Posse Incitatus

So this is pneumonia

We had originally planned on a small post outlining what we were thankful for this year.  However, as we returned homeward from the great feast, we began to feel poorly.

Writing it off as a byproduct of gluttony, the Posse thought nothing more of it until Friday night, when we became inexplicably cold - so much so that we found it necessary to wear a sweatshirt and down vest merely to stop the shivering.

By Saturday we knew things were bad, but it was not until Sunday night that we got the illness full force.

Yesterday we journeyed to our town doctor and were informed that we had the dreaded pneumonia.

This is a disease we have not yet experienced, and we'd be quite happy never to go through it again.

Needless to say, our long-anticipated return to the pistol range wil not be happening on Thursday.  We're rolling it back for a week.  Hopefully by then we'll be healthy.

Gun control is off the table

That's the Posse's take from the recent elections.  The NRA stayed out of it because there was no reason for them to get into it.

While the Donkey-swatter may be in a state of mourning, the Posse remains upbeat.

As we've noted several times, the GOP majority was conservative in name only.  The shift in power allows the Republicans to regroup and retool and get back to their small-government roots.

At the same time, it offers a chance to see if the Democrats will act in typical paleoliberal fashion and act as if their razor-thin mandate to cut down on corruption is really a clarion call for socialized medicine and gun confiscation.

Should the Dems drink this Kool-Aid, the backlash will be blistering and they know it.

For gun-rights supporters, the best thing we can hope for is a pause to allow more states to embrace shall-issue and for "gun control" to become as much of a non-issue as "Free silver."  Ideally, our kids will need to read about it in history books because it will disappear from the national agenda of both parties.

The Dems love their gun control, but they love power more.

The Posse is also pleased to announce that the biannual Schutzenfest will take place soon, probably the first week of December.  Pictures will be posted.  Attendence is encouraged and there is a one-box minimum.  Nothing brings about political catharsis like the smell of cordite.

If readers are especially nice, we'll try to convince Sithkitten to wear her Lara Croft outfit.

Veterans' Day 2006

There are many views of military veterans.  To many (like John Kerry), our military veterans are victims, either unwilling conscripts or desperately poor people with no other choices.  The choice for them is between military service and starvation.

To others, veterans are zombie-like killers, soulless murderers who thrive on death.

In opposition to these hateful stereotypes, there is the truth: that military members are human beings, fallible, capable of error, who love others and are loved in turn.

The military, through the nature of its great size and openness, has its share of screw-ups, idiots and human detritus.

Yet it also is filled with heroes, truly self-less individuals who have decided to dedicate their lives to something bigger than themselves.

Out at Michigan Vietnam Memorial this morning it was cold and blustery, with watery snow whipping through the air.  Still, a handful of the faithful turned out - as they have every year - and listened to the volunteer bugler play "Taps" at 11 a.m.

One phrase was spoken more than any other, even from veteran to veteran:  Thank you.

The reasons for the Fall - and the real winner

It is interesting to compare the reactions from various quarters to the recent elections.  Hitherto, Democrat defeats were met with cries of "FRAUD!" or "FLEE TO CANADA!" and other hysteria.

The Republican defeat (which is what it was, rather than a Democrat victory) has brought a different reaction from the losing side.  There is a sense almost of relief, that at last the ordeal of defending bloated, selfish politicians is over.

The Posse sheds no tears for the GOP on this.  They got what they richly deserved.

The Democrats, too, must be aware that the extent of their mandate "such as it is" is fragile and of little consequense on the big issues.  Indeed, they know first-hand how effective 49 senators can be at stopping legislation in its tracks.

Was this a rebuke to George W. Bush? 

Absolutely, but not in the sense the liberals would prefer.

In 2002 and 2004, Americans were asked to turn out in record numbers, to defy historical trends and give the  president the tools he needed to do the job.

The American people responded.  They gave him a solid majority of 55 senators, preserved the House and gave Bush a broad mandate to rule.

What did we get in return?

Harriet Myers.

Amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Bureaucratic infighting without parallel, particularly within CIA and the State departments.

Did we get a death tax repeal?  A permanent tax cut?

No.

So many people wondered what the point of it all was.

2004 was a referendum on the war and conservatism in general; what we got was Congressional arrogance and administration missteps.

The Posse has said before that we have little good to say about how the White House communications office has handled things.  From Bush's Texas Air National Guard record to the whole Scooter Libby/16 words/WMD fiasco, this country deserved a solid and aggressive response to Democrat attacks.

Instead, the White House seemed indifferent to the charges thrown at it, outsourcing its rebuttals to Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt.

