Tag: Steve Scalise

“It’s all about the f***in’ attitude…”

It’s probably been a decade or so, but once upon a time I picked up a used CD at a store that sold such things called “Full Bluntal Nugity.” As you may be able to guess, I’m a fan of Ted Nugent’s music and this album was a recording of a “Whiplash Bash” New Year’s Eve live performance he did many years ago in Detroit. The phrase in my title was a joking reference Nugent made to how he did his songwriting as part of the expletive-filled banter between songs. (I like Ted, but let me tell you the dude could make a sailor blush. Maybe he’s mellowed out a little bit as he approaches the age of 70?)

But what triggered me to think of the phrase (and I realize in this day and age that’s a loaded word) was the Scalise shooting that’s almost a month gone by now. (I actually didn’t intend the puns at first, but stuck with them.) With the schedule I keep these days I have less time for writing but I still have time to read social media, and on that medium I often check out what the Left has to say more than what my peeps on the Right have to say. And as is predictable in these cases, their sentiments often broke down into two categories, and generally without the fig leaf of well wishes for the victims that the politicians had to put up.

On the one hand, you had the crowd who thought the Republicans deserved this as karma for trying to take away people’s health care by repealing Obamacare. Setting aside the obvious fallacy of that mindset of deserving anything bad to happen to them for any action that’s legal – and, I would argue, more in accordance with the intention of those who founded our nation – the reality of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) is that it’s a work in progress and there’s still going to be way more government involvement in our healthcare than there should be. Remember, many of the provisions that characterized Obamacare were untouched by the AHCA. Moreover, there are several states rushing to fill the gaps they perceive in the AHCA so their laws will likely supplement the federal regulations.

The other side of the coin was the usual banshee-like cry for more gun control, and this is the part I want to spend most of this post addressing. Like many people around this area, we are gun owners. Members of our family went out of their way to be legal gun owners, as a matter of fact, because they strive to be law-abiding citizens.

Those weapons that we have, however, even if they were laying around loaded, would not hurt anyone because (and I realize this is a stunning revelation to some) guns are inanimate objects. I could pull a handgun out of its safe place in our house, lay it in front of me, and stare at it for hours – it’s going to just sit there. No one will be injured. The only risk of someone being injured from that gun would be the exceptionally unlikely events of one of our cats knocking it off our table and it falling just the right way to discharge; meanwhile the random line of fire would have to actually strike someone.

So as the events unfolded in Alexandria and we learned more about the mindset of shooter James Hodgkinson, a 66-year-old retired home inspector from Illinois who identified himself as a leftist and supporter of Bernie Sanders for president last year, we once again saw the Right blamed for actions a member of the Left was participating in. But let’s look at two basic facts regarding the shooter here: he was born in 1951 and came of age in the Illinois town in which he last permanently lived.

Thus, Hodgkinson grew up in an era when he could have been sent to Vietnam, could have gone to Woodstock (although it appears he did neither), lived through Watergate and the energy crisis as a young adult, and was approaching middle age during the Reagan Revolution. Whatever the case, his story ended as he was living out of a van several hundred miles from home and hanging around a local YMCA, according to this somewhat sympathetic Washington Post feature. While he was married, Hodgkinson had a violent past and perhaps became moreso as he aged, regardless, the question has to be asked: what made him believe he was justified in picking up a rifle to attempt to kill people who presented no physical threat to him?

Moreover, one also has to ponder what Hodgkinson would have accomplished had he mowed down the entire field of Congressmen: would that have scared the remainder into inaction or simply redoubled their resolve? Maybe it would have been a moment not unlike the days after 9/11 or the Oklahoma City bombing, when Americans turned introspective regarding their place in the world. The AHCA may have been shelved for a time, but likely would have returned after the wave of special elections made necessary by the slaughter of Congressional membership, with most of the seats likely remaining in GOP hands and Democrats perhaps paralyzed by having to run campaigns against a wave of sympathy.

I don’t believe for a second that access to guns is the problem in this nation. Instead, I think what we need to access a better sense of morality, beginning with a newfound respect for life. Hodgkinson lived most of his adult life under the rules of Roe v. Wade, and ironically enough spent many years as a foster parent – so he dealt with a number of children who were deemed expendable by their parents. Just days before I began writing this piece in the wake of the Alexandria shooting last month, our city of Salisbury was rocked by two shootings in one night that left two men dead in separate incidents less than an hour apart – then last night two other men were gunned down at a local Denny’s restaurant.

You keep hearing about these gatherings where we are told violence is not the answer, but that message is being drowned out in a cacophony of cultural and political references:

(Respectively, Barack Obama reputedly paraphrasing the 1987 movie “The Untouchables”, Obama adviser Jim Messina, and Donald Trump.)

So which side is winning here? Is it the side with the attitude that life is something that should be treasured and preserved, and that differences in philosophy aren’t so great or insurmountable that they can generally be worked out with patient discourse and a little bit of compromise if it achieves something that’s good for everyone?

Or is it the side that takes the first sign of disrespect as the cue for escalating violence because it’s what they were taught and encouraged to do?

Whichever is the case, there is only one person over whom you have full control, and that is yourself. You determine your own attitude, so perhaps this is a good time to discuss turning the other cheek. I give you not just the verse (which comes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount) but some context as well.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.

And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.

Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:38-48, KJV)

How you approach life and how you approach others is the one thing you have control over. A good attitude can go a long way in making things better, but that is also something which needs to be encouraged in the culture by turning away from those who would tell you otherwise. Heck, even Nugent himself pledged to tone things down in the wake of the Alexandria incident and if he can follow through so can the rest of us. It truly is about the attitude.

