Category Archives: Doublespeak

Hillary Clinton: Second Amendment Defender?

Constitution, Doublespeak, Dumbasses and Authoritarians, Election '08, History, Individual Rights, Keep and Bear Arms, Politics, The Bill Of Rights

The Hillary Clinton campaign has sent out mailers criticizing Barack Obama for trying to have it both ways on the Second Amendment. The mailer reads as follows:

These are all valid criticisms of Barack Obama; I have made some of these very criticisms myself (here, and here). But the source of these criticisms (Hillary Clinton) seems very strange to me. Barack Obama could very easily ask the same question: What does Hillary Clinton really believe?

Correct me if I am wrong, but didn’t Hillary Clinton’s husband Bill Clinton sign the Brady Bill into law? Maybe this is another example of her disagreeing with the policies of her husband’s administration, such as with NAFTA (if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you).

Apparently, I’m not the only one who is skeptical of Hillary Clinton’s sudden bid to become the NRA’s next president (she might as well, she doesn’t have any realistic chance of winning the Democrat nomination for president). Ben Smith writes:

The piece [the mailer as shown above] is particularly striking coming from Clinton, who has been seen for most of her career as a firm advocate of gun control, but more recently has emerged — without dramatically shifting her stance on specific issues — as a defender of the Second Amendment who fondly recalled being taught to shoot by her grandfather in Scranton.

Hillary Clinton: Second Amendment Defender? How stupid does she really think we are?

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/

President Bush Is A Liar And A Coward

Doublespeak, Dumbasses and Authoritarians, Foreign Affairs, Military, Non-Intervention, War on Terror

On Thursday, President Bush decided to offer some encouragement to the troops in the war Afghanistan (a war he has often neglected in favor of his disastrous vanity project in Iraq) by offering this bon mot on his personal feelings about the mission and the service rendered by our armed forces:

I must say, I’m a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks.

Often this is the sort of wistful atta-boy mentality one will find stated in any number of mediums…old war movies,  recruiting posters, articles by crappy journalists, pro-war speeches by notable personalities, etc.  I’ve heard it myself a few times, usually whenever somebody I’ve recently met who’s never served in the military finds out that I’m a veteran and they’re trying to stretch a polite compliment into personal bonding.  Usually it’s not so much offensive as it is thoughtless, but it never ceases to grate on me nonetheless…partly because it smacks of sucking up (a character trait I can’t abide); partly because if you ask the follow-up question of why they didn’t follow through on their desire to serve their response is either an awkward silence or a string of transparent rationalizations that boil down to “I wasn’t actually considering it.” (exposing them as rather crappy and dishonest suck-ups); but mainly because I tend to have little patience with or respect for people who wholeheartedly rah-rah the idea of jumping quickly into any war so long as people other than themselves are the ones getting shot at. 

While part of that attitude is obviously due to my belief in the benefits of individual choice and my libertarian distrusts of the idealism of politicians and the wisdom of government planning, part of that dislike is very much a factor of realizing, from a personal perspective, just how destructive and long-lasting the damage of wars are…particularly wars that have little or no coherent purpose any more.  When Bush talks about the “fantastic experience on the frontlines” I don’t envision WWII Rangers scaling the cliffs of Normandy on D-Day or John Wayne gunning down swarms of Japanese troops on Iwo Jima, I think about what happens to those men and women Bush “envies” after the “glory” of combat is a distant memory to the uninvolved bystanders.  I think about one of my former soldiers whose marriage was falling apart after he re-deployed because his post-traumatic stress disorder made it almost impossible for him to relate to his wife and his nightmares of having to shoot a 12-year old kid in the face in Afghanistan wouldn’t let him sleep more than an hour or two a night, but who was scared of seeking psychiatric help because his previous unit punished people for doing so.  I think about my best friend Tom who’s racked with guilt because he, while trying to do a counter-fire mission in reaction to an insurgent attack, ended up dropping artillery rounds on an Iraqi family thanks to receiving a bad set of coordinates and a freakish wind change.  I think about the time that an officer who didn’t know anything about intel, and wasn’t in the mood to hear one of her NCOs point out that she was factually mistaken, cherry-picked one of my reports to authorize an A-10 strike that killed nine little kids and zero insurgents because she thought taking decisive action would look good on her rating.  And I look at the fact that, almost seven years down the road, we’ve still yet to accomplish the one primary goal we went to Afghanistan to accomplish, or to put forth any realistic strategy for “victory” Iraq (besides stalling tactics) and I wonder, “What was the point?”

