Saturday, July 13, 2013

Dissent Is Patriotic Unpatriotic!

The legal experts at The Liberal Gun Club have decided that TJIC's infamous "1 down, 534 to go" comment constituted "a threat to standing congresspersons", and therefore doom on him*.

Lacking a law degree, I am not entirely certain on what constitutes a threat or not, so I'm not going to talk out my ass with confident certainty, but maybe I'll stop telling that joke about "What do you call a bus full of Progressives that goes over a cliff with one seat empty?" lest these fine legal minds construe it as an actual threat to go out and buy a bus and start filling it with hippies.
Q: How many Progressives does it take to get indignant?
A: That's not funny!
On a tangentially related note, given that so many genuinely funny comedians are as pink as a Myrtle Beach sunrise, how come the average gathering of run-of-the-mill lefties is so serious it makes a Methodist church service look like a Three Stooges film festival? Saving the world is srs business?


*...and how many of them attended or approved of political protest events where a sitting president was burned in effigy? Irony is apparently a decadent bourgeois thing.


EDITED TO ADD: I'm also amused that it is apparently very Liberal to waive any Fourth Amendment warrant requirements in the case of alleged "threats". How P.A.T.R.I.O.T.ic!

Apparently the Bill of Rights is very situational. I guess one can expect that from people who wanted Gitmo shut down (and Right Now, dammit!) before 1/09 and then suddenly got all "Well, these things take time..." when it was their team carrying the water to the board.

FURTHER EDITED: Congratulations to this guy; he gets it. The rest just went into the usual "Yay, my team! Boo, their team! Us smart! Them dumb!" kneejerk response straight from the medulla oblongata that characterizes American political discourse today. ("Can you believe those people like [Joe Biden/Sarah Palin]? Whatta bunch of maroons!") That's me: A big ol' Limbaugh-lovin' wingnut...

32 comments:

Scott J said...

Progressives are absolute masters of the double standard.

But I'm not going to dwell on such depressing things today.

Local club IDPA monthly match is today. Hopefully I can finish better than bottom third overall.

Old NFO said...

Scott is correct, they are also masters of do as "I" say, not as "I" do because the rules don't apply to me...

Bubblehead Les. said...

Liberal Gun Club? I wasn't aware of that many people owned Joe Biden Specials to form a Club.

Anonymous said...

Their rule is pretty simple, actually: "we make the rules, you shut up."

jf

Ancient Woodsman said...

Sounds like another for Robb's list: "I don't know the person involved nor really anything substantive at all about the story, but I'll share my expert opinion on the matter. I say the guy is not only an extremist who shares none of our views, he certainly doesn't even have the ability to understand how wrong he is. He should be excommunicated from this forum and any other organization, group, nation & planet he belongs to. Because he cannot possibly measure up to my standard, he does not deserve the same rights that I am enjoying."

The Daily Double Standard: the new liberal newspaper.

Cincinnatus said...

I have a law degree. Its not a threat, its free speech - which liberals fear more.

Educated Savage said...

Care to enlighten us as to what the law considers a threat?

Anonymous said...

E.S.: Personal prounouns. Didn't see any in TJIC's darkly humorous quip.

Cincinnatus said...

Something more specific and more credible. Something people don't say every day.

Cincinnatus said...

And my "I have a law degree" was meant as snark against Tam's disclaimer because it does not take a law degree to know that TJIC's comment was not a illegal threat - as Tam well knows and the twit at Liberal Gun Blog's comment thread should know.

Paul said...

Anything spoken at best be slander.

Sticks and stones and all that noise.

You cannot institute deadly force on the spoken word, unless it is en garde or defend your self.

Ted N said...

Harmuph.

Liberal gun club. Bah. I wouldn't want to be in their company anyway.

Ygolonac said...

"1 down, 534 to go" is not a threat.

It's keeping score. :V

It's also pretty tame, IMO and from what I've seen over the years online and realtime.*

What it *is*, is an *excuse*. Just like bringing a Lego gun to kindergarden. And far too many other examples to name: A triumph of the "hurt fee-fees over reality/using your brain" machine.

Maybe we'll be lucky and it'll rain. Then, while those types gawp up at the sky with their mouths open...

They're gonna come arrest me for that, ain't they?

* Disclaimer: I'm a fully-paid and -horrible Something Awful Forums Goon. And trawl 4Chan on occasion. Brain bleach? I have to use the Q-tip extension on my orbital sander to get all the Internet out.

Justthisguy said...

I know what you mean, Ma'am. I was raised and baptized Methodist, but am more comfortable in my current Afro-Anglican church, in which our mick pastor reproaches me for being a stodgy sassenach and our most recent Archbishop was a Tutsi from Rwanda.

When we exchange the Peace, the officiant usually has to yell a bit to make it stop and get back to the serious stuff.

Stretch said...

I sit in wonder at the flexibility of the Progressive mind. The ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously passes all understanding.
Clearly I lack "nuance."

Billll said...

Q: How many Progs do you have to question to get a straight answer?

A: Homophobe!

Munitions & Miscellania said...

His complete comments that got him in trouble were: "1 down and 534 to go. It is absolutely, absolutely unacceptable to shoot indiscriminately. Target only politicians and their staff and leave regular citizens alone."

In this day and age making such comments are unwise, especially if you happen to live in a place like MA.

Tam said...

I follow his Twitter feed; I know what he said. Hell, he's engaged to one of my best friends; I was on the phone with her when the cops were taking her guns because they were all bitchy about his Tweet. What part of the BoR covers that?

