misfitS pOLITICS
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CDP
With the Presidential election a scant 4 months and change away, many voters of all persuasions feel trapped. Given the two prospective nominees of the major parties, what other option is truly on the table? The hard truth of the matter is that there are no good options, which is why it is time for a new politics, a new party, one that starts anew free from all the corruption and rent-seeking of the current political system. What we need is a non-party.
This new party, dubbed the Misanthropic Individualists Seeking Freedom from Institutionalized Tyranny (MISFITs), is not a party. There is no membership list. There are no fundraisers. We don’t have conventions or meetings or stupid looking hats with simplistic slogans. We don’t want you to join. As a matter of fact, you can’t join because there’s nothing to join. We do, however, have a platform. Sort of. Some items in our sort-of-a-platform may strike some people as counterintuitive, even hypocritical. To this we say: so what? We aren’t interested in your opinion. It isn’t like we’re asking for your money.
The MISFITs sort-of-platform is not subject to change. Or it is, we frankly don’t care. As a non-party we are not asking for your vote. But if November rolls around and you’re feeling stuck between a rock and a couple of corrupt authoritarian morons, think of Bob. His pocket Constitution will be ready.
CDP
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Guest Contributor TheOneSoleShoe
Senator Joseph McCarthy used to represent a model the Left opposed
Not many people know that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was innocent.
I do not mean “Not Guilty” but actually innocent of the charges for which he was investigated and later convicted. In fact, at the time Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald interviewed him, Mr. Fitzgerald was well aware that the actual leaker of CIA employee Valerie Plame’s name to the press was then Deputy Secretary of State Richard “Dick” Armitage. That knowledge should have ended any further inquiry into the matter for which Mr. Fitzgerald was tasked by Congress to investigate. But alas, Scooter Libby, adviser to Vice President Cheney, was sentenced to 30 months in prison not for outing a CIA agent, a crime he was never charged with, but for allegedly making false statements to a federal investigator. However, as Peter Berkowitz chronicled (1) this conviction was based almost entirely on the recollection of Tim Russert. Russert initially told the FBI he “could not recall” mentioning Plame’s name on a phone call but “could not rule it out.” A year later he was certain he had never mentioned Plame’s name. The conviction was carried four years later, supported only by the discrepancy in the two men’s accounts of a single conversation. Mr. Armitage, being a critic of the Bush administration on the Iraq War, was left uncharged with any crime. Libby was prosecuted as a whipping post for the Bush Administration by the Left. Unable to bring war crimes charges against the Bush administration and frustrated by their inability to get Bush to resign despite overwhelming help from the Media, they sought avenues with more teeth like the judicial system. As a result, Scooter Libby became a bona fide political prisoner. This is unfortunately not an outlier event. A couple of more talented pundits have written recently on the Left’s use of government prosecutorial authority to achieve political ends. Robert Tracinski wrote of the recent case of Bill Nye pushing to prosecute people who spoke against his understanding of climate change. Kevin Williamson took note of this effort as well, with notable figures calling for imprisonment under RICO laws for people who depart from the Left’s orthodoxy on global warming. A US Virgin Islands prosecutor followed through on this precise idea. (He has since pulled the indictment but the message was sent.) In addition, Williamson recounted how Senators such as Elizabeth Warren have put pressure on the Securities and Exchange Commission to punish businesses who lobby against regulations “fraudulently,” in Senator Warren’s opinion:
“Senator Warren charges that the businesses in question exaggerate the costs of regulations when lobbying against them in public and do not do so when communicating with investors and shareholders — which is to say, she wants to make a felony out of what amounts to at most hyperbole or political spin.”
But wait, there’s more!