I also think about the injured or disabled vets who come back from this war who will end up needing the assistance of the often substandard military medical system, sometimes for the rest of their lives.  Or the vets who will go undiagnosed for psychiatric problems and end up on the streets once they’re out of the service and aren’t the government’s “problem” anymore.  Or my cousin Mike, an infantryman in Vietnam, who, 40 years after serving, still struggles with a case of PTSD so severe that he can’t discuss what happened to him back then without having nightmares for a week now and which has made him the proud recipient of a couple of heart attacks.  And I wonder if that’s what the current generation has to look forward to in 40 years and whether it will all have been worth it for what we’ll have actually accomplished.  Somehow, I doubt it.

War is hell, and not just for the people who “deserve” it.  People like Bush, who has some rather odd impressions of combat and actually ducked the chance to serve in his generation’s “romantic” war (which would make his comment slightly less than honest) never seem to figure that out.  But then, why should they?  They’re rarely the ones with something to lose.  The same principle that Milton Friedman once applied to other peoples’ money also applies to other peoples’ lives…nobody will spend what’s yours as carefully as you do.  And nobody is as willing to avoid an unnecessary war as much as someone who understands what it actually costs.  Sadly, that’s wisdom rarely found among the ranks of the chickenhawks.

UCrawford
I Can’t Think Of A Catchy Title

I suppose the best way to describe myself would be to say that I have a problem with authority. I’ve always disliked when people told me what to do, even as a young child, and I’ve always preferred to find my own path through life and make my own decisions, even if it occasionally went against the conventional wisdom and sometimes worked to my short-term disadvantage. My dad said I inherited it from him, but that I’ve taken it to a whole new level. When I was young I wanted to be a journalist, until I got to college and realized that journalism was less about the search for objective truth than it was about writing the stories that best suited your employer’s interests, whether they were true or not (which didn’t sit well with me at all). So I drifted aimlessly through a couple of years of college as an indifferent (often drunk) student, unsure of what to do with myself until one of my fraternity brothers gave me a copy of “The Fountainhead” and I got hooked on the ideas that success and a refusal to conform to societal standards were not mutally exclusive, and that the greatest evil in the world was society and government’s failure to recognize or accept individuality and individual freedom as a strength, not a weakness. So I threw myself into studying politics and history, worked in a few political campaigns after college, had some success, and thought about doing a career in politics until I realized that most of the people I knew who had never had a career outside of politics had no comprehension of how the real world actually worked and tended to make a lot of bad, self-absorbed decisions that rarely helped the people they claimed to be representing.

That didn’t sit well with me either, so I decided to put any thoughts of going into politics on hold until I’d actually had a life and possibly a real career, and I spent the next couple of years drifting between a series of random yet educational jobs (debt collector, deliveryman, computer salesman, repo man, dairy worker) that taught me the value of hard work, personal responsibility and the financial benefits of dining at Taco John’s on Tuesday nights (2 tacos for a buck) when money got tight.

After awhile, however, the desire to see the world (and the need for a more consistent and slightly larger paycheck) convinced me to join the Army, where I spent ten years traveling around the world on the government dime working as an intelligence analyst. I generally enjoyed my time in the military, despite the aforementioned problem with authority (which wasn’t as much of an issue in the military as many people might think it would be), and I got to see that the decisions our political leaders make were sometimes frivolous, often ill-informed, and always had unforeseen repercussions down the road…especially on the soldiers tasked with implementing those decisions. I was fortunate enough to spend most of my 10 years in the military doing jobs I enjoyed, traveling to countries that I always wanted to see (Scotland is the greatest place in the world to hang out, Afghanistan is very underrated) and working with people I liked and respected, until I finally decided that at 35 it was time to move into a job where I didn’t have the threat of relocation lying over my head every two or three years, where I didn’t have to worry about my friends being blown up, and where I didn’t have to work in any capacity for George W. Bush.