The soul of the GOP

By Cathy Keim

I wrote a piece on Thursday night about John Boehner’s upcoming problem with the continuing resolution. To my surprise, Speaker Boehner announced on Friday morning that he would resign at the end of October. He claims that he had the votes to survive Rep. Mark Meadows’ (R-NC) motion to vacate the chair, but we will never know now if that was true.

At his resignation press conference he stated:

But more than anything, my first job is — as Speaker, is to protect the institution.

He seemed to think that by resigning he was protecting the institution. Actually, I believe that he was not protecting the institution by his continual acquiescing to President Obama’s desires, nor has he stopped the infighting amongst the House members by his resignation.

His self-deception will continue, it appears. In the corporate world when an employee is terminated, they are often escorted to the door immediately. Here, the Speaker is resigning before he can be fired, but he has decided to hang around for another month to help with the transition and has already said that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) would be a good Speaker of the House.

Since he is resigning due to conflict, perhaps it would be better if he left posthaste and didn’t try to influence the election of the next Speaker.

Here is my original piece. I still think that many of the points are worth reading since Boehner’s resignation has not fixed anything. Unless a new Speaker is elected that will replace the failed GOP leadership model, then there will be no improvement and the conflict between the conservative and moderate GOP House members will continue.

(Editor’s note: I slightly revised the original piece to refer to Boehner in the past tense as appropriate.)

Original piece:

It is possible that we are seeing the end of the Republican Party. We are rapidly approaching another continuing resolution battle where the fight is between two factions of the GOP rather than between the Democrats and the Republicans. The conservative portion of the House of Representatives would like to stand up and fight even to the point of shutting down the government. The mainstream portion would prefer that they go along to get along.

There are two potential sources of members refusing to go along with the party line: the Defund Planned Parenthood group and the no to Syrian refugee resettlement group (both of which may overlap.)

We may have to call this the Carly Fiorina dilemma: shut the government down to stop the attack on our physical security by importing thousands of Syrians who cannot be vetted by the FBI to ensure that they are not jihadists or shut down the government to stop the destruction of our moral character by the killing of our babies and selling their body parts for profit.

Personally, I am for attaching amendments to the CR to achieve both of these goals. However, as we have seen with the CRomnibus bill and numerous other opportunities, the leadership would rather throw in the towel before the fight begins than stand up to the President.

I am not a gambler, but as Kenny Rogers sang, “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.” Speaker Boehner seemed to have one policy and that was to fold ‘em and run away.

His refusal to fight resulted in the relinquishing of the power of the purse and the complete abandonment of any check on the executive branch of the government.

Speaker Boehner is leaving in part because he was in the unenviable position of being squeezed between the unhappy conservative members. If he insisted on the clean CR he would lose at least 50 conservative Republican votes – meaning he will need Democrat votes to pass his CR.

Had this come to pass, it would have caused Congressman Mark Meadows (R-NC) to call for his motion to vacate the chair. At that point, it is possible that the Speaker would have only been able to retain his position if he had support from the Democrats. He would have retained control as Speaker, but at the cost of being beholden to the opposition party for saving his speakership. There was even talk that Boehner would give subcommittee chairmanships to Democrats.

At some point, you have to ask, is it really worth being the Speaker of the House if it would require destroying your party to retain power? For Boehner, the answer was no.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-LA, is trying to woo the conservative bloc by offering to use reconciliation as a method to defund Planned Parenthood. Reconciliation only requires a simple majority, as we remember from the Obamacare fight. By using reconciliation, the amended CR could make it to President Obama’s desk, where he would promptly veto it and that would be the end of that since the GOP could not get the 67 votes necessary to override a veto.

So what does that get us? Nothing. Planned Parenthood would continue to receive 41% of its funding from taxpayers. Although they cannot directly use the money to fund abortions, we all know that they just shift money around and pretend that it didn’t enable them to do exactly what they want to do. PP would continue to abort babies. They would perform about 440,000 more abortions before President Obama would finish his last day in office.

If the GOP leadership would stand up and fight, there could be a chance to save some of those 440,000 babies. If they would refuse to allow thousand of “refugees” into the USA, they would not have to be concerned about jihadists gaining entry through the refugee programs.

Despite the clear and present danger to the lives of our unborn citizens and of violent jihadists gaining entry to our country, Speaker Boehner showed every sign of weepily folding without a fight. And by his staying through October, a grand bargain may well be set in motion.

Rather than hoping that the next president will be a Republican who will fix everything by undoing executive orders, I plead with our current leaders to do what we sent them to DC to do: fight.

Do not brag to me about how many bills you passed in the House when we all know they never made it through the Senate, so they never achieved anything. Stop passing bills that never go anywhere and get a strategy that will actually advance our cause. If we must shut the government down to get the president’s attention, then let’s do it. All essential personnel are required to work anyway, so the government never really shuts down.

This president has already shown his vindictive streak the last time there was a government shutdown when he “closed” the World War II Memorial and national parks. We know what he will do. Let’s prepare an offensive strategy.

We have many vocal Presidential candidates who can very ably make the case to the public that the President is the one that is shutting down the government by his veto. This may be the best possible time to have this battle since the Presidential candidates can use their public time to advance the cause.

Wouldn’t you like to see Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and even Donald Trump explain why we needed to pass the CR with the defund Planned Parenthood amendment and the no refugee amendment?

Speaker Boehner and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell should welcome the help since they have been silent far too long.