Steve Skubinna said...

Q: How many progressives does it take to change a light bulb?

A: How DARE you question our patriotism!

ErikO said...

Oh yeah, Liberal != Progressive.

Gee, sorry I brought this up for discussion in my club since it upsets you so much that we exist. Sorry, no right to be comfortable in your paradigm. ;)

I saw Oleg mention your issue on FB, thought it was BS that they were attacking your 2nd and 4th Amendment rights.

FWIW, most of us are not Progressives but there are some in the club.

Hate to break it to ya (not really) but from a logical sense it makes MORE sense for Liberals to back RKBA and I am doing my part to reach out as much as possible to expand on this.

Buzz said...

How many "progressives" does it take to build a road?
I lost count after the consulting firm performing the environmental impact assessment, the board deciding how much "prevailing wage" should be, the committee reviewing "proper" demographic representation in the work crews, and the protesters drowning in the sea of irony regarding the billions of tons of CO2 "averted" versus one unconfirmed spotting of an irrelevant species that barely made it out of pre-human competitive survival.

Tam said...

ErikO,

You're sorry you brought this up? Why? Because you think I'm a Conservative? ;)

Rock on, dude. You did the right thing, even if you're not exactly sure why. :)

ErikO said...

Nah, I'm fine. I do believe in the right to speak freely but I also enjoy using my same right to retort.

I'm sure nobody here has ever decided to defend the NRA or GOA to someone that was running their group down, right? ;)

I am sorry that there are members of the LGC who feel that opinions being expressed are grounds to block access to natural rights. I am not one of those.

Tam said...

ErikO,

(Incidentally, liberal != pink and liberal != hippie, too. Lighten up, Francis; this blog is all about smartassery. ;) )

Tam said...

Typing at the same time! Jinx!

ErikO said...

Honestly, I brought it up due to this exact thing being an issue that bugs me. If someone breaks a law, is found guilty in a court of their peers and loses access to a right, well, that is the way things are supposed to work. This situation sounds more like a 'no knock at a wrong address' situation.

Sunshine is a very good antiseptic.

I did wish that I could 'unlearn' that some of my buddies have the opinion that rights can be nullified by being an insensitive jerk.

Tam said...

It's worse than a no-knock at a wrong address; it's a warrantless search and seizure at exactly the address they intended.

Further, the guns they seized weren't TJIC's, but rather his fiancée's.

Tam said...

nb. I was on the phone with Jenn while the cops were seizing her guns without a warrant. I could hear the cops in the background. This is very real for me and not some Internet hypothetical.

perlhaqr said...

I was on the phone with Jenn while the cops were seizing her guns without a warrant. I could hear the cops in the background. This is very real for me and not some Internet hypothetical.

In 1999, a fair grouping of my friends were renting a significant number of student ghetto apartments on the same end of the same street. I don't know exactly how many we had at the time, four or five, and most of them were in post-construction split houses turned into duplexes, but the important part is that my friends A. and P. had one of those duplex apartments right across the street from the apartment building that my then girlfriend, now wife, S. was in.

A., P., and S. were all off on a camping trip in the mountains, and I was at S.'s place working on my car. Two other friends of ours were hanging out with me while I did so. It's on about dusk, and three squad cars and another vehicle pull up, discharge 8 people, who then all proceed to pack into A.'s front yard, and start going into the back yard, poking around the house, etc.

So, I walk across the street to ask what it is they are there for, at which point I get spread out and searched. After they're done with that crap, they show me an arrest warrant for some guy I've never heard of, with an address on it miles away. They say they are here because the phone number he had at the time was once assigned to that apartment, ten years before this. It is not the same phone number that A. and P. have at this point. The two guys not in a squad car and not in uniform are bounty hunters.

I tell them that I know everyone who lives there, and hang out there all the time, and the person they're talking about isn't there, and I've never heard of him. They say "fine, thanks" and send me back across the street.

About 10 minutes later, after poking around the back yard some more, they come over to question me and my buddies while we're sitting on S.'s porch, about the electronic equipment in A.'s basement bedroom, and the webcam on the front door, behind the security fence around their porch. This being 1999, webcams and the internet weren't nearly as common as they are now, so the cop had a really hard time grasping "It's connected to the internet. Anyone could be watching it." when asked who was monitoring the camera. Eventually Officer Jackass went away, after threatening to bring the SWAT team in. In later reports, I am said to have been "uncooperative".

I note them looking more "ready for action", so I get on the phone and call the landlord. It's about 2300 by this time (it's summer, so "dusk" was pretty late) so I have to call a couple times before he answers. I tell him, "B., it's O. I'm over at S.'s place, and some bounty hunters are kicking in A.'s door with a bad warrant. You better get over here." He said he'd be over shortly, and I hung up. The cops come back over and demand to know who I was calling, and are very belligerent when I tell them it was the landlord. "Well, it better have been!"

The bounty hunters run away. B. shows up, and so does a lieutenant. A report of the evening is taken from me by the lieutenant. I take off to go up to the campsite to tell A. and P. that their house has been tossed by the cops.

So, the point of that story is to say that I'm highly sympathetic to the "this is very real for me" notion.

Matthew Walker said...

OT, but as a bike person and a gun person, have you noticed that the noun "bobber" and the verb "to bubba" have some kind of deep and horrifying etymological affinity?

Ed said...

The power to prosecute is the power to punish, as the punishment initiates well before acquittal or conviction.

Firehand said...

Got a descriptive in my comments from Keith:
so that's the collective noun for progressives:

an indignant of progressives