For the Record: One More Time for the Second Amendment

This is a theme I keep recycling a little, but I felt this version came out extra-pithy, and also it's got a Boebert malapropism in it.

No, they were being pressured by slaveholders who threatened to tank the whole project of the Constitution if Madison didn't give in on this one stupid gun thing. Madison thought the need for a strong central government was so great he gave in to the blackmail.

— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 15, 2022

Not that the founders, speaking firmly, weren't some of them slaveholders too, as they certainly were, but it's still important that Virginians Washington, Jefferson, and Madison all agreed that slavery was a horrible crime. They were kind of like mythical Franklin Roosevelt saying, "Now make me do it," but unfortunately nobody did. Whereas those other Virginians Patrick Henry and George Mason were really explicitly freaked out by the possibility that Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, among others, might just up and ban slavery outright (as indeed they did, not that long afterwards) and before you knew it start helping their African property to escape from servitude

They were determined to make sure the new government would be strong enough to be able to prevent rebellions like that from getting anywhere.

Exactly the opposite of what loonies like Boebert claim the 2nd Amendement is supposed to do.

— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 15, 2022

"Expedition" must have been the word she was hunting for.

Imaginary Madison: "Let's make sure state militias are well armed so they have a fair chance to overthrow me when I'm president."

Real Madison: "OK you can have your slave patrols but only if we get to use them to put down a whiskey tax revolt."

— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 15, 2022

For the Record: Fact Checking

Steve points out something that is very wrong about former Attorney General Barr deciding to tell the truth to Jonathan Karl, namely that he doesn't think there was anything morally wrong about trying to overthrow a democratic election, he just didn't think it was going to be successful. It occurred to me that there were a few other things:

I'd like to know more about how much of that he did, as with the multiple investigations of Crossfire Hurricane and its origins, harrassing people who Trump regarded as his personal enemies.

— Specter of Happiness (@Yastreblyansky) June 28, 2021

And of course if he want to start telling the truth let's hear about his role in surveillance of Times, WaPo, CNN, and House Intelligence Committee

— Specter of Happiness (@Yastreblyansky) June 28, 2021

He seems to have ordered up an awful lot of investigations for which there was no justification to satisfy his vindictive client. He looks more and more like John Mitchell to me.

A more complex thing was a very annoying "fact check" in Washington Post, where Glenn Kessler assigned four Pinocchios to Biden for saying that the 2nd Amendment didn't allow you to buy a cannon in the 1780s:

For the Record: Gaetz's Rebellion

 

Scuffle outside the Springfield, Massachusetts courthouse, 1786; 19th-century wood engraving, Granger Academic.

From here https://t.co/dccKX08vue

— Freewheeling Passion (@Yastreblyansky) May 28, 2021

https://t.co/qc2kxI5gC2 pic.twitter.com/s7qO4tfQRr

— Freewheeling Passion (@Yastreblyansky) May 28, 2021

Hi, it's Stupid

A happier Dallas protest moment, September 24 2015, from NBC-DFW.

Back in the day when Left Blogistan was just a couple of mud huts and a stray cow, and I was a dumbstruck lurker, there used to be a poster at Kos (I think, even that detail is getting vague) calling himself Stupid, who would always begin, "Hi, it's Stupid to say..." and go on to say something so naive and helpless that none of the smart and savvy news junkies was smart enough to think of it. As in—

Hi, it's Stupid to say there's something left to be learned from the horrible events in Baton Rouge and St. Paul and Dallas over the past week. We know it all already, don't we? And yet nothing changes.

Except it does, you know. What I've been learning, listening to the radio all morning (including a wise Mayor Bill de Blasio on his weekly call-in on WNYC):

Shays' Longue Rebellion

Army of Lawyers, from Saratoga in Decline.

Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice notes the startling views of cartoonist Ted Rall, who accepts the need for some gun regulation even as he proclaims himself to be (who knew?) a member of the Water the Tree of Liberty Second Amendment Club. He says, [jump]