Cowboy Confessional

The most poorly key secret in American gun control debates is that those favoring gun control have given up denouncing the Second Amendment (the right to keep and bear arms) as a states right. Only Sarah Brady, the aging figurehead of that movement, seems to have missed the memo.

So let us look to constitutional scholars across a broad spectrum in an effort to get poor old Sarah to shut the hell up. I bring as evidence Eugene Volokh, Lawrence Tribe, and Akhil Amar.

Eugene (who I knew back when we were both computer programmers) is considered to be politically right-of-center, as evidence by his collection of compadres at the Volokh Conspiracy. Eugene has been well published on the Second Amendment, and testified before congress on the basis of the right. But one could and would expect someone such as Eugene to defend the right to defend. After all he and his family escaped the former Soviet Union, a place where armed resistance against government power is always fatal.

Then there is Lawrence Tribe, considered to be the con-law darling of the left, which is to be expect of anyone holding a chair at Harvard or residing in the state of Massachusetts. Tribe has been quotes saying such radical things as “The people’s ‘right’ to be armed cannot be trumped by the [Second] Amendment’s preamble.” Indeed he appears to have caught a vest full of flack from fellow liberals when he revised his tome “American Constitutional Law” to expound that the Second Amendment was an individual right .. just like the first, and third, and forth, and fifth …

Finally there is Akhil Amar, who in con law circles is considered an academic’s academic, and a hell of a gentleman to boot. I had the pleasure of meeting Amar at a local skull session and asked discreetly if he felt the Second Amendment protected the right of individuals to keep guns, or the power of the states to arm militias. He said “Yes.”

So we have constitutional scholars from the right, the left, and straight up the middle in perfect agreement that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. Indeed the scope of this belief is so complete and sustained that it is referred to as the “standard model” on Second Amendment theory.

Why then does this conclusion escape the gun control lobby? Why do they pretend that any such thing as “reasonable regulation” can be wedged into the conversation? Yes, yes, I know their collective hypocritical past, so I am not surprised. That not withstanding, the conversation needs to be brought to a close and for the Sarah Brady’s, Josh Sugarman’s, and Rebecca Peter’s of the planet to cease and desist, for the constitution trumps their will power.

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Baghdad is a microcosm of Iraq, the effects of a premature withdrawal, and the key argument against time-table evacuation planning.

The long stated goal of this administration was for Iraq to be a self-sustaining democracy. A key element to such a society is the ability to defend itself from threats internal and external. The U.S. started this process of transformation earlier this year by allowing the new Iraqi government — an organization built from dust and existing for less time than a campaign promise — to take security control of Baghdad.

The bloodshed accelerated after Iraq took ownership of their own capital. Ignoring political posturing, we can safely say that the new government and their security forces have not existed long enough to do their jobs effectively. The U.S. was premature in executing the hand-over. Odds are we will have to take back full or partial control of Baghdad until such time as the Iraqi national government is fully prepared to do so … again.

Imagine then what would happen to the whole of Iraq if, based on some artificial time table, the U.S. withdrew. An unyielding chronological deadline would force the Iraqi government to take control of national security before they were competent to do so. The new order currently at play in Baghdad would become the fate of the entire nation, leading to massive death, and at best a new theocratic oligarchy.

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I just finished reading P.J. O’Rourke’s “Eat The Rich”, which I should have read eight years ago when it was first published (I’ve been busy). A wondrous tome rich in O’Rourke-isms and conceived through world travel and an estimated about two dozen cases of scotch (he must be on the wagon).

O’Rourke’s final chapter could be read alone, showing in summary pages the true grandeur of capitalism as well as the vivid villainy collectivism. Aside from Thomas Jefferson, O’Rourke makes a few statements that cement the concepts of money, government, and fairness. On the subject of why an authoritarian open market (China) is a Bad Thing™:

A businessman finds that one of his stockholders has tanks, artillery, and jet fighter planes. This violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.

China may well be the worst of our geopolitical nightmares — a wealthy, militant, maniacal oligarchy. The top tier of that regime has all the money (since business license and power is bestowed by the government) and all the guns. And they seem to be creating more of each all the time.

More importantly, O’Rourke bludgeons the trite socialist argument for economic “fairness”:

The market is “heartless.” So are clocks and yardsticks. Saying the economic problems are the result of the free market’s failure is like gaining twenty pounds and calling the bathroom scale a bum.

Throughout the book, O’Rourke identifies what Thomas Jefferson had penned so long ago, and which we as a species continually forget and forsake.

… a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government

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Songs are short stories set to music. Aside from the rubbish once known as disco, most songs have a very compact story.

• * The average novel starts at 80,000 words
• * A novella is around 30,000
• * Short fiction starts at 1,000
• * Most three stanza, one chorus songs … 200

A songwriter must struggle with almost every word to paint the most vivid picture possible, in the shortest space available. Without care, lyrics and the story being sung are lifeless. And people don’t buy lifeless songs (well, if you ignore anything recorded recently by Karen Carpenter).

Let me illustrate with a single line I once stole from Tom Waits. The line was describing someone drinking. If the line had been written:

He’s drinking whiskey every night

You would have a mental picture of a man who doesn’t have much of a life, but is otherwise harmless and unharmed. Had it been written:

He’s sippin’ whiskey every night

You envision a fellow, perhaps a southern gent, happily indulging in a five o’clock ritual at the tennis club. Had it been:

He’s slurpin’ whiskey every night

Well, that could be anybody down at the corner sports bar … at ten in the morning.

What Waits wrote painted a very different portrait by selecting one specific word. The original line was:

He’s spillin’ whiskey every night

This one word, that omitted anything resembling drinking except in the past tense (i.e., he’s already bombed beyond quick recovery) sold the stanza. It painted a story of a man who every night gets drunk to the point of losing physical control and emotional responsibility. And all because of one word.

Longer phrases apply as well. When James McMurtry wrote about the Lights of Cheyenne, he described them as broken glass on the road into town. But that phrasing does not bring the song to life as it is not descriptive. McMurtry wrote instead:

Like windshield glass on the shoulder at night

This puts the listener outside of Cheyenne city limits, on a lone highway in the dead of dark.

Now that’s a short story!

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I just watched the highest pile of political equestrian exhaust thus far this millennium, the Texas Governor’s debate.

With the exception of Kinky Friedman, who gave inarticulation a good name, the assembled candidates lofted answer so empty that they defied gravity. Strayhorn was feisty and non-specific in her answers, Perry was busy skirting issues, and Bell was practicing hypnosis and putting the audience asleep.

Most of the fault can be assigned to the media mavens who selected a fast paced, fractured, and anti-intellectual format that included 60 second answers, 30 second rebuttals, and media/candidate interrogations that the CIA is now considering for use at Guantanamo.

At least Kinky referred government bureaucrats as “old farts” live, which likely shook up some of those old farts.

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