ATTORNEY GENERAL DESIGNATE Alberto Gonzales has told the Senate he supports renewing the federal assault weapons ban, thereby confirming the anti-Second Amendment stance that was first reported by The Washington Post the day after President Bush announced Gonzales' nomination. (Click here for my archives that include a link to the WaPo story.) Once again my suspicions are confirmed.

Nor am I the least bit surprised. While I fervently believe in the Constitutional correctness of Attorney General John Ashcroft's position – that the right protected by the Second Amendment is indeed an individual right – I have also long been convinced that Bush tolerated Ashcroft's stance merely to seduce gun-owners: that in reality Bush is every bit as anti-gun as John Kerry or even Barbara Boxer. Proof of my accusation was apparent early-on in the Bush Administration's malicious (and ongoing) obstruction of the Congressionally mandated Armed Pilots Program. Anti-Second Amendment bias was also obvious in Bush's appointment and re-appointment of Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta (a notorious anti-gunner) and in Bush’s original Homeland Security appointment of Tom Ridge, another known Second Amendment opponent who as a congressman cast a decisive vote to enact the original "assault weapons" ban.

The latest story on Gonzales' hostility to the Second Amendment, which appeared in The Washington Times yesterday and is now on the National Rifle Association's web site, is here.

Bush's deceptive and deliberately dishonest flip-flopping on the Second Amendment makes me increasingly distrustful of everything he says and does. I know the Bush Administration is lying about the urgency for Social Security reform – an outrageous, crisis-mongering Big Lie told in service to the vicious right-wing passion for wrecking the entire social safety net, a vindictive, greedy rage that has simmered in the Republican Party's ideological cesspool since the time of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So perhaps the Democrats are right: perhaps the Bush Administration knowingly lied about Iraq too.

And I cannot but wonder what else Gonzales has said or done that the mainstream media is suppressing, whether by deliberate censorship or misguided political "correctness." Such as Michelle Malkin's disturbing report that "Gonzales was (and may still be) a member of the National Council of La Raza, the nation's leading anti-immigration enforcement lobbying group" ("Bush's Open-Borders Nominees," Jan. 17, 2005, for which click here and scroll down.)

(Not at all what I had planned to write today: I had intended to reminisce about living in deep country and how I so desperately miss it, even the long wait for the return of the swallows who every year in late spring and early summer raised their families under my eves, but once again the need to confront the ugly politics of Enron Nation has taken precedence over aesthetics, spirituality and contemplation.)

Posted by: Loren at 06:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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