armed liberal

It’s not politically correct for one as left-leaning as I am to admit to owning guns. I do, though. Lots of them. I didn’t come to this point on my own, though I was brought up in the home of a WWII vet, a gun collector, who took me with him to Saturday morning target practice at the VFW.

There I learned how to handle a gun, how to clean it, how to be safe. I was just a child, but there was none of the nervous nelly “what about the children???” attitude we get these days. Guns were a fact of my life growing up. At 17, a newly wild-eyed radical, I donned the full cloak of hard left liberalism, including the mandatory abhorrence of weaponry, and righteously insisted that all guns should be confiscated or, at the very least, registered to death.

In the last 15 years, I’ve changed. It started when I went with my partner to Wyoming, where all of his relatives were packing pistols. It was a culture shock and I drew myself up in my good liberal outrage, clambered to the top of smug mountain and expressed my displeasure. They looked at me as if I were mad and shook their heads and continued going armed into the world.

A few years later, at a loss for a birthday gift, I bought my sweetheart a Colt .38 Special and a box of bullets. A Wyoming boy, he felt more secure with a gun in the house. Over time, more guns came: rifles, shotguns, more pistols. I now have pistols in my warehouse, where I often work alone at night in the back of the building, 300 feet from any door. The fact of it, having a gun handy, allowed me to eject one of the crackheads who occasionally come looking for work. Most of them I hire, but this one turned aggressive and violent almost immediately and I was glad ~ yes, glad ~ to have a gun nearby that I could use to make him move.

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Today’s Must Read..

An interesting, thought provoking piece at The New Republic today on why the left isn’t firmly behind Obama. A short blurb:

‘The relationship is frosty,” explains Micah Sifry, cofounder of techPresident, a blog that focuses on the interaction between candidates and the Web. “At various points in the campaign, Obama has said or done things that have antagonized progressive bloggers”–from calling Social Security a “crisis” to criticizing New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “I think his instincts are liberal, but his governing style may not be,” says Open Left blogger Matt Stoller, adding that Obama’s readiness to embrace conservatives and chastise his allies on the left have caused many bloggers to wonder how strongly he would fight for liberal priorities as president. “The point is,” Stoller adds, “I’m not sure. And this has been accentuated by the fact that no one [from the campaign] is talking to us.” 

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The DCCC, DLC, and the Clintons

Just for starters let me say I am registered as “Decline to State” and have been for what seems like forever; I have, however, voted for Democrats 99 percent of the time. The other one percent, as an example, was when I filled in my cat’s name instead of voting for Kerry, and I haven’t voted for Dianne Feinstein’s tired ass in the last three congressional election cycles.

So with that out of the way, let me get to the point, which is this:

The Democratic party and specifically Hillary Clinton aren’t ‘our friends’. By ‘our’, I mean progressives or the old-fashioned word, liberals. The Democratic party is controlled largely by folks who look out for the interests of big business because, after all is said and done, Big Bidness has all the money. To keep getting reelected you have to keep those coffers filled, don’t ya know? Getting into bed with the Corporatocracy eases that pain quite a bit. Now, publicly funded elections might change all that… but that is for another time and rant.

Many of the grassroots candidates were such because the DCCC didn’t see fit to send any appreciable cash their way. That sure as hell says “We LOVE ya,” don’t it? Some Democrats who ran for office lost only because the DCCC didn’t help them out, using the tried-and-true excuse of “Gee, we are low on funds and have to squeeze every penny we got into the for sure races,” or flat out decided to support the more ‘moderate’ candidate. If Kos and other folks had not done a fair amount of fund raising, there were other candidates that wouldn’t have made it to Congress, too. Now, you might want some proof that what I just said is true, and I could land a boatload of links on you here and there, but the bottom line is, a real progressive knows I am not bullshitting them.

The DLC should be known as the Clintons’ Personal PAC as far as I can tell. It’s no surprise that Bill Clinton and his wife are big supporters of this bunch since the Clintons seem to reap the most from the cash register at the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC); after all, Bill used to be the head cheese there, you see. The DLC likes to label itself as ‘moderate’, and the truth be told, that very same DLC really hates the progressives. They think we want to control the agenda, which wouldn’t bode well for rich folks and Big Corporations.

They are right. We do want to wrestle the power away from them. Damn skippy mutha fuckas.

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