The Bell Tower

Tits on a bull

“The NRA is a non-partisan, single-issue organization made up of millions of individual members dedicated to the protection of the Second Amendment. We do not represent the interests of other organizations. That’s their responsibility. Our responsibility is to protect and defend the interests of our members. And that we do without apology.”

If you are a member of the NRA, cancel your membership. The Second Amendment has no value without the larger context of the entire Constitution. If the NRA’s purpose is merely to protect the interests of its members, then they also have no value. Basically, this is a doctor walking by a man suffering from a heart attack in the street and announcing “I’m on lunch break.” The Second Amendment is not a “single issue” and those who pursue it as such are no different than the teacher’s unions or ACORN. They do harm to the Constitution and by extension to the Second Amendment they claim to support.

If you don’t know what H.R. 5175 is, take a look. Not only has the NRA ceased opposing this bill, they’ve taken a bribe from Congress that will exclude them from jurisdiction. So, the government can force other organizations to disclose their donors but the NRA will be exempt. As long as they are, that’s fine with the NRA. They’re more than happy to look the other way while other less organized or represented groups of citizens are abused under the law. Don’t buy their cynical attempt to hide behind the outstanding men and women who serve in our armed forces or law enforcement agencies. That is a red herring attempting to divert your eyes from the fact that they care only about one thing, and it isn’t the Second Amendment. Nobody is asking the NRA to take up the cause of other organizations. However, when you withhold criticism of a bill you’ve clearly described as a “draconian” measure designed to “intimidate speech” because Congress has bribed you to keep your mouth shut, you’re not serving any cause at all.

My message to Chris Cox and the rest of the NRA is this: Take your seven pieces of silver and shove them up your ass. I’ll keep my shotgun anyway.

So let me get this straight.  North Korea torpedoes and sinks a South Korean ship in cold blood - an act of war by almost any conceivable measure.  The world stands idly by.  Other than some vapid grandstanding from Hillary Clinton, the United States has done nothing to counter this naked and reckless act of tyranny against our close ally.

Meanwhile, Turkish “peace activists” refuse Israel’s offer to allow them to dock at an Israelil port, be inspected for arms and let their cargo of peaceful supplies into Gaza.  Instead, they illegally cross an Israeli blockade and then proceed to peacefully beat and stab Israeli commandos who board the flotilla in a legal effort to defend their own border.  These peace loving innocents even throw one commando overboard - perhaps a sort of physical gesture of their peaceful agenda.  The commandos - in fear of their life from these peaceful protesters - dispense with their paintball guns and use real ones.  The world is outraged.

Where is the President?  Where is the Secretary of State?  In less than two years, this administration has managed to completely isolate Israel - without any doubt our most important ally on this planet.  The Obama administration has made some abominable decisions during its two year run:

Barack Obama’s World Appeasement Tour set the tone for his administration’s weak pseudo-philosophy of appeasement and what the President mistakes for empathy.

As actual peace protesters in Iran struggled for freedom, this President stood idly by.  His diplomatic hubris and approval rating were more important than the lives of Iranian revolutionaries fighting for their freedom and their lives.

This President allowed the President of Mexico to come before Congress, criticize an American state and lecture Americans about how we treat our illegal immigrants.  Never mind the horrid treatment immigrants to Mexico face nor is there any thought of the barbaric slaughter going on between rival drug gangs under Felipe Calderon’s administration - except of course to blame guns in America.

Obama’s effort to halt Iranian nuclear proliferation has been a complete and utter fiasco.

Instead of denouncing the anti-Semitic charade taking place on the UN Human Rights Council, Obama took a seat on it.

Remember Darfur?  Neither does the President.

Remember Guantanamo Bay?  See above.

This President has been swindled by the Russians, bullied by the Turks, embarrassed by the Brazilians, insulted by the French, rebuffed in Copenhagen, marginalized in the United Nations…

All of these gaffes over the past 2 years have been ugly.   But this?  Isolating Israel and ignoring the security of the Jewish state will disrupt the balance of power in the Middle East to the detriment of the entire world - most especially the Jewish people.  How many Jews have to die before this planet learns that anti-Semitic hatred is real, virulent and the enemy of peace?  Israel faces enemies who are committed to the “annihilation” of Israel.  They believe the Holocaust during World War II - which saw the systematic slaughter of six million Jews - is fabricated.  Thousands of rockets have been fired into Israeli neighborhoods, which is why the blockade exists in the first place.  What would the United States do if Mexico was repeatedly firing rockets into the suburbs of California?  Cede them Texas?

President Obama’s flaccid moral relativism thus far has been appalling as foreign policy.  His abandonment of Israel is unforgivable.

He’s Furious!
“I would love to just spend a lot of my time venting and yelling at people,” the president said, “but that’s not the job I was hired to do. My job is to solve this problem.”

No it’s not. Your job is to manage public expectations, not react to public opinion. This is the difference between the successful modern presidents (Clinton, Reagan) and the rest. Obviously he can’t control public opinion but he can be honest. People are foolish to expect inhuman things from their president but he’s the bigger fool for allowing those illusions to persist.

Obama’s failure so far isn’t his inability to fix the spill. It’s his inability to convey to the public the limitations of reality. They are the following:

• The President of the United States is a limited executive position that was restricted – by design – from having an omniscient power over the population. Through his administration he can enforce laws and encourage certain behaviors but (fortunately) he is not all powerful. Private companies and citizens retain autonomy over their actions – and maintain responsibility for those actions. Announcing that you take responsibility for everything that happens under the sun is irresponsible.

• Unless he plans on summoning Poseidon to unleash the Kraken, there is no human being who could resolve this problem any faster. The limitations of technology and nature are clearly significant. Even if he were His Majesty the Mighty and Omniscient King of the United States, he would still have to contend with nature and technology. Such are the frailties God has bestowed on the human body.

The disappointment about Obama’s handling of this crisis (and really his entire presidency to date) is his knee jerk reaction to anything and everything. Great leaders find solutions before they point fingers. Obama’s administration has been a study in the opposite – from day one. There’s no doubt BP needs to be held accountable but there is plenty of time for blaming.

At the moment, the good people at BP are tasked with cleaning up the spill. Rather than wagging his finger at them and letting his administration run wild with ignorant threats about boots and regulations, he should be reining his team in and providing any assistance he can. The one hole he can plug is the verbal deluge of ignorance steadily flowing from officials like Lisa Jackson and Ken Salazar.

Second, it would be nice if his administration demonstrated the capacity to understand that a company is made up of many various individual people. A few of them clearly made some bad decisions and ultimately, those problems need to be addressed but that doesn’t mean the whole company is corrupt. BP is not just one big, evil entity bent on destroying earth and humanity. That only happens on Captain Planet – which Democrats appear to have watched entirely too much of as children.

This is not rocket science. The truth is Obama has so far proven to be a horrible leader. He’s the guy on the team who sells out his teammates at the first sign of trouble. He has a far too grandiose view of himself and his position. It’s never his fault, it’s always someone else.  He has the unique ability to say he takes responsibility while simultaneously pointing his finger at everyone else.  He’s basically the Ryan Leaf of US presidents. Surprisingly for a law professor, he seems to have a fairly trite and simplistic view of the world around him. Government good.  BP bad.  Democrats good.   Republicans bad.  There doesn’t appear to be any subtlety to his mind at all.

Above all else, he is missing one important quality. The great Presidents like Washington and Lincoln had something that Barack Obama seems to have absolutely no concept of whatsoever: humility. Without that, any US President is doomed to failure.