I work now for a financial company in Kansas where I’m responsible for overseeing, pricing and maintaining farms, commercial and residential properties, mineral assets, insurance policies, annuities, etc. In my spare time I like to read books on economics, history, and politics (I’m preparing to tackle Murray Rothbard’s “Man, Economy & State” and Von Mises’ “Human Action”…should take me about a year at the rate I’m currently finishing books), watch movies, and destroy posers on “Halo 3” (where I’m signed in under “UCrawford” for anyone interested in taking a shot at me some time). I used to play rugby until age, inconsistent conditioning, and a string of gradually worsening injuries finally convinced me to quit. I’m a rabid fan of the Kansas Jayhawks in general and their basketball and football programs in particular and I’m also a devoted fan of the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals. I’m also fond of going online and debating/picking fights with people on the merits of the philosophy of individual freedom…sometimes to the point of being an asshole (but hopefully a reasonably well-informed asshole). I’ve been a big fan of The Liberty Papers ever since finding it online, I respect the body of work they’ve put out, and I’m honored that Brad Warbiany invited me to join his jolly band of freedom fighters. So cheers, Brad, and to everyone else I look forward to reaching consensus or locking horns with you in the near future.

http://dangerouslyidealistic.blogspot.com/

More on Obama’s Doublespeak

Constitution, District of Columbia v. Heller, Doublespeak, Economics, Election '08, Federalism, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Keep and Bear Arms, Political Correctness, Politics, Privacy, Property Rights, The Bill Of Rights, The Nanny State, The Surveillance State, The Welfare State, Theory and Ideas

Last week I wrote a post about how Barack Obama was trying to have it both ways on the Second Amendment. Ken Blackwell at Townhall.com, however, believes that Obama’s doublespeak about the Second Amendment (among some of Obama’s other statements) reveals a disturbing pattern in his attitudes about individual rights and a host of other issues:

Yet while Mr. Obama says he supports your Second Amendment rights, he also says he supports that gun ban. He went on to say that local governments should be able to enact any gun control laws they consider necessary to end gun violence, and that any such measures are constitutional.
What kind of gun rights does he supposedly support? What kind of “right” do you have, when the government can completely rob you of 100% of the exercise of that right, anytime they decide they have a good reason?

That’s like saying you have the right to worship as you choose, but the government has the power to ban attending church. Or that you have the right to free speech, but that government has the power to stop you from speaking about any subject it wants. Or that you have the right against unreasonable searches and seizures, but that anything the government wants to search at your house is automatically reasonable.

A right that the government can completely take away at any time is no right at all.

So to say that the Second Amendment means you can own guns, but that the city where you live can ban all gun ownership, then you have no Second Amendment rights at all.

I truly hope that someone will have an opportunity to ask Obama if he really believes that local governments can toss aside the Constitution whenever convenient (though I have a hard time believing that Obama would restrict federal agents to the Constitution while giving local law enforcement carte blanche to violate basic civil liberties of citizens). As if doublespeak on the Constitution wasn’t enough, we can expect doublespeak on many other issues which concern such issues as the economy, terrorism, and growing government.

The article continues:

This is what Americans could expect from a President Obama. He’ll wax eloquent about your rights, but then say government can take away whatever part of them—or all of them—that it wants.

It’s the disturbing pattern that’s starting to emerge of Mr. Obama announcing a principle or a goal, then endorsing policies that are the exact opposite of what would promote that principle or goal. It’s political-doublespeak. It’s Orwellian. In fact, it’s Clintonian.

Look for this pattern across the board. This is how he’ll empower private markets, by increasing government control. He’ll preserve our private-market healthcare system, by having government take it over. He’ll lower taxes, by raising them. He’ll cut government, by increasing government spending. He’ll create jobs, by raising taxes and fees on business […]

I’m sure there will be even more Obama doublespeak as the campaign wears on. I wouldn’t be too surprised if he proposed a new cabinet level position such as The Ministry Department of Truth.

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/

Obama Tries to Have it Both Ways on the Second Amendment

Constitution, District of Columbia v. Heller, Doublespeak, Election '08, General, Government Regulation, Individual Rights, Keep and Bear Arms, Politics, Privacy, Property Rights, The Bill Of Rights

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Barack Obama said Friday that the country must do “whatever it takes” to eradicate gun violence following a campus shooting in his home state, but he believes in an individual’s right to bear arms.

