A.J. DiCintio
Liberals attack gun essay with arrogance, omissions
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By A.J. DiCintio
February 3, 2013

In reacting to "Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm" (dailybeast.com/newsweek), a number of liberal commentators have assaulted not just the essay but author David Mamet with the contemptible pretension worthy of the first leftist who had himself carted to the top of the town's highest hill so that looking down on his fellow citizens, he could proclaim the superiority of his "scientifically" derived beliefs to the world.

Luckily, Michael Tomasky's critique (thedailybeast.com) serves as a model for the whole mess of diatribes and therefore saves a lot of time for anyone who takes on the task of exposing and commenting upon their shameless arrogance and omissions.

However, before getting in my two cents on the issue, I should point out that the vitriol aimed at Mamet is not surprising; for the word "gun" alone is capable of sending liberals flailing in the irrational vortex of a finger pointing, statist loving panic attack.

Yet, in this instance, the intensity suggests that something in addition to Mamet's thoughts about guns offended the liberal psyche. But I'll get to that later.

So, how much of the "little more listening" and the whole lot more thoughtful thinking that Obama conveniently forgot to mention in his advice to "advocates of gun control" is evident in Tomasky's response?

Well, very little, a fact we realize immediately after reading its first few words, which deride Mamet's piece as nothing more than a "bizarre rant" whose "optimal word count" should have been "zero."

Then, there's Tomasky's sarcastic allowance that Mamet could have cut the essay to four words, specifically, "Me really angry man."

Actually, that lame put-down is deplorably incomplete, though the author makes up for his laziness in the last paragraph by adding "rich" and "white" to it, thereby, with the introduction of class warfare, self-loathing, and race/ethnicity baiting, coming closer to the true amalgam of behaviors and attitudes that define the modern liberal.

This initial incompleteness sets the example for the rest of the piece, in which Tomasky subjects Mamet's ideas and observations to arguments whose glaring, calculated omissions would likely be exposed and ridiculed by fifth graders, certainly by their schoolmates a year older.

For instance, in response to the observation that Obama has accepted protection by armed guards for life, Tomasky ignores its full meaning as he mocks Mamet without offering a word about the real world and every human being's "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Once again, no surprise, for liberals always turn up their statist noses at Jeffersonian individualism, a truth that explains why for the past sixty years this nation has been subjected to innumerable sickening incidents in which liberals have reacted to a person who used a gun against an aggressor in the home, at work, or on the street with hand-wringing angst that worries about disregard for the criminal's "rights" and issues perverse interrogatories regarding whether the victim availed himself or herself of an "avenue of escape" or used "excessive" force.

In another, particularly treacherous, omission, Tomasky joins the likes of Dennis Kucinich, who at every opportunity invokes the 2008 Heller case in his new gig at Fox News.

So it is that he spouts the latest lying liberal meme, which is that liberals believe in an individual's right to "bear Arms," when he lectures that Mamet is free to purchase his own handguns or hire "an armed body person[sic]."

(Holy Mother of Reason! In the dictatorially arrogant, neurotically self-flagellating world of liberal PC, even the term "bodyguard" carries negative connotations of gender!)

However, what Tomasky, Kucinich, and other liberals never say about the right established in Heller is that the case was decided 5-4, with all four of the Court's liberals vigorously maintaining that the Second Amendment confers no individual right to bear any kind of "Arms" whatsoever.

They never mention that in his dissenting opinion, joined by the other three liberals, Justice Stevens incredibly argues that "the Framers [never] intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution."

They never mention that the Court's two "empathic" Obama-nominated liberals as well as any other liberal justice the president may propose will, unless hell freezes over, agree with the minority in the case.

They never mention that if their beloved Supreme Court Empath Wing gains a fifth vote, every state will be free to prohibit individual ownership of any kind of weapon.

And liberals never mention that on Second Amendment questions, they agree entirely with the Court's liberal activists.

But what's the betrayal of intellectual honesty to ideologues who take their cue from the leftist principle that demands everything be subordinated to advancing "the revolution."

Which brings me to the something else that has sent liberals spewing venom at David Mamet:

Specifically, it's that he opens his essay by warning against voraciously big, mightily centralized government because in such a doomed-to-fail society, it is the plague upon humanity called politicians who will make the decisions about Marx's dictum, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

Now, every human being who knows just a little bit of history and is lucky to be at least somewhat in his or her right mind perceives Karl Marx as a megalomaniacal, human rights hating, pathologically arrogant power loving freak whose ideas have brought the world a universe of pain, including that suffered by millions of captive college students who have been tortured by the blustering oxymoronic buffoons who call themselves "Marxist" professors, novelists, poets, etc.

But to liberals Marx is one of history's most beloved, most important thinkers, explaining why Mamet's opening words leap from the page like Odysseus' hot poker, hissing and exploding their way not just through the liberal eye but full into the brain.

That reality explains why Tomasky gets into such a snit over the essay's introduction that he feels a compulsion to lecture Mamet that he "gets his Marx wrong" because "The famous offending diktat. . . would not. . . be enforced by the state [for it] wouldn't really kick in until the state had withered away and the proletariat itself was calling the shots."

Ah, the supremely stupid notion that the elites of a "temporary" dictatorship's politburo, troika, central committee, or gang of four will allow the people to call the shots.

Liberals will never admit it, but they, too, believe the best of all possible worlds has a small group of elites forever soothing the savage breasts of the proletariat.

That's why in their dearest dream for this nation, they enact thousands of individualism-stifling laws and issue thousands of "activist" Supreme Court decisions, all of them, of course, enforced by a million governmental guns.

© A.J. DiCintio

 

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A.J. DiCintio

A.J. DiCintio posts regularly at RenewAmerica and YourNews.com. He first exercised his polemical skills arguing with friends on the street corners of the working class neighborhood where he grew up. Retired from teaching, he now applies those skills, somewhat honed and polished by experience, to social/political affairs.

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