Rick Perry battled for 2 years against a prosecution based solely upon his use of veto while governor of Texas. Yes, really. Donors to Scott Walker’s campaign and various conservative activists were hounded for years in Wisconsin by an overzealous state prosecutor named John Chisolm who wanted to know the degree of coordination between these groups, acts which were not crimes. Midnight raids, subpoenas issued with gag orders, all for participating in democracy. The Wisconsin Supreme Court finally put an end to the matter last year. Churches are being taken to court by the state of California to pay fines, which could lead to prison should they refuse to pay those fines, for failing to provide for birth control and abortifacient medications, which run counter to their bona fide religious beliefs, in their health insurance plans. Despite the clear contravention to federal law, the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice has opted to take no action. The Left does not like to think of civil fines and the like being equated to criminal prosecution of course – it’s just part of the friendly community encouraging people to do the right thing. But, ultimately, someone with a gun hauls you to prison for refusing to comply. No one on the Left doubts that the religious belief involved here is bona fide or widespread; they simply do not care. Flower shops in Colorado and bakers in Oregon have been required to pay onerous fines – some in excess of one hundred thousand dollars, along with their own expensive attorney’s fees, for their refusal to provide services for gay weddings in violation of their beliefs. The IRS famously used the weapons at its disposal to bring pressure against conservative groups from forming as nonprofits in the two years leading up to the 2012 election. Barack Obama won that election if you’ll recall. It was not technically criminal prosecution, but the penalties for providing false information, even if collected improperly, to the IRS are criminal in nature. The DOJ has not brought charges against any individual involved at the IRS. The Center for Medical Progress recently uncovered gross abuse and felonious conduct, including the sale for profit of aborted fetus parts, at Planned Parenthood, one of the Left’s more revered institutions. Aside from the Media quashing the story under false pretenses, the Harris County, TX (another Democratic stronghold in Texas) prosecutor’s office decided to bring charges, not against PP, but against CMP itself. The message of course is: don’t go after one of our Sacred Cows. President Obama’s Department of Justice has not brought federal charges against Planned Parenthood. Just ask Catherine Englebrecht what happens when you try to form a conservative nonprofit. Her family’s small business had the EPA, OSHA, IRS, and ATF sicced on it only after she formed “True The Vote,” a conservative activist organization. These cases represent more than mere statistical error instances of gross injustice. Rather, taken as a whole, they indicate a trend of using the justice system, or threat thereof, to crush political opponents when the Left fails to succeed in either the marketplace of ideas or the political arena. This is, of course, the sum of all fears for Conservatives and why we hold the views of limited government we do. Using the criminal justice system, notoriously loaded in favor of the prosecution as it is, to silence and intimidate political dissent is, de facto, the end of our Republic. That is not hyperbole. We can counter these abuses by introducing Civil Rights legislation nationally – providing further recourse under 42 U.S. Code § 1983 and stripping prosecutors of judicially-crafted immunity who engage in this sort of flagrant misconduct, perhaps allowing for personal liability and criminal sanctions in such cases. But that this step would even be necessary is a sign that something is rotten in the United States. No, what is more worrisome and saddening is that our fellow citizens are seeking to do this, or sanctioning the activities, in the first place. The prosecutors and government officials are merely playing to the crowd in hopes of furthering their careers while the silence from the Left on these injustices is deafening. (The only search result on Vox for the John Doe prosecutions is a defense of the prosecution, naturally.) The matters may be reported in a traditional “Republicans/Democrats Say” format but even that is a tell for affirming the underlying prosecutorial activity by refusing to condemn it. Where are the public outcries that surely would take place were the positions reversed? Where are the hand-wringing editorials like this one about the future of a democracy in which disagreement can mean facing indictment and/or heavy civil penalties? We still hear about Hollywood blacklists and witch hunts during the McCarthy era, but it’s crickets for a over a decade on more recent abuses. I suppose it’s not a problem if the right people are doing it to the wrong people? The Left should make all bipartisan efforts to end these practices before the situation devolves. Or else the only remedy the Right will have will left will be to respond in kind. (1) Berkowitz, Peter. “The False Evidence Against Scooter Libby.” Wall Street Journal. April 6, 2015
First things first: I hate guns. The reasons are long, personal and unimportant in this venue, but I absolutely hate guns. I don’t want to see them, I don’t want to shoot them, I don’t want to be around them, and I won’t live in a home with one. If it were solely up to me, no one would have them. On this, I am unquestionably out of line with my fellow Misfits (except maybe for @LunaticRex’s lovely wife!)
