Showing posts with label G. Gordon Liddy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label G. Gordon Liddy. Show all posts

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Call 'assault weapons' what you want, the result's the same

Many pundits and analysts have been recently pleading, predictably, that we don't understand what "assault weapons" really are. Here are just a couple of examples:

Is it fair to call them 'assault weapons'?

Some myths about assault weapons

It reminds me of the nutty '90s, before and after President Bill Clinton's assault-weapons ban, when gun nuts like G. Gordon Liddy used to maintain, pedantically, that what the Crime Bill really banned were "assault-type weapons." As if that made any difference.

Look, whatever you call them, these high-capacity, semi-automatic firearms are not used to bake souffle, hunt deer or protect a home. They are offensive weapons designed to kill a lot of human beings very quickly.

And that's just what Adam Lanza did at Sandy Hook Elementary on December 14, 2012. 

Afterward, investigators found "multiple 30-round magazines and hundreds of bullets" where he killed 26 people, most of them 6- and 7-year-olds, in a matter of seconds, with a semi-automatic .223 rifle. Some of the victims were shot as many as 11 times at close range. One of the semi-automatic pistols on Lanza was never even used. It wasn't needed. The other 10 mm pistol found on Lanza was used only once... when Lanza shot himself in the head. 

Thursday, August 9, 2012

GOP's political rehabilitation of Bill Clinton

We must harken back to our fathers' wholesome, anti-American radicalism of the 90s to save our country

Ah, the 90s.  Believe it or not, I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy daily, read all Ayn Rand's "masterpieces," and subscribed to National Review.  I voted for Bob Dole!  I really drank the kooky conservative Kool-Aid.

I remember myself and other conservatives foaming at the mouth about how Clinton hated America; Clinton was going to destroy the economy "with the largest peace time tax increase in U.S. history;" Clinton killed Vince Foster, Ron Brown and about 40 other people; Clinton was going to take all our guns away; Clinton was handing over our sovereignty to the UN as their black choppers invaded our airspace with impunity.  And on and on.

If all these right-wing voices (including my own) were to be believed, America was in certain decline and facing imminent disaster.

And now, lo and behold, Repulicans are looking back wistfully on the Clinton years with fondness. 

Doesn't it make you conservatives wonder, if only just for a moment, if you're not being unreasonable and paranoid now as well?  Maybe Obama is not the Anti-Christ, or an Afro-Arab-Asian Manchurian Candidate, or a crypto-Muslim?...

... Nah!  Of course he is all those things!  Definitely Obama is the most liberal, anti-American POTUS ever...  until the next Democrat gets elected, that is.


By Ari Shapiro
August 9, 2012 | NPR