Election night 2006 was the harvest of this bitter crop of tone-deafness and political ineptitude.

Karl Rove outsmarted himself by half on this one.  Conservatives still dominate the arena of ideas, but limited government is essential, arguably the essential ingredient in the Republican coalition.

When the GOP bolted on that and began a spending spree, the coalition collapsed. 

This brings us to the real winner in all of this.

Republican governors are now fewer and less cocky.  Republican legislators chastised and unelectable.  John McCain is through.

There is only one prominent GOP member who has not been tainted with this defeat.

Rudy Guiliani.

We have stated before why we like him.  The election throws this into even sharper relief.

Contrary to what the editors of National Review think, gay marriage is leaving the national agenda.  The states that are going to stop it have done so; those that have not will not.

As a federal issue it is finished.  The only thing that remains to be said is for Guiliani to state clearly that it should be decided legislatively, not judicially.

Gun control likewise is a dead issue.  The Dems know it, the liberals hate it, but there it is. 

Democrat strategists have to know that nominating an anti-gun politician will stir the sleeping giant that is the NRA.  The NRA sat out this election.  It may not sit out the next one if it has a reason to get involved.

So what two issues remain?

The war.

The budget.

On both of these, Rudy has the goods.  He has experience in fighting bloated, inefficient bureaucracies and of course his dedication to the war effort is absolute.

And that will put him over the top.

The Lamb...

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.  Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote. ~ Benjamin Franklin

The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness.  You have to catch it yourself. ~Benjamin Franklin

VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!

BTW, if you are military, don't forget which party thinks your STUPID!

Sithkitten

Hang 'em high

The Posse is pleased with the death sentence meted out to mass murderer Saddam Hussein.  It is not vindictive, but it is just.

We are also highly amused with the media line currently being taken - that is, that somehow the Sunnis will become even more angry and revolt.

What are they doing right now?  What more can they do?  Sunni dead-enders have slaughtered children, massacred women and children and tried to destroy everything in reach.  We are truly amazed that anyone can say "Oh but now they'll get really mad" with a straight face.

The left seems to have an innate fear of making its enemies angry.  Possibly it could be because they are, at their core, cowards.  It might also be because they hope to ride out the storm and don't want the enemy to be so pissed that it slaughters them rather than accept them as dhimmis.

Either way, the objective of war is to crush one's enemies, not placate them.  The Japanese and Germans were no doubt livid with the US during World War II.  Lot of good it did them when we occupied their countries.

One cannot befriend one's enemies until they are defeated.  The only other way is to surrender or join them - in which case they won't really be friends so much as overlords waiting to finish you off.

Roger L. Simon notes that the EU is playing true to type and urging clemency for one of the world's most vicious and sadistic tyrant.

Of course the EU can do this, they already hanged their tyrants.

From Louis XIV to Benito Mussolini, the Europeans are hardly ones to talk about the best ways to deal with former dictators. 

The closest parallels are with the Warsaw Pact regimes and even here the people with the truly bloody hands were either already dead (Stalin, Brezhnev) or out of reach.  In the one instance where the tyrant was still alive - Romania - they sorted things out the old-fashioned way.

We suppose the Europeans expect the rest of the world to learn from their mistakes, a paternalist attitude that should not surprise us either in its arrogance or condescension.

However it also flat-out wrong; when you overthrow a king, you kill him, period.  Otherwise he will be a rallying point against the new regime(see Jacobitism, wars resulting from).

This is even more necessary when the war to overthrow him is still going on.

We offer this fearless prediction: more ink and emotion will be generated to save Saddam's miserable life than was ever expended by the same people to defend his victims.

Operation Falcon III

Via the Belmont Club, the Posse was interested to learn that the US Marshals have recently completed another sweep of wanted criminals.

Dubbed Operation Falcon III, the multi-state operation netted 10.773 fugitives.  What is interesting is that only 232 firearms were seized.

The Posse took great interest in an earlier sweep, particularly because so few guns were brought in out of such a large sample.  The 10,773 criminals accounted for 13,333 warrants. 

These included:

• 1,659 sex offenders
• 971 unregistered sex offenders
• 364 documented gang members
• 3.609 narcotics/organized drug crime offenders
• 140 homicide warrants cleared

Earlier this year the Marshals conducted Operation Falcon II.  That netted 9,037 fugitives arrested and 10,419 warrants cleared.

Among those were the following:

• 462 violent sex criminals
• 139 drug seizures
• 163 documented gang members
• 87 homicide warrants cleared

Total of guns seized?  Only 111.