Obama said he spoke to Northern Illinois University’s president Friday morning by phone and offered whatever help his Senate office could provide in the investigation and improving campus security. The Democratic presidential candidate spoke about the Illinois shooting to reporters while campaigning in neighboring Wisconsin.

The senator, a former constitutional law instructor, said some scholars argue the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees gun ownerships only to militias, but he believes it grants individual gun rights.

When I ran across the headline’s article “Obama supports individual gun rights” in The Rocky Mountain News, I knew I had to read further. So far, so good…so what:

“I think there is an individual right to bear arms, but it’s subject to commonsense regulation” like background checks, [Obama] said during a news conference.”

He said he would support federal legislation based on a California law that would facilitate immediate tracing of bullets used in a crime. He said even though the California law was passed over the strong objection of the National Rifle Association, he thinks it’s the type of law that gun owners and crime victims can get behind.

To be honest, I don’t know anything about this particular policy [if anyone can give me a Cliff’s Notes version, please fill me in]. Being able to trace bullets used in a crime back to a particular firearm…I thought this was already an accepted, common practice? I must be missing something; clearly if the NRA is opposed to this policy maybe we should look at it.

So Obama believes that the right to bear arms is an individual right (more than we can say about most Democrats) but also believes in “common sense regulation.” Surely, Obama would not consider the D.C. gun ban to be common sense…or would he?

Although Obama supports gun control, while campaigning in gun-friendly Idaho earlier this month, he said he does not intend to take away people’s guns.

At his news conference, he voiced support for the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, which is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court next month.

“The notion that somehow local jurisdictions can’t initiate gun safety laws to deal with gang bangers and random shootings on the street isn’t born [sic] out by our Constitution,” Obama said.

Now I’m really confused! The only thing I can figure is that Obama’s views on gun rights are based on what he thinks his supporters want to hear at any given moment (in other words, he’s being a politician). Obama’s comments also reveal a fundamental misunderstanding about the Constitution on his part. The right to bear arms, or any of the other rights found in the Constitution for that matter, are not “born out” of the Constitution; the Constitution merely recognizes individual rights which already exist.

Given these seemingly contradictory statements, one wonders what policies an Obama administration would support and what sort of judicial appointments Obama would make with regard to the 2nd Amendment.

***Correction***

Brad pointed out that the journalist likely misinterpreted Obama’s statement:

The notion that somehow local jurisdictions can’t initiate gun safety laws to deal with gang bangers and random shootings on the street isn’t born [sic] out by our Constitution.

What Obama likely meant was “borne out by our Constitution” meaning “supported by our Constitution” rather than “born of our Constitution.” While Brad and I both disagree with Obama on this point even as he likely intended it, I think it’s important that we try to represent the senator’s remarks accurately.

Elsewhere in the article there was this:

The senator, a former constitutional law instructor, said some scholars argue the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees gun ownerships only to militias, but he believes it grants individual gun rights.

Here again, it’s the journalist’s interpretation (Nedra Pickler in this case) of what she thought Obama said. Hopefully, Obama knows better since he is a former constitutional law instructor (though I’m sure that there are many constitutional law instructors who actually do believe the Constitution grants rights rather than recognizes their existence). The only way to determine if the journalist correctly interpreted Obama’s speech would be to find a transcript of the speech. So far, I have been unable to find one but when I do I will link the transcript to this post so readers can decide for themselves whether Pickler’s interpretation of Obama’s speech is correct or not.

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/

Al-Qaeda’s “Number Three Man” Killed…Again

Doublespeak, Foreign Affairs, General, Military, War on Terror

I think this brings us up to seven or eight “number threes” killed in the al-Qaeda hierachy since 2001.  Must be a hell of a corporate flow chart they have.  I wonder what country the next guy will be situated in when our government decides to “promote” him.  Somehow I think it will end up being whatever country the president’s taking the most criticism on that particular day.

 Update:  According to the updated version of CNN’s story on the death of al-Qaeda “number three” Abu Laith al-Libi:

In October, the U.S. military’s anti-terror Combined Joint Task Force-82 announced rewards ranging from $20,000 to $200,000 for al-Libi and 11 other mid-level Taliban and al Qaeda leaders.  The military distributed posters and billboards with pictures and names of the insurgents around eastern Afghanistan.  Al-Libi and the others were described at the time by CJTF-82 spokesman Maj. Chris Belcher as “mid-level bad guys.” (emphasis mine)

Translation:  “Mid-level” is not generally a classification for a high-value target, which means there’s pretty much no difference between al-Qaeda’s recently deceased “number three man” and a couple dozen other schmucks running around out there on the AF/PAK border except that the military and the press happened to have a photo and a name for this guy.

