the debt it also compromises U.S. independence and citizens’ economic well-being via massive borrowing from malign foreign powers and by exacting half-a-year’s wages from each American taxpayer.
10.) That the unaccountable U.S. Supreme Court interprets the Constitution in a way that makes the nation’s political system a cesspool of financial corruption, endorses the murder of more than 50 million-plus unborn U.S. citizens, and empowers the federal government to wage unrelenting war on religion, especially on Christianity.
11.) That the federal government’s executive and legislative branches permit multiple lobbies to act as agents of foreign powers to corrupt our political system; to influence our foreign policy in a manner destructive of U.S. security and leading to war; and then protects them by not making them register as agents of foreign powers and by passing “hate-speech laws” – the latter a clear violation of the 1st Amendment.
12.) That the federal education department ensures the school curriculum taught to U.S. children negatively distorts U.S. history, denigrates the Founding Fathers, and keeps students ignorant of the meaning and purposes of the country’s founding documents – such as the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
While it is hard, nay, nearly impossible to imagine that even one – let alone all – of these severely oppressive and destructive actions could be deliberately perpetrated by the federal government, we each learn over the course of a lifetime never to say never. And if the sorry day ever dawns when one or more of the above depredations occur, I would suggest Americans might well think about taking recourse to the arms guaranteed them by the 2nd Amendment, arms with which to defend their liberty, economic welfare, national independence, and their Constitution’s viability.
And who knows what the future will bring, some of the foregoing hard-to-imagine actions may not be all so far fetched. If one or more came to pass, I suppose the 2nd Amendment would be the last, best resort for Americans after, as Jefferson recommended, a patient and prolonged effort to peacefully undo the oppressive measures imposed on them. “Prudence, indeed,” Jefferson wrote, “will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
At day’s end, then, the 2nd Amendment exists to permit American citizens to perform the “duty” Jefferson describes by resisting and defeating with arms a federal government that knowingly produces a “train of abuses and usurpations” that is designed “to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” The 2nd Amendment should not be altered or diluted a whit, but should stand, as the Founders intended, as a stark reminder to all elected federal officials and their bureaucrats that, in extremis, the 2nd Amendment ensures that Americans have the right and the means with which to hunt down and remove those who use the federal government to oppress them.
http://lewrockwell.com/scheuer/scheuer15.1.html
http://non-intervention.com/
"Don't patronize the enemy. They mean business. They mean every word they say. They're killing us now. Their will is not broken, They mean it. ... If they're there, your job is to kill them all. I did not want to have them just retreat and have to fight them all over again."
Maj. Gen. James Mattis, USMC
Monday, September 10, 2012
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
NEW YORK STATE - Erie County ballots must offer Spanish | WIVB.com
More Erie Co ballots must offer Spanish | WIVB.com
Is Erie county serious ? You do have to be a citizen to vote ? You can not understand English and you are allowed to vote what a farce !!! This state becomes more of a loony asylum every day !!!
Is Erie county serious ? You do have to be a citizen to vote ? You can not understand English and you are allowed to vote what a farce !!! This state becomes more of a loony asylum every day !!!
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