The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Civil War or Uncivil Peace

Posted on | November 11, 2010 | 13 Comments

My colleague deploys to defend our freedom recalling the stoic song of Scottish courage:

War or peace, it’s all the same to me.
I’ll be killed in the war or hung during peace.

Or, as that same dauntless spirit was once expressed on a famous battlefield: “Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer!”

It happened that, earlier today, I received a tersely mystifying e-mail from another warrior, my friend Allen West:

It is with deep regret that this Congressional office and the people of CD 22 will not have Joyce Kaufman as my Chief of Staff. Joyce is a good friend, and will remain loyal to South Floridians and to me. I will always seek Joyce’s counsel for being a good Representative of this Congressional District.

What was this about? Who is Joyce Kaufman? Why was this staffing decision being announced via an e-mail from the West campaign office? A bit of research revealed that her hiring had been announced Tuesday:

A proud Puerto Rican Jew, Kaufman became a de facto spokeswoman for South Florida’s anti-illegal immigration movement in 2007. . . .
“Her 20 years of experience on the political scene in South Florida (always as a radio host) will give me helpful insights and perspective,” Tea Party fave West told Page2Live Monday night. “As chief of staff, she’ll be my right-hand person. “
A screaming liberal Democrat turned independent, Kaufman also gave West plenty airtime as he ran against Democrat Ron Klein in 2008 and this year. West is believed to have been on Kaufman’s show more than 100 times.

That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow did a hit job on Kaufman:

A media dogpile ensued and today Kaufman announced she would resign as chief of staff rather than be used as a weapon against West. But watch that video and ask yourself, what’s wrong with what Joyce Kaufman said?

“I am convinced that the most important thing the Founding Fathers did to ensure me my First Amendment rights was they gave me a Second Amendment. And if ballots don’t work, bullets will. . . . [S]ome things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth dying for.”

Does anyone disagree? Or is there nothing worth fighting and dying for?

And isn’t it true that the Founding Fathers specifically intended the Second Amendment as the ultimate guarantor of our liberty?

A friend of mind down home is a ranking police officer. He once told me that Americans have three means of redressing our grievances: The soap box, the ballot box and the cartridge box. So long as we have the first two — free speech and free elections — there is no need to resort to the third.

In point of fact, the stupendous success of Allen West and other Republicans at the ballot box has averted the scenario in which Joyce Kaufman felt she would be justified in going into the wilderness to form an armed resistance.

While you or I may disagree with her justification,who can doubt that the concerns she expressed were shared by millions of Americans? And who can doubt that, upon learning that Republicans had won a House majority, many of those millions breathed a sigh of relief, encouraged to believe that with men like Allen West in Congress perhaps there might yet be hope for the peaceful preservation of our liberty?

Ms. Maddow smirks as if Joyce Kaufman is self-evidently loony, as if there were not in this country many millions of people who are in deadly earnest about their desire to preserve our constitutional republic. A few months ago, after Nancy Pelosi rammed through the health-care bill — despite the clear “no” heard from Massachusetts on Jan. 19 — a friend of mine sent me an e-mail. This friend is not some militia kook, but is in fact a well-respected attorney. And in that e-mail, my friend said that our only hope now was that Texas would secede from the Union.

He was absolutely serious.

What my attorney friend said, and what Joyce Kaufman said, must be seen as a reaction to the evident desire of the Nancy Pelosis and Rachel Maddows of the world to impose their own preferred mode of living — in accordance with the norms of the affluent urban elite “Ruling Class,” as Professor Angelo Codevilla has called it — on the rest of the country.

The Culture War, as it has been called, has never been an effort by the Religious Right (or any other Right) to compel the folks of New York and San Francisco to live according to the norms of Tulsa, Topeka or Tullahoma. Rather, conservatives of what Professor Codevilla calls the “Country Class” have fought to defend their own folkways against the relentless aggressions of the cultural Left. (God bless the Alabama dildo ban!) And yet this struggle has been purposefully mischaracterized by the political/media axis of the Left, so as to frighten people into thinking that voting Republican is only for holy-roller hicks and bigots.

Now, of course, Rachel Maddow wants her viewers to believe that these hicks and bigots are violent hicks and bigots. Never mind that criminal violence is an ever-present danger in the very cities where Ms. Maddow’s liberal friends exercise dominant political power. And never mind that Maddow doesn’t seem much concerned about defending Americans against Islamic jihadi violence or Mexican drug-gang violence.

Never mind any of that, says Maddow: What you really need to be afraid of is . . . Joyce Kaufman.

How long can people be deceived? H0w stupid does Rachel Maddow think her viewers are?

As a student of history, I consider war an evil to be avoided where possible, and I know that no war is so terrible and so terrifying as a civil war. It is therefore the duty of statesmen to do all in their power to preserve peace. Certainly, lawless violence — the terroristic acts of paranoid kooks and moody loners — should be discouraged, prevented and condemned. Leon Czolgosz, Lee Harvey Oswald and Squeaky Fromme were not conservatives.

Peace must be preserved, but conservatives believe in peace through strength and an armed citizenry remains the bulwark of liberty, so that those who might wish to infringe our rights cannot do so without the expectation of resistance.

As Jehuda the Rhetorican replied to Ted Rall: Bring it, Comrade.

UPDATE: “It’s not a double standard. It’s The Party line.”

Category: Allen West, Florida, MSNBC

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