UCrawford
I Can’t Think Of A Catchy Title

I suppose the best way to describe myself would be to say that I have a problem with authority. I’ve always disliked when people told me what to do, even as a young child, and I’ve always preferred to find my own path through life and make my own decisions, even if it occasionally went against the conventional wisdom and sometimes worked to my short-term disadvantage. My dad said I inherited it from him, but that I’ve taken it to a whole new level. When I was young I wanted to be a journalist, until I got to college and realized that journalism was less about the search for objective truth than it was about writing the stories that best suited your employer’s interests, whether they were true or not (which didn’t sit well with me at all). So I drifted aimlessly through a couple of years of college as an indifferent (often drunk) student, unsure of what to do with myself until one of my fraternity brothers gave me a copy of “The Fountainhead” and I got hooked on the ideas that success and a refusal to conform to societal standards were not mutally exclusive, and that the greatest evil in the world was society and government’s failure to recognize or accept individuality and individual freedom as a strength, not a weakness. So I threw myself into studying politics and history, worked in a few political campaigns after college, had some success, and thought about doing a career in politics until I realized that most of the people I knew who had never had a career outside of politics had no comprehension of how the real world actually worked and tended to make a lot of bad, self-absorbed decisions that rarely helped the people they claimed to be representing.

That didn’t sit well with me either, so I decided to put any thoughts of going into politics on hold until I’d actually had a life and possibly a real career, and I spent the next couple of years drifting between a series of random yet educational jobs (debt collector, deliveryman, computer salesman, repo man, dairy worker) that taught me the value of hard work, personal responsibility and the financial benefits of dining at Taco John’s on Tuesday nights (2 tacos for a buck) when money got tight.

After awhile, however, the desire to see the world (and the need for a more consistent and slightly larger paycheck) convinced me to join the Army, where I spent ten years traveling around the world on the government dime working as an intelligence analyst. I generally enjoyed my time in the military, despite the aforementioned problem with authority (which wasn’t as much of an issue in the military as many people might think it would be), and I got to see that the decisions our political leaders make were sometimes frivolous, often ill-informed, and always had unforeseen repercussions down the road…especially on the soldiers tasked with implementing those decisions. I was fortunate enough to spend most of my 10 years in the military doing jobs I enjoyed, traveling to countries that I always wanted to see (Scotland is the greatest place in the world to hang out, Afghanistan is very underrated) and working with people I liked and respected, until I finally decided that at 35 it was time to move into a job where I didn’t have the threat of relocation lying over my head every two or three years, where I didn’t have to worry about my friends being blown up, and where I didn’t have to work in any capacity for George W. Bush.

I work now for a financial company in Kansas where I’m responsible for overseeing, pricing and maintaining farms, commercial and residential properties, mineral assets, insurance policies, annuities, etc. In my spare time I like to read books on economics, history, and politics (I’m preparing to tackle Murray Rothbard’s “Man, Economy & State” and Von Mises’ “Human Action”…should take me about a year at the rate I’m currently finishing books), watch movies, and destroy posers on “Halo 3” (where I’m signed in under “UCrawford” for anyone interested in taking a shot at me some time). I used to play rugby until age, inconsistent conditioning, and a string of gradually worsening injuries finally convinced me to quit. I’m a rabid fan of the Kansas Jayhawks in general and their basketball and football programs in particular and I’m also a devoted fan of the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals. I’m also fond of going online and debating/picking fights with people on the merits of the philosophy of individual freedom…sometimes to the point of being an asshole (but hopefully a reasonably well-informed asshole). I’ve been a big fan of The Liberty Papers ever since finding it online, I respect the body of work they’ve put out, and I’m honored that Brad Warbiany invited me to join his jolly band of freedom fighters. So cheers, Brad, and to everyone else I look forward to reaching consensus or locking horns with you in the near future.

http://dangerouslyidealistic.blogspot.com/
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