You know who didn’t hate guns, though? The people who wrote and then adopted the Bill of Rights. They didn’t hate guns at all, and in fact viewed them as an important force for liberty against the natural powers of government. They had very good reason for this: tyrants have a propensity to disarm their people as a first step of exerting control over those people. Historically, this went back to the English Bill of Rights in 1689, which resulted largely from the attempts of Catholic King James II (not LeBron) to disarm the Protestant majority. Since the 1700’s, the pattern has been repeated, and most every great despot has either disarmed his people or aggressively worked to keep them disarmed. All of which is a very brief way of noting that the Second Amendment wasn’t created without forethought, and there is no reason to believe that the concept is not still relevant. This enumerated right, however, has come under increasing scrutiny in the United States, criticized by gun control advocates who point to our current rates of gun violence as an argument to curb the right. {Never mind that this increased panic and popular attention is wholly removed from actual data that measures deaths, injuries and other forms of violence related to guns…} Those gun control advocates have proposed a whole bunch of reforms including expanded background checks, a reintroduction of the assault weapons ban, liability for gun makers, “smart guns” and, recently, #NoFlyNoBuy, an attempt to use the Federal No Fly list as a means of blocking suspected terrorists from legally purchasing firearms. Nearly every proposal fits one identical profile: A. Waste. Of. Fucking. Time. Background checks? You already need to pass a background check to buy a gun from a gun dealer. You don’t need to pass a check to buy one from a private citizen, or to accept one as a gift from a friend or family member. It is nearly impossible to conceive of a reasonable way to regulate the private sales of private citizens in the secondary market. “Smart guns”? They don’t work, and they can never be counted on to function properly in the few moments when a gun is needed as a matter of life or death. Gun maker liability? An unimaginable can of worms for makers of consumer and industrial products that would kill the domestic manufacture of pharmaceuticals, cars, heavy equipment, alcohol and numerous other things. Not one of these does anything about the 400 million (give or take) guns in circulation in America. I’m going to take special issue with the last two, which just demonstrate how unserious the left really is about reducing gun crimes. First, the assault weapons ban, which has at least three major issues. First, it addresses (barely) an ill-defined class of weapons without meaningful distinctions. Second, we already banned “assault weapons” for ten years, with no statistically observable impact on gun violence. And finally, most aggravatingly, it addresses a largely insignificant source of gun violence. Banning assault weapons to curb gun violence is like banning Samurai swords to curb stabbings…sure, they are big and scary and they sure seem dangerous, but the actual data says that they are rarely used to kill or injure people. American gun violence is about handguns. Period. Semi-automatic rifles get headlines, and they are capable of killing more people in small time periods, but the verifiable, demonstrable and undeniable truth is that these injuries are a fucking rounding error in the measurement of gun violence. If you are serious about curbing the rate of gun violence in America, the only meaningful topic you should be attacking right now is the vast number of handguns owned across America right now. If you are hung up on AR-15’s, you’ve completely lost the plot. You know what else the Founding Fathers didn’t hate? Due process, which seems to be pretty inconvenient to gun control advocates these days. Advocates are, this week, loudly beating the drums for using the FBI’s terrorist watch list as justification for revoking someone’s right to buy a gun. Let’s think about what they are suggesting that we give up because they find the Second Amendment inconvenient at the moment. They would give the FBI, which has a long and sordid history of being racist, corrupt, paranoid and ineffectual and of targeting radicals, protesters, dissidents and critics of the government, to arbitrarily strip US citizens of their enumerated Constitutional rights. They would let the FBI do this without notice, without judicial review, without providing for the right of the accused to defend himself and in fact without the accused ever knowing. Oh, and just for good measure, once you’re on this list, you’re never getting off of it. Never. Further, the same people on the left who are now calling for this expanded use of the watch list were, not long ago, decrying the same list for its many, many obvious flaws. Apparently, though, since they can now send fundraising emails, they think that it is worth tearing up the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments because they are unhappy with the Second. I wonder if they would feel the same when President Trump announces that all journalists will now need a license issued by his FCC before they can practice journalism..? The Bill of Rights matters. It matters a lot, and in many ways it matters more than the Constitution proper. Coming up with workarounds to erode the rights laid out in the Bill of Rights is the worst slippery slope I can possibly imagine. We have already seen the government creep further and further into the protections created by the Fourth Amendment, and it has fundamentally changed (for the worse) our relationship with the government. The Second Amendment matters because it was a very important and very intentional inclusion in the Bill of Rights. Ignoring the protections offered by that amendment weaken the entire Bill of Rights in a way that is far more dangerous than an AR-15 could ever be. So, here’s the deal. You want to cut down on gun violence? You have to take away people’s guns, and you have to take away the fundamental right to own them. Anything else is a counter-productive exercise in making yourself feel better. That is your equation. Do you think that meaningfully reducing gun violence is worth amending the Bill of Rights and revoking the right to bear arms? If you think the answer is yes, and you’d like to have a reasoned discussion around a campaign to amend the Constitution, then have at it. The rules to do so are written down right there in Article V. If you don’t have the political will or the necessary support, or you’re not willing to have that fight, then just admit that you’re not really serious about reducing gun violence and move on to something else. Stop wasting your time and mine. |
MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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