So for Operation Falcon II, there were more drug seizures than guns.  Indeed, if only a few of the homicide suspects carried backup weapons, many of these killers were also taken without any guns.

Aggregating the numbers we get:

Falcon I:  10,340 fugitives, 243 firearms
Falcon II:  9,037 fugitives, 111 firearms
Falcon III: 10,773 fugitives, 232 firearms

For a grand total of 30,150 fugitives who, between them, had only 586 firearms.

Now, as we are often reminded, half of American households have firearms in them.  So if this was a random sample, we should have produced 15,000 firearms at least (since many households own more than one).

Yet only 1.9 percent of these criminals had them. 

The counter of course is that these are overwhelmingly non-violent offenders.  Even so, non-violent people own guns as well - unless half of the country has bodies buried in the flower garden.

This is an amazing piece of information, and deserves the widest possible distribution.  Criminologists should extensively study these numbers, because the sample size is so massive, over such a long period of time that it simply cannot be ignored.

The message that we derive from this is clear: criminals are already as disarmed as they are likely to get. 

Further gun control will disproportionately effect the law-abiding, making them more vulnerable to criminals.

What Kerry must have been thinking

The Posse hasn't had an opportunity to comment in the troop-bashing remarks by John Kerry until now, and most of the good zingers have already been used.

We therefore have decided to put on our Roger L. Simon hat and try to get inside the mind of the junior senator from Massachusetts.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that Kerry has been completely obsessed with his limited service in Vietnam.  He really believes that his 90 days of commanding a motorboat have invested him with the military expertise of Napoleon, Clausewitz and Patton combined.  (Yes, we purposefully left out great naval commanders because Kerry's advice is entirely about land-based operations).

Now it is possible, as James Lileks suggests, that Kerry was really trying to throw a brick at President George W. Bush, but was simply too daft to do it.  If that is the case, it was just as idiotic, since a man with an MBA from Harvard is hardly someone who let educational opportunities "pass him by."  In fact, Bush is one of the most highly educated Presidents we've ever had - and the first Harvard MBA to serve in the Oval Office.

More to the point, it fits with Kerry's patrician views of the military - views that his service no doubt reinforced.  This Boston Brahmin could not help but look down on the scum under his command.  Let us recall that the Navy has the sharpest divisions between officer and enlisted.  There is little question that old school Yankees (and Ivy Leaguers, at that) probably yielded to none - not even Naval Academy graduates - in terms of snobbery to the lower ranks.

John Kerry was never the kind of officer to have a beer with his men.  Hell, he didn't even know what was on the menu at Wendy's.  His experience with conscripts in the Vietnam era coupled with his Navy mentality meant that he truly felt nothing but condescension for the enlisted ranks - and the Army was clearly the bottom of the barrel.

Think about it.  The Army/Navy rivalry runs deep, and it was no accident that soon to be drafted Kerry decided he'd rather wear dress whites in the wardroom than hunker down in a muddy foxhole.

Modern research tells us Kerry was wrong even then: the average Vietnam soldier was reasonably well educated and most were actually volunteers.  Still, the stereotype was there and from Kerry's vantage point - the electrical closet of a coastal destroyer followed by three hectic months on the rivers far from major Army installations - there was nothing to prove it wrong.

Which brings us to the Winter Soldier Project.  Kerry's electoral rehabilitation brought in a bumper crop of fakes, frauds and liars, but they all reinforced Kerry's notion that Army soldiers are low-class scum.

Now let us recall that most of what we believe, what we know to be true, comes from what we have experienced personally.  Facts from books are all well and good, but nothing rivals knowledge gained first hand.  For example, if one reads that Toyotas are the most reliable vehicle, but one's own experience of owning one was negative (the thing never started, kept going back into the shop, finally died after only 30,000 miles), one will predictably conclude that Toyotas are in fact crappy cars and the surveys are wrong.

Kerry's experience of war was that the smart ones avoided it.  When they couldn't avoid it, they arranged the safest possible billets.  When those went away, they set themselves up to be heroes.

This, after all, was what Kerry himself did.

Kerry doens't care that today's volunteers aren't like yesterday's conscripts.  He knows what he knows.

The same arrogance that causes him to state that three months' service on a riverine patrol now makes him a grand strategist also leads him to this iron-clad conclusion: no one in their right mind volunteers for the infantry in wartime.

To Kerry, fighting in Iraq is a job for the desperate or stupid.  And that is exactly what he said, and what he meant.

Channels of communication

Due to a recent spam attack, the Posse was forced to require registration for comments.

However, since the attack has abated, we are pleased to announced that comments are once again open for the masses.