The blogs that I have listed in my blogroll tend to fall into three categories:
"Bush is an incompetent idiot" blogs, with some of them being primarily about the War on Terra and some not.
Gun blogs.
Aviation blogs.
There is not a lot of crossover between the first category and the second two. A lot of the gun blogs and some of the aviation blogs are well to the Right in the political spectrum. As long as they tend to stick to their main theme, I read them. It doesn't bother me if they have some of the brain-dead fascists in their blogrolls, I don't have to go visit the Kool-Aid drinkers.
They interest me. That's all I care about.
They’re Both Going To Milk This For All It’s Worth
48 minutes ago
6 comments:
Most of the people I know on the right don't care much for Bush, either. There are a lot of conservatives who dislike the Republican party; many people on the right tend to be libertarian to some degree or the other.
Bobg, you are describing Western Republicans. However, I am sad to say that Southern Republicans still love the Bush Administration just fine. It's all about guns, gays, and darkies with them. Any President who's on the right side of the guns, gays, and darkies issues is okay by them, and Dear Leader let the assault weapon ban expire, seems to hate gays as much as they do, and seems to love killing darkies as much as they do, so he's all right by them.
So yeah, Dear Leader is spending money with the drunk abandon of a sailor just come into port, keeps wanting to give amnesty to the Mexicans who took their high-paying construction jobs, etc., but they don't care. It's all about guns, gays, and darkies with them, and they just LURVE the fact that Dear Leader is "kickin' darky butt" overseas...
- Badtux the Southern Penguin
And then there is the network known as Fixed Noise. I don't see Republicans effectively doing anything about Bush. Bush could start shooting puppies on the South lawn and, though Republicans might grumble, they'd do nothing.
As for guns, I think it is a poor carpenter who blames his tools for his shoddy work. The guns are not the problem.
A gun is a tool, not a magic talisman of good or evil. But the Southern Republicans that I'm thinking about don't think of a gun as only a magic talisman. They think of it as a penis extension. When they jack off they stroke their guns with the hand they're not using to stroke their wand. The gun literature they peruse has hot wimmins stroking guns and it makes them horny. When they go staggering off into the woods two sheets to the wind to go "hunting", they're as likely to shoot themselves as any wild game (it did NOT surprise me when Cheney shot his lawyer, I saw shit like that happen ALL the time when I lived in Crackerstan) and every year at least a half dozen end up shooting themselves or killing themselves by falling out of their hunting blinds onto their drunk-ass heads, but they're with their beloved guns when this happens so they don't care.
As you say, a gun is a tool. We have regulations for operating a lot of dangerous tools, for example you cannot operate a heavy semi-trailer on a public highway unless you go through rigorous licensing and testing process. We don't allow semi-trailers on the highway unless they pass various safety inspections. I don't see any reason why we should not hold guns to the same standard as semi-trucks, they're both equally dangerous if misused or defective. Anybody who views a gun as a tool has no problem with this viewpoint. But for people who view a gun as a penis extension, you're not attacking their "rights" if you don't talk about guns with the same combination of awe and lust that they view guns with. You're attacking their very sexuality, what they feel makes them a man, you're saying that reasonable licensing and regulation of their penis is needed. Now, what it says about them as men that they need a gun to feel like a man, well, all the Gay Old Perverts of the Republican Party who've been outed soliciting sex in restrooms recently ought to tell ya somethin' there, but so it goes.
(Note: I am not a "gun ban" type, I just don't see any difference between a gun and a semi-trailer when it comes to reasonable regulation, they're both dangerous pieces of equipment that are equally capable of being misused to disasterous effect).
I would be fine with reasonable regulation but for two reasons:
First off, nobody is seeking to ban semi-tractor-trailers. There are people who are trying to ban guns and there have been places that have used the ability to regulate as the ability to ban.
Second, there is that pesky constitutional issue. I do not accept the argument that the 2nd Amendment is a collective right, for there is not a government in recorded history that questions its innate right to own weapons. All of the other of the first 8 amendments in the Bill of Rights are individual rights, I think it stretches credulity to argue that the 2nd amendment is a right accorded only to the government.
Beyond that, the penis argument does not work, at least for me.
You have the right of free speech also, but reasonable regulation of that right has been true since the early days of the Republic. For example, you have the right to an opinion about person X, but you do not have the right to tell lies about person X. That's called "defamation", and is a civil offense. You can't yell "1st Amendment! 1st Amendment!" and get away with saying that person X spends his evenings raping his sister when he actually doesn't even have a sister.
Similarly, you have the right to draw a cartoon. But you don't have a right to take one of Garry Trudeau's cartoons and re-publish it as your own. Once again, reasonable regulation of speech does not violate the 1st Amendment to the Constitution. Perhaps this is a bad example, since copyright is explicitly mentioned in the Constitution proper as a valid governmental function, but is just another example to show that having a right does not eliminate the ability of government to regulate the use of said right in a responsible manner.
As for the 2nd Amendment, I agree with you there. If the gun banners really want to ban guns, they need to quit trying end-arounds around the Constitution and propose an amendment to repeal the 2nd. Personally I think the gun banners are just as demented as the gun fetishests -- they are attaching magical totemic powers to what is just a tool. That, however, is a different issue altogether.
In any event, when it comes to Southern Republicans, it's all about God, Guns, Gays, and Darkies. They're just fine with the current Republican party, though a bit disquieted by the recent gay Republican outings.
- Badtux the Reasonable Penguin
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