Democrat Hate - The site

Democrat Hate - The site Democrats.com is front and center with every wacko-left conspiracy theory. In the immediate aftermath of the Wellstone plane crash, they were printing conspiracy theories practically before the bodies were cold.

More? Notice this little bon mot (scroll down the page to find it):

CNN and Rightwing Horatio Alger Association Push a Corporate Model of 'Success' to TeensThis is almost as bad as if CNN used its television forum to push smoking or alcohol abuse on teens!! CNN and the 1950's style rightwing outfit the Horatio Alger Assoc. have collaborated to "help young people" through their production, "Only In America." This program is pure corporate propaganda, designed to replace traditional America goals - integrity, sacrifice, making a difference for the greater good of mankind - with a new goal: Become a CEO!! The show is hosted by rightwingnut adman Ed McMahon. What's next? Preteen shows on how to lend your pals money at 18% interest, compounded quarterly?

Working for a corporation is as bad as teen alcohol abuse? And Horatio Alger (and the eponymous society) has goals that are less "traditionally American" than "integrity, sacrifice and"...making a difference for the greater good fo mankind? Huh?

The authors' illiteracy about finance is too plain to even mention. But the question remains - who are these people? Some left-wing nutbars, as removed from the mainstream of the Democrat party as the "Vince Foster Conspricy" tinfoilhats are from the GOP?

As if! Look at this list! These people are mainstream Democrat players!

And if a Republican group were to put out such noxious, hate-drenched slime, it'd bring the media down like a pack of Dave Matthews fans after the last bottle of Zima.

Hate speech, indeed.

Dem Gun Demigoguery - The Minnesota DFL website offers this gun control bon mot - a reprint of a Strib editorial:

The government wants you to think it takes terrorism seriously -- that it's doing all it can to excise murderous plotters from American soil. But think again: Though the White House has done much to heighten homeland security, one font of fear flows as freely as ever. Bad guys still buy U.S. guns by the bushel; the feds are still willing to look the other way.

Which "bad guys"? The September 11 hijackers flew planes, as I recall. Which "bad guys" are the DFL/Strib referring to?

"Bushel"? The hyperbole starts here, and never stops...

Could this really be true? People who've been watching say yes.

Who? Anyone?

Even after Sept. 11, they note, the White House hasn't done a thing to stop unsavory gun traffic -- of which the United States is a large if unwitting sponsor. Underground armies the world over can credit U.S. dealers with supplying the arms fueling their endless wars.

"Underground armies". Remember this bit. It'll pop up later in this fisking.

Even the congressional ban on assault-gun sales hasn't slowed things down much. Thanks to some speedy redesign and renaming, any thug with an ax to grind can stroll into a retail store in any number of states, fill out a cursory background-check form and walk out with a MAK-90 -- a "sporting" version of the banned AK-47.

So let's get this straight: According to the DFL/Strib, "Underground Armies" are flocking to sporting goods stores to load up on sporterized cheap copies of "AK-47"s, with which they equip themselves for "endless wars".

Next time you're at Joe's Sporting Goods, wave hi to the Serbian militiamen and the Hutu death-squadsters!

And though legal limits are placed on multiple handgun purchases, no law bars a buyer from driving off with a truckload of long guns designed to shoot people rather than deer or bears.

No limits are placed on people buying thousands of gallons of gasoline and filling up a stolen tank truck and using it as a bomb, either - but it doesn't seem to be happening, regulations or not.

Transactions like these don't do much for world harmony, and it's hard to see why they're allowed at all.

Because unregulated purchases of sporting arms have no effect on crime in the US, much less wars overseas.

That'd be my wild guess, all in all.

But that's how it goes in gun-mad America: Nearly every would-be terrorist in want of a weapon can get one -- at a gun show, from a pawn shop, through a newspaper ad, from a friend. In days gone by, at least, a no-good gun-buyer stood a chance of getting caught if his gun ended up being used in a crime: If that happened, the FBI typically checked federal gun-purchase records to look beyond the scene of the crime.

No longer. Just when its use could prove most crucial, Attorney General John Ashcroft called a halt to that tracing tactic. Why? To protect gun buyers' "privacy."

Uh oh. It's the scare quotes. Whenever the left wants to get you to part with a right (or rather, a "right"), they put the scare quotes around it. Look for references to "due process" and "free" "speech" soon in reference to "talk" radio.

It's hard to know what to make of an attorney general whose chief civil-liberties concern is keeping secrets for gun owners up to no good. It's certainly not a good sign. Neither is Ashcroft's failure to propose any gun-related provisions in the recently approved U.S. Patriot Act -- the government's catch-all antiterrorism law: Despite Ashcroft's pledge to "unleash every possible tool" to fight terror, it's evident that cracking down on gun trafficking just isn't in his plans.

Perhaps because "gun trafficking" (I can do scare quotes too) in US hunting rifles has not been found to be any sort of problen whatsoever.

But why not? Doesn't Ashcroft know that even now U.S. guns are pouring into terrorist hands? He must know, because the federal government has long been monitoring gun purchases by U.S. militant groups with links to Al-Qaida.

Really? Data, please?

If this is like the "facts", (yaaay) also breathlessly reported by the DFL/Strib, that " a gun is 43 times more likely to kill someone you know than a criminal" (wrong in SO many ways) and "concealed carry permits will put more guns in the hands of gang members"

Yet when the FBI tried after Sept. 11 to see whether anyone on its list of terror suspects was on the government's list of recent gun buyers, the Justice Department threw a fit and nixed the check.

And they were right to do so, just as they would be right to nix blanket checks of recent car buyers or recent Blockbuster rentals.

So there you have it. In the World According to Ashcroft, fighting terrorism means asking airline passengers to take their shoes off at security checkpoints while respecting the "privacy" of unknown characters who buy armloads of long guns in the dark of night.

If they're buying them "in the dark of night", odds are it's not at a gun store...

Where's the logic in that? Where's the safety?

Surely it wouldn't hurt to check whether suspected terrorists are also avid gun buyers. Indeed, doing so might even give investigators new leads as they try to track terror networks. As broadcaster Bill Moyers noted in his Nov. 15 PBS program, "Gun Land,"

...which was chock-full of equally bad information...

it's plain that foreign terrorists have exploited this country's lax gun laws to arm themselves against their own governments -- and ours.

If I say "it's plain that the earth is flat", does that make it so? I've seen precisely no evidence that any US weapons, bought through the same sorts of civil channels that US civil gun buyers use, have had any impact on the world weapons trade.

The United States must toughen its laws to avert such exploitation. It must shake off the silly idea that gun sales should be secret, and do what it takes to catch the exploiters.

"Exploiters"? I thought we were after terrorists.

Of course, we're not. The DFL/Strib wants to make the life of the law-abiding gun owner, buyer and merchant just that little bit more onerous.

They're scared, of course - the GOP won big, the NRA is ascendant, and the Minnesota Personal Protection Act (our "shall issue" concealed carry law) will probably pass this session.

Expect much more of the same.

Posted by Mitch at November 29, 2002 10:30 PM