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Gun ownership faces rocky future under Obama’s rumored Attorney General nominee
Posted by civil truth on November 23rd, 2008
Among all the drama surrounding Obama’s rumored nomination of Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State and the various speculations around other posts, Barack Obama’s rumored nominee for Attorney General, Eric Holder has largely remained under the MSM radar. Of course, this is no surprise with Obama already being compared with FDR and Abraham Lincoln. I fully expect the MSM to beatify Barack Obama on January 20.
In any case, when the One promised Hope and Change™, by Hope he evidently must have been referring to Arkansas, given the number of people who served in the Clinton administrations being promoted to high positions in the upcoming Obama adminstration.
However, given that the Attorney General set the tone for the legal and prosecutorial direction of the U.S., one would hope that someone promising to Bring American Together™ would select an official free of partisan baggage and a reputation for rooting out corruption.
Instead, we face the prospect of Eric Holder as our new Attorney General, who served as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration and whose records does not inspire confidence for Change, to say the least.
One key action that Mr. Holder undertook in the waning days of the Clinton adminstration has at least gained some MSM attention: his unsavory role in the pardon of billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, most notably elucidated in a recent NYT op ed by George Lardner, who covered the pardon for the Washington Post at the time.
In his piece titled A Pardon to Remember, Mr. Lardner paints a disturbing portrait and lays the case for more careful scrutiny of Mr. Holder’s actions. His concluding paragraph states the following:
Mr. Holder never came close to meeting that standard. He had the last word at Justice on clemency petitions and he saw to it that he had the only word. He brokered one of the most unjustifiable pardons that an American president has ever granted.
However, what has garned even less attention is Mr. Holder’s abominable record on gun control and the Second Amendment, which he evidently considers to be only worthy of target practice.
David Koppel over at the Volokh Conspiracy writes a devastating exposé of Mr. Holder’s record on 2nd Amendment issues. Key points:
At the oral argument before the Fifth Circuit in United States v. Emerson, the Assistant U.S. Attorney [i.e. Holder] told the panel that the Second Amendment was no barrier to gun confiscation, not even of the confiscation of guns from on-duty National Guardsmen. As Deputy Attorney General, Holder was a strong supporter of restrictive gun control. He advocated federal licensing of handgun owners, a three day waiting period on handgun sales, rationing handgun sales to no more than one per month, banning possession of handguns and so-called “assault weapons” (cosmetically incorrect guns) by anyone under age of 21, a gun show restriction bill that would have given the federal government the power to shut down all gun shows, national gun registration, and mandatory prison sentences for trivial offenses
Holder played a key role in the gunpoint, night-time kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez. The pretext for the paramilitary invasion of the six-year-old’s home was that someone in his family might have been licensed to carry a handgun under Florida law. Although a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo showed a federal agent dressed like a soldier and pointing a machine gun at the man who was holding the terrified child, Holder claimed that Gonzalez “was not taken at the point of a gun” and that the federal agents whom Holder had sent to capture Gonzalez had acted “very sensitively.” If Mr. Holder believes that breaking down a door with a battering ram, pointing guns at children (not just Elian), and yelling “Get down, get down, we’ll shoot” is example of acting “very sensitively,” his judgment about the responsible use of firearms is not as acute as would be desirable for a cabinet officer who would be in charge of thousands and thousands of armed federal agents, many of them paramilitary agents with machine guns.
Forewarned is forearmed!
November 24th, 2008 at 12:01 am
too long. nobody cares. you’re melodramatic.
“Hope & Change” are metaphors that Obama, and all professional politicians, use to create ambitious wiggle-room. Like the terms liberal and conservative, there is no concrete definition to “Hope & Change” on purpose. You’ll never see real pundits/economist/policy makers use these terms because they are vacuous and play into the hands of each term’s creator. The fact that CT thinks he’s smart for trying to uses Obama’s catch phrases against him only shows he’s been duped.
November 24th, 2008 at 12:32 am
dj, there you go majoring in the minors again . You take my humorous asides and try to make them the focus of my article. Do you know anything but trolling?
How about tackling my substantive points, which is the record of Eric Holden regarding the Marc Frank pardon and his position on gun rights/2nd Amendment – and how this comports with setting a new tone in this most sensitive cabinet position.
Consider carefully how you reply. As Moe at RedState would write – :click:
November 24th, 2008 at 1:17 am
like I said……
too long. nobody cares. you’re melodramatic.
Seriously, I stopped reading when you started talking about the MSM’s vast left-wing conspiracy to cover Marc Rich in something.
And what’s up with the bolding of select words and your faux old English writing style? “Forewarned is forearmed!”…”in this most sensitive cabinet position”. Gay.
Which brings me to my last observation….
MSM is a well established term in the health professions meaning “Men who have Sex with Men” (ask Dr. Raven). Go to Pubmed and search MSM and you’ll get over 4,000+ per-reviewed articles on homosexuals and health behavior. Left-leaning people in the health professions have a good chuckle every time a wignut uses the abbreviation MSM.
November 24th, 2008 at 1:40 am
dj: Moth, meet light bulb. Just can’t help yourself, can you. You were warned. Blam