January 18, 2013
Obama Playing Chicken with American Men
By Daren Jonescu

The Obama administration's current warpath against so-called "gun violence" -- which is Newspeak for non-violence committed by non-criminals with their non-illegal private property -- is a brazen challenge to America's manhood. The progressives have apparently decided that this is the moment when they can play their ultimate authoritarian hand, and let the chips fall where they may. They believe, in other words, that this is the moment when they may be able to break America at last, one way or another.

Through Obama's forceful, smug insistence on taking action in defiance of Congress, along with the aggressive urging to do so from his sycophants in the progressive elite -- from the vice president and the senate majority leader on down -- the leftists are engaging in a game of chicken with the American spirit that is disturbing both for its immediate intentions and for its revelation of their thought process and game plan.

In light of the well-known fact that their proposals and trial balloons will be judged by millions of Americans to be an outright violation of constitutionally protected liberties -- and liberties of the most emotionally trenchant nature, namely those related to the very foundations of limited government -- the progressives' deliberate projection of haste and intransigence on gun control must not merely be taken at face value, and judged on its "merits." It must also be interpreted -- in other words, one must ask precisely what they are hoping to achieve by attacking the most deeply held principles of so many Americans in such a heavy-handed fashion.

It seems to me that there are two plausible interpretations of their open chastisement of "all this debate" over Second Amendment concerns, i.e., their boisterous spitting upon the U.S. Constitution.

The first option is that they believe the citizenry of the once-freest nation on earth will ultimately be first to flinch in this game of chicken, and back down. This is the simplest explanation. Having tested the waters on so many fronts, and prepared the population with generations of propaganda about the evils of guns (and so little clarity about the meaning of limited government) from the educational establishment and the media, the left may have determined that, for all the tough talk, American gun owners will not, in the end, have the nerve to stand firm against a federal order to produce their weapons for registration, to submit their guns and themselves to a federal tracking system, or even, eventually, to relinquish legally-purchased property that has newly been ruled illegal.

The second possibility is that they know the public has not been sufficiently softened up to begin the "peaceful" disarming of America suggested by option one, and are therefore hoping to precipitate the kind of "serious crisis" the Obama administration has vowed never to let go to waste. This second possibility is appearing more likely to be the administration's real intention each day.

Consider the extent to which the federal government has gone, during the past four years, to brand conservatives, Christians, defenders of the Constitution, gun owners, and in general believers in property rights, as not merely racist and stupid (the usual mantra), but rather as angry, "bitter," and positively unhinged. These are not mere insinuations; government representatives, spokesmen, and apologists have been saying such things with increasing directness and frequency since 2008. A "study" funded by DHS expressly lists people who are "reverent of individual liberty" or "suspicious of centralized federal authority," among the common potential terror threats (p. 9). Obama himself, during his 2008 campaign, suggested in no uncertain terms that "clinging" to a Bible and/or a gun -- i.e., believing in God or the right to bear arms -- is a clear symptom of serious psychological problems, and equivalent to racism. And of course almost every mass killing over the past couple of years has been blamed on the Tea Party by someone in the media (see here) -- until, inevitably, the facts prove otherwise -- thereby creating the general impression that the Tea Party is a natural repository of "people on the edge," regardless of whether they turn out to have committed any crimes.

The Obama team knows full well that its words and actions are causing fear, anger, and heightened vigilance among conservatives. The spikes in gun sales, NRA memberships, and harsh anti-government talk all over the internet are an unmistakable sign of a population preparing for -- for something ugly. And yet they push forward, threatening specific action and escalating the anti-gun rhetoric with each passing day.

And the prodding is clever. Prior to this direct assault on the right to bear arms, the single Obama program most hated by constitutionalists was the Affordable Care Act. Now, ingeniously, the left has found a way to bring these two great affronts to individual liberty together under one umbrella. A major focus of Obama's executive actions on gun violence is the promotion of ObamaCare's mental health provisions as a suitable mechanism for dealing with preemptive psychiatry, i.e., drugging wayward children, labeling people in their federal government records as mentally ill, and using doctors as informants to track guns in private homes.

In sum, they could not be stoking pre-revolutionary fever any more effectively among that minority of America's citizenry that still stands by the nation as an idea, rather than merely as a piece of geography, if they had planned to stoke it. The only question remaining, it seems, is where all of this will lead


Read more:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/o...l#ixzz2IN4aETia