Neocon Gun Grabbers: Second Amendment Allows Restrictions

From http://www.truthnews.us/?p=1668

Neocon Gun Grabbers: Second Amendment Allows Restrictions
Kurt Nimmo
Truth News
January 15, 2008

In Bushzarro world, up is down, black is white, and the Second Amendment permits the government to make firearm possession illegal.

“Since ‘unrestricted’ private ownership of guns clearly threatens the public safety, the 2nd Amendment can be interpreted to allow a variety of gun restrictions, according to the Bush administration,” reports . “The argument was delivered by U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement in a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in the ongoing arguments over the legality of a District of Columbia ban on handguns in homes, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times.”

Clement was an understudy of the neocon Laurence H. Silberman, a federal judge appointed co-chair of the Iraq Intelligence Commission — the official excuse making body designated to minimize the impact of neocon lies about Iraq — and the reactionary Supreme Antonin Scalia, a member of the Federalist Society, a fascist club aligned with the American Enterprise Institute, the CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife, and a smattering of neocons, including Bill Kristol, the latest edition to the “liberal” New York Times. “Clement clerked for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and worked as chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights. He joined the Department of Justice in 2001 and moved into his current position in 2005.”

“Clement is the Bush administration’s chief lawyer before the court, and submitted the arguments in the case that is to determine whether the D.C. limit is constitutional. He said the 2nd Amendment, ‘protects an individual right to possess firearms, including for private purposes unrelated to militia operations,’ and noted the D.C. ban probably goes too far,” WorldNetDaily continues.

However, Clement argues that nothing “in the 2nd Amendment properly understood… calls for invalidation of the numerous federal laws regulating firearms.” In other words, according to Clement and the neocons, you have a right to possess firearms under the Constitution while at the same time the government has the right to make possession of firearms illegal. In Bushzarro world, up is down, black is white, and Orwellian doublethink – the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously – rules the day.

It should come as no surprise the neocons are gun-grabbers while at the same time claiming to be conservatives. “Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” the neocon sock puppet Bush told Republican Congressional leaders back in 2005 when some of them complained about the USA Patriot Act. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

Neocon guru Leo Strauss “abhorred liberal democracy,” not the modern version of lefty liberalism, but classic liberalism, i.e., natural rights of the sort at the bedrock of the Constitution. He engendered this hatred of individual rights in his followers, including Allan Bloom, Henry Jaffa, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, and many others, a handful now at the very pinnacle of power and pulling Bush’s strings. Strauss’ vision was of “a hierarchical society based on natural inequalities and welded together with the fanatical devotion state religion engenders,” writes Michael Doliner.

Strauss’s political program is designed to counter the ills of liberalism. He believed in, and proposed, a state religion as a way of reviving absolutes, countering free thought, and enforcing a cohesive unity. Strauss argued against a society containing a multiplicity of coexisting religions and goals, which would break the society apart. He thought that ordinary people should not be exposed to reason. To rely on reason is to look into the abyss, for reason provided no comforting absolutes to shield one against the blank sky. Strauss opposed not reason itself, but reason stripped