E. J. Dionne Jr. nails the issue of the "right" to carry weapons in the vicinity of the president (PLUS: Harold Meyerson on the shrunken GOP)

Mark Streeter in the Savannah Morning News

"The simple fact is that an armed citizenry is not the basis for our freedoms. Our freedoms rest on a moral consensus, enshrined in law, that in a democratic republic we work out our differences through reasoned, and sometimes raucous, argument. Free elections and open debate are not rooted in violence or the threat of violence. They are precisely the alternative to violence, and guns have no place in them. . . .

"Will some group of responsible conservatives, preferably life members of the NRA, have the decency to urge their followers to leave their guns at home when they go out to protest the president? Is that too much to ask?"

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post column
today, "Leave The Guns At Home"

by Ken

During the eight unrelentingly lawless years of the Bush regime, at almost every turn developments cried out for a round of "If the shoe were on the other foot." And now that the soldiers of the Bush crime machine are mostly purged from the government bunkers they befouled those eight years (there are still holdovers reporting for work daily, aren't there?), though not yet in the prison cells where most of them belong, the craziness they fostered has only gotten crazier.

I've been on online listservs where people are in shock over the absence of a deafening uproar at the right-wing scumbaggers -- oops, I meant teabaggers -- who have taken to making a show of carrying weapons to the sites of presidential appearances, living up to their calling as totalitarian thugs and anti-democratic intimidators. And I have to say, my shocked colleagues have a point. Where is the outrage? Can you imagine the Bush-Cheney security apparatus allowing anyone with a weapon in the same county as one of their officials?

As I argued recently, the chances that this is what the original intenders of the Constitution had in mind with the Second Amendment seem to me nonexistent. The current extremist majority on the Supreme Court -- a majority, that is, when poor Justice Anthony Kennedy blows their way -- may have had its reasons for wishing to unleash a wave of political-gang violence in the country, but those reasons have nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution, whether read literally or seen through the prism of "original intent."

At the president's appearance in Phoenix Monday

One day a Supreme Court majority made up of sane people who know how to read will undo the mischief of the radical anti-constitutionalists of the Roberts Court and correct their fundamental misreading of the Second Amendment, which addresses the need for "a well-regulated militia," a need that is now met by our rather sizable standing armed forces as well as the states' National Guards. Those future justices will probably be too polite to inquire how five of their predecessors managed to get their heads wedged so far up their butts, but they may well point to the incitement to civilian violence laid by their Far Right activism, and wonder how the provocations and intimidation of the scumbaggers related to the need for a well-regulated militia.

People are pointing a finger at the Secret Service, which is unfair. I can't imagine they're happy about the presence of guns where they're on the job, but I'm guessing they're voicing their displeasure as forcefully as they can. A comparison with Bush-Cheney security is unfair, because the Bush regime clearly had the security apparatus of any totalitarian regime, which proceeds from the generally well-founded assumption that it has enemies everywhere.

Of course there was never much reporting on the Bush-Cheney security operation. I expect that any reporter enterprising enough to try to report on the subject would have had it made clear that doing so would have been regarded as a breach of national security and would have been dealt with accordingly. Nevertheless, we got occasional glimpses of the scope and thoroughness of the operation, like when people were thrown out of gatherings -- and even roughed up and arrested -- for wearing unsupportive T-shirts, or when Chimpy the Prez traveled, and it seemed as if entire countries had to be displaced to provide a large enough security perimeter for the Tiny One.

All of which is a prelude to calling the Washington Post's E. J. Dionne Jr. to the witness stand. Boy, did he nail this in his column today:

Leave The Guns At Home

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Try a thought experiment: What would conservatives have said if a group of loud, scruffy leftists had brought guns to the public events of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush?

How would our friends on the right have reacted to someone at a Reagan or a Bush speech carrying a sign that read: "It is time to water the tree of liberty"? That would be a reference to Thomas Jefferson's declaration that the tree "must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Pardon me, but I don't think conservatives would have spoken out in defense of the right of every American Marxist to bear arms or to shed the blood of tyrants.

In fact, the Bush folks didn't like any dissent at all. Recall the 2004 incident in which a distraught mother whose son was killed in Iraq was arrested for protesting at a rally in New Jersey for first lady Laura Bush. The detained woman wasn't even armed. Maybe if she had been carrying, the gun lobby would have defended her.

The Obama White House purports to be open to the idea of guns outside the president's appearances. "There are laws that govern firearms that are done state or locally," Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said on Tuesday. "Those laws don't change when the president comes to your state or locality."

Gibbs made you think of the old line about the liberal who is so open-minded he can't even take his own side in an argument.

What needs to be addressed is not the legal question but the message that the gun-toters are sending.

This is not about the politics of populism. It's about the politics of the jackboot. It's not about an opposition that has every right to free expression. It's about an angry minority engaging in intimidation backed by the threat of violence.

There is a philosophical issue here that gets buried under the fear that so many politicians and media-types have of seeming to be out of touch with the so-called American heartland.

The simple fact is that an armed citizenry is not the basis for our freedoms. Our freedoms rest on a moral consensus, enshrined in law, that in a democratic republic we work out our differences through reasoned, and sometimes raucous, argument. Free elections and open debate are not rooted in violence or the threat of violence. They are precisely the alternative to violence, and guns have no place in them.

On the contrary, violence and the threat of violence have always been used by those who wanted to bypass democratic procedures and the rule of law. Lynching was the act of those who refused to let the legal system do its work. Guns were used on election days in the Deep South during and after Reconstruction to intimidate black voters and take control of state governments.

Yes, I have raised the racial issue, and it is profoundly troubling that firearms should begin to appear with some frequency at a president's public events only now, when the president is black. Race is not the only thing at stake here, and I have no knowledge of the personal motivations of those carrying the weapons. But our country has a tortured history on these questions, and we need to be honest about it. Those with the guns should know what memories they are stirring.

And will someone please tell the armed demonstrators how foolish and lawless they make our country look in the eyes of so much of the world? Are we not the country that urges other nations to see the merits of the ballot over the bullet?

All this is taking place as the country debates the president's health-care proposal. There is much that is disturbing in that discussion. Shouting down speakers is never a good thing, and many lies are being told about the contents of the health-care bills. The lies should be confronted, but freedom involves a lot of commotion and an open contest of ideas, even when some of the parties say things that aren't true and act in less than civil ways.

Yet if we can't draw the line at the threat of violence, democracy begins to disintegrate. Power, not reason, becomes the stuff of political life. Will some group of responsible conservatives, preferably life members of the NRA, have the decency to urge their followers to leave their guns at home when they go out to protest the president? Is that too much to ask?

Dionne is a fine and sensible writer whose regular columnizing efforts become all the more important as the Post's editorial pages become more and more overwhelmingly right-wing. Some days, though, he rises above and beyond. Here he has tackled a Big Subject head-on, and done it about as well as I can imagine it being done.

POSTSCRIPT: HAROLD MEYERSON IN TOP FORM SAYS
YOU CAN'T MAKE A DEAL WITH THE SHRUNKEN GOP

"In its ideological uniformity, today's GOP looks -- O, the irony -- more like a classic European party than an American one."

-- Harold Meyerson, in his WaPo column today,

"Lincoln's Prophecy for the GOP"

Is Thursday "Let's Let Loose the Lefties" Day at WaPo OpEd? My guy Harold Meyerson has a really terrific column on the geographically and ideologically shrunken GOP. He starts by noting Senate Finance Committee ranking Republican Chuck Grassley's unexpectedly frank admission that he won't support any health care proposal that doesn't "find a broad base of support within the Republican Party," and wonders:

Why, then, does Max Baucus, the committee's Democratic chairman, persist in the charade of bipartisan negotiations with Grassley? Does he -- does anybody -- really believe that a Republican Party so deeply invested in defeating President Obama's campaign for health-care reform is open to a scaled-down version that Obama can still claim as a victory?

Meyerson takes a hard look at the consequences for American governance:

Republican ideology has shrunk alongside its geography and demographics. Where once its view of the role of government ran the gamut from Rockefeller activism to Goldwater libertarianism, today the party largely adheres to the religiosity and the anti-statism of the white South. (In its ideological uniformity, today's GOP looks -- O, the irony -- more like a classic European party than an American one.)

In short, the Republican Party with which Democrats could make deals no longer exists. The GOP is too narrow; the gap between the parties, too wide. Our politics are not those of the mid-20th century, when bipartisanship was fairly common. If anything, they're more like those of the mid-19th century, before the Civil War, when North and South combined only to make a house divided against itself -- a conflict resolved not by compromise, but, as Lincoln predicted, by a nation then half-slave and half-free becoming "all one thing or all the other."

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