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Say it isn’t so. Please. According to the New Orleans-based examiner.com, the National Rifle Association has endorsed the re-election campaign of U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Excuse me; I have to run to the restroom for a little Technicolor® yawn. Seriously, has the NRA taken leave of their ever-lovin’ minds? Apparently. And as one of their newest Life Members, I am seriously ticked off about this. Here’s the 411 on this surreal moment, straight out of a Rod Serling nightmare . . .

The NRA is a one-trick pony – a single-issue organization that is apparently somewhat myopic about . . . um . . .anything else. As the article rightly points out, gun rights are important. But if we lose everything else, what does it matter?

Getting rid of Reid is a priority for the Tea Partiers – as well it should be. Reid has been more than willing to carry water for Team Obama. He’s made it possible for the Senate to pass more progressive legislation in a shorter period of time than at any point in history.

So if our economy crumbles under a carbon tax/cap and trade scheme, the burden of confiscatory taxes, non-existant border security, and a rising tide of illegal aliens, what does the NRA care? As long as Reid is friendly to the NRA’s single issue, they’re good to go.

Now I’m not a lawyer (nor do I play one on TV), but it strikes me as incredibly stupid to look at gun laws and not consider the overall picture. Reid and his cronies are busy shafting capitalism, and turning America in the next big Socialist state. If the country throws incumbents like Reid out, the march to Socialism can be slowed, stopped, and perchance, reversed. With Reid & Co. large and in charge, there’s not a chance we’ll avoid losing rights we hold dear. And like Pastor Martin Niemöller‘s famous WWII statement, I think if that happens, the NRA epitaph will read something like this:

“THEY CAME FIRST for our Banks,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Bank.

THEN THEY CAME for the Car Manufacturers,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Car Manufacturer.

THEN THEY CAME for the Doctors and Insurance Companies,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Physician, Pharmacy company or Insurance Agent.

THEN THEY CAME for my gun rights
and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

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6 COMMENTS

  2. Politics is not a game for the feint of heart, or the strong of character. Whatever else you can say about The National Rifle Association, the org plays politics with the best of them. Remembering (as they must) that the best pols are still some of the worst people you'll ever meet.

    Rest assured that the NRA's political operatives weighed up this one VERY carefully. As we reported previously, Reid has been very, very good to the firearms industry; including a massive federal subsidy to his home state's shooting facilities.

    If the NRA played politics on a macro level, they would lose the credibility they earned on the micro level. All politics are local. Do the math. The NRA did.

    Either that or this is cronyism, pure and simple. Payback for favors done or a promise of favors to come.

  3. I find that I can't generate much sympathy for investment banks, car manufacturers or insurance companies. In the case of cars, they were warned – just read TTAC sometime – but refused to listen. But if you said, they came for my job, then my house, then my gun – that might reflect what I'm seeing.

    In today's NY Times Opinionator, JM Bernstein gets, I think, halfway to what bugs the Tea Party:

    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/t…

    This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable. And just as in love, the one-sided reminder of dependence is experienced as an injury. All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved. However, in political life, unlike love, there are no second marriages; we have only the one partner, and although we can rework our relationship, nothing can remove the actuality of dependence. That is permanent.

    In my view the Tea Party is made up of folk that have enjoyed the lion's share of government largesse, like DOD contracts and Block Development Grants, for so long that they expected they and their children to live comfortably forever. But their prosperity was far more linked to the working class jobs they gladly jettisoned to Asia than they realized.

    There are 263 comments, some better than the article:

    In our country we have similar middle-aged mentalities cowering in fearful little caves of unreality but we don't accord them the same sort of regard as these American Tea Partiers seem to receive.

    Why are they so beset by the press on every side?

    Hey yes, I know that FOX and the right wing echo chamber has been pumping this thing up but that has never accounted for much in the real world. It certainly can’t account for the incredible fascination that this tiny speck of a movement has garnered.

    Look at the recent elections in your country – as far as I can see it virtually every incumbent who ran for office was re-elected excepting those who were sleeping about or otherwise disgraced – and yet the narrative that is being presented on every hand is all about a huge reactionary wave of protest!!!

    The only reactionary wave of protest that I see in America is big capital fighting the American citizen – with big capital winning, hands down.

  4. Actually, I give the NRA props for consistency. The NRA is not a blanket conservative political group. They will support any candidate who supports their stated positions. They have opposed anti gun Republicans and have supported pro gun Democrats, and I think that's to their credit.

    As I've said before, the NRA owes its status as a lobbying levithan to the fact that it's perceived as a centrist organization dedicated to a single cause, that of supporting and promoting gun rights, training and ownership.

    If the NRA started applying political litmus tests on any issues other than guns, they'd rightfully lose much of their clout, as they'd be seen as just another conservative or right-wing political lobby.

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