A Certain Kind of Peace...

The title is, of course, from a quote by T.R....in it's entirety, the quote reads: Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain kinds of peace.

I bring this up because an excellent comment from yesterday's post deserves an expanded answer. Here's the complete comment:

I very much enjoy your blog and tv shows, mainly for two reasons. Your vast knowledge of guns and the articulate way you present them. I think it is surprising that you have fallen to the level of using nazi references and slurs against the president .you may not respect the man, but at least respect the position. As little as two weeks ago you said that we needed to stick to the facts to win this fight. Please, do not let you standards fall... We need you.

First, thank you so much for the kind words...they are appreciated more than you can imagine. However, I can't imagine how you can read the Daily Kos piece, How To Ban Guns: A Step-By-Step Long Term Process and not hear echoes of Germany in the 1930s (and note that my comment was not addressed directly at BHo). One of the progressive Left's greatest strength is it's ability to not just ignore the past, but to pretend that there is no such thing as the past. The progressive Left can't even agree or articulate a reason why they want all civilians disarmed, but accept it simply as an element of faith, of dogma...yes, the wine is indeed transmogrified into the blood of Christ! We must disarm the citizenry because...because...because we must disarm the citizenry! The dogma itself becomes its own rationale.

That post on the Daily Kos, BTW, is very similar to the material produced by the earlier incarnation of the Brady Organization, Handgun Control Inc., in the late 1960s. Consider this quote from founding Chairman of the Board Nelson T. "Pete" Shields:

"I'm convinced that we have to have Federal legislation to build on. We're going to have to take one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily--given the political realities--going to be very modest ... Our ultimate goal--total control of handguns in the United States--is going to take time ... The first problem is to slow down the increasing number of handguns being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is to get handguns registered, and the final problem is to make the possession of all handguns, and all handgun ammunition totally illegal."

Civilian disarmament has always been the goal of the progressive movement in the United States. It is the only goal...everything else is just smoke and mirrors (or night and fog, as the case may be). Recall Diane Feinstein's amazingly revealing quote after the passage of the first AWB in 1994 (see it here on YouTube):

If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them — Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in — I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren't here.

A couple of  days ago Diane Feinstein said on PBS Newshour that she didn't want to ban all guns — "that dog just doesn't hunt," she said, assuming all of us in the gun culture to be toothless morons from the swamps. Watch it yourself...which Diane Feinstein do you think is telling the truth?

A quick change of subject...as you've heard on my podcasts, my college career drifted off into areas I never anticipated for a variety of reasons, largely having to do with the little head leading the big head around. My original majors were physics and math, and, indeed, for one quarter I made the Dean's List for emulating Leonard in Big Bang Theory. My career as a scientist or a systems engineer hit the shoals of young lust, and like a sad little puppy I started tagging along behind my Brand New Squeeze to her classes...religion, specialty history, psychology, etc....so I could write her papers so she could get an "A" and I could get...whatever. So I studied Islam, the psychology of mass communication, the history and psychology of revolutionary movements, the rise of Nazi Germany, TR and the Gilded Age in America...I read Trotsky, Marx, Lenin, Kropotkin and the Russian anarchists, studied under "Death of God" theologians, read that "new guy" Saul Alinsky (whom I thought was brilliant, BTW) and all manner of strangeness at the intersection of media, propaganda and public policy. I changed my major to mass communications, got a faculty advisor with dual PhDs in mass comm and statistical analysis and who was delighted to have a student who wasn't afraid of math, and began studying statistical analysis and its application toward polling, propaganda and "disinformation" in public media, and on and on.

When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, Media Man," a catchy phrase I cribbed from Goodbye Media Man,  a circa-1970 Tom Fogerty (John Fogerty's elder brother) song that ironically presaged what the media would become:

Believin' in your power, it's what you can do
You gotta help change the world, there's nothin' to lose
Come on and do the people's will, your masters are hate
You gotta help us bring the changes to the masters of our fate

Weird, huh? My views, then, are shaped by those early years of studying mass comm, the psychology of propaganda and revolution, and stuff like that.

As to what all that has to do with the price of tea in China, we are now engaged in the great media war of our times. We no longer have a free media...we have allowed that institution to become a change agent for the progressive Left, a la Goodbye Media Man..."You gotta help change the world, there's nothing to lose..."

Read this piece from the WaPo blog on, "Why this gun control debate has been different." The short answer is that the media is now unabashedly all-in with the progressive Left agenda:

Even before the 27 victims had been laid to rest, gun control was a far more prominent part of the Newtown narrative than it had been in previous incidents. And in contrast to the Virginia Tech, Aurora and Giffords shootings, it has come to dominate the media narrative. The week that Obama issued the executive actions, more than 60 percent of stories that mentioned Newtown also included a reference to gun control.

To be sure, the media has always been antigun, at least for the latter part of the 20th Century forward. A story I've told many time before is the first time I walked into a newsroom and applied for a job, in 1968 at my college paper, the editor explained to the stupid kid from Tennessee how important gun control was. In my time in the MSM, I was usually the only person working for or writing for a particular publication that held pro-gun views.

The difference is that now the new uber-partisan media no longer feel even a remote need for balance. Rather, they are active participants in the war to disarm the American public, maybe the most important players because they have the most experience in building and controlling the narrative. I refer you to my friend Steve Hunter's definition of "the narrative" from his book I, SNIPER (and which I wrote about here on the blog):

The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It's not like they get together every morning and decide 'These are the lies we tell today.' No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it's a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they've never really experienced that's arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they've chosen to live their lives. It's a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture.

And they are formidable enemies.

How do you fight "formidable enemies?" Well, let's go back to the manual currently in use to change the United States into the progressive vision of soft socialism, Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals. Here's a concise list of his 11 rules...I suggest you read them and commit them to memory. One of the most powerful, and one that I use repeatedly, is Number 11:

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

This is amazingly powerful, the basic line of the successful attack on Romney in the last election. That rule should alwasy be coupled with Rule 5:

Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.

Ridicule is man's most potent weapon! We are as a culture uncomfortable with ridicule, because we prefer to think of ourselves as a debating society with all the facts on our side. Yet ridicule can be used as a nuclear option — immediately after Newtown all the usual suspects in Hollywood put together their "powerful" call for gun control in a multimillion dollar commercial, which was COMPLETELY DESTROYED by this YouTube parody (which I'm not showing here because of the "F-bombs").

That parody not only completely negated the millions poured into the original commercial, but it emasculated Hollywood's antigun efforts and robbed the progressive and the media of one of their most reliable and powerful allies. Notice how you haven't seen the usual Hollywood ninnies out there shilling for BHo on this issue? It's because they are now objects of ridicule rather than "respected spokespeople."

The point that I want to make here is that just because we have the facts on our side doesn't automatically mean that we win. Every word that Mitt Romney said about Barack Obama in the last election has proven to be true, yet you'll notice that BHo is the President and Mitt Romney is a future trivia question on Jeopardy. This is not a debate, and we are not a debating society. This is an all-out war for the soul of the United States. I don't want to win this debate; I would rather borrow this quote from Conan the Barbarian (channeling Genghis Khan of course), "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women."

Facts are indeed weapons of this war! We must have those weapons at our fingertips (and I'll do my best to help in that arena), but weapons alone do not win a war. Strategy wins a war.And in this war we need to be thinking of ourselves as guerrillas facing a large, heavily funded, absolutely ruthless oppressor.

Regarding the current President of the United States, for whom I have nothing but contempt, I always refer back to the words of Teddy Roosevelt (remember those "History of the Gilded Age" classes? LOL!):

Our loyalty is due entirely to the United States. It is due to the President only and exactly to the degree in which he efficiently serves the United States. It is our duty to support him when he serves the United States well. It is our duty to oppose him when he serves it badly. This is true about Mr. Wilson now and it has been true about all our Presidents in the past. It is our duty at all times to tell the truth about the President and about every one else, save in the cases where to tell the truth at the moment would benefit the public enemy.

Our loyalty is due entirely to the United States. Teddy went on at different times to say that the Office of the President was indeed due respect, not so much the man occupying that office at any given time. Maybe one more quote from TR bears repeating:

No man who is not willing to bear arms and to fight for his rights can give a good reason why he should be entitled to the privilege of living in a free community.