Don's Tuesday column

         THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   3/12/2013

Lincoln dinner; Obama’s bloody nose, fit

Here’s a “last call” for folks to reserve their place or table at this year’s Red, White and Blue Republican dinner, Vets Hall, this Saturday; 5 PM for the pre-dinner mixer. We’ll hear from several of our fellow Republicans, not the least of which will be Elizabeth Emken, our candidate for U.S. Senate last year. We who heard her at our election headquarters can attest to her insightful ability to connect with regular working folks on the issues confronting California and America.

Three improvements, if I may say, over previous dinners: First, the “virtual” Abraham Lincoln refers to Mr. Frank Jones, who has played Mr. Lincoln for about 35 years at churches and schools. Next, dinner service is going back to buffet style with two serving lines; you can personalize choices of British beef short ribs, pork loin medallions and the other delectable side items. Finally, the price of dinner, $40 per person, includes an entry in the drawing for $300 in Lincoln $5 bills. Additional drawing tickets are available and advisable; making it a cash award has the advantage of not committing someone a particular rifle or shotgun they may not want or need, or a gift card for a retailer they dislike. As usual, the silent auction items will be highly bid worthy.

Anyway, the caterer needs a head count; you will be glad you did your part for your local Republican party. Call 529-1226 soon for more information and reservations.

The title of the Powerlineblog.com analysis, “A Lame Duck Squawks, But Why?” only starts to describe the pathetic and ultimately fruitless efforts of Democrats and their classless, petty, disingenuous leader, President Obama, to wring some modicum of new gun laws out of the senseless slaughter in Newtown, Connecticut in December. So-called “lame duck” status usually waits until a president is politically impotent with only a year or two left in his term and an opposition emboldened to obstruct his every initiative. However, Obama’s lameness may have shown itself in the arrogance-driven hubris of his thinly-veiled, venom-filled, petulant fit over getting his political nose bloodied in the Senate; Democrats were forced to show their losing hand over the “thin gruel” of expanded background checks.

Obama’s Rose Garden speech, more accurately described as “an angry rant,” demonstrated more raw emotion, as it were, than he displayed over the original killings; this months-long campaign of staged outrage and maudlin heart-tugging was designed to cynically advance an off-the-ideological-shelf gun control agenda. No such anger emerged over Benghazi, the Fort Hood terrorist murders, or even the terror attack in Boston. He reserves his real vitriol for his political opponents, Americans all, ideologically dead to him.

Dead children are, the way I see it, little but political props for an Obama who demurred that politics had nothing to do with his gun control measures (“My starting point is not to worry about the politics. My starting point is to focus on what makes sense, what works [to make] our children safe [and] reduce the incidence of gun violence.” 1/14) Nothing he or Harry Reid proposed to legislate or implement by executive fiat would have stopped the crazed Adam Lanza from stealing and using weapons his mother legally bought, weapons any law abiding citizen should rightfully be able to own. The only way to stop criminally insane killers would have been for the institutional left, in the form of civil rights lawyers, mental health advocates and Democrats in legislatures, to facilitate committing those deemed unsafe to themselves or others to incarcerated treatment.

Yet, here’s Obama, demonizing his political opponents in the Rose Garden: “The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill. It came down to politics … This pattern of spreading untruths … served a purpose.” No, it’s Mr. Obama, “spreading untruths,” who “willfully lied,” made up stuff, misrepresented polls, studies and statistics, who has sullied the office he holds through fabrication for crass political gain. Because none of it would ever pass in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the whole “anti-gun” (Harry Reid’s words) campaign has been nothing more than a shameless plan to provide the Democrat base with get-out-the-vote campaign motivation to deliver the House back to Nancy Pelosi.

So, how sweet the irony: The Obama/Reid jam down of legislation, stripped of measures that could defeat Democrats in 2014, was supposed to garner every Dem Senator as well as peel off some Republicans (which it did). Vulnerable Democrats still voted against it (in that every amendment needed 60 votes), dooming both pro- and anti- gun amendments. Funny thing, though: there were more votes for pro-gun than anti-gun amendments

If it were true, as Obama-crats, repeat, that 90 percent want universal background checks, all Democrat Senators would have voted for it. There is no such poll, where people are informed of the current National Criminal Instant Background Check system, and 9 of 10 still want Obama’s background checks. People rightfully suspect that registration and criminalization of lawful guns and law-abiding citizens will follow and don’t want it. Only 4 percent of Americans think gun control is a priority, nearly last in importance (Gallup).

40 percent of gun sales outside the current system? Bogus number. Military style assault weapons? Made up terminology. Federal gun crime prosecution? Lowest in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Enforce current federal laws, Barack Obama and Eric Holder, before passing, and asking the law-abiding to comply with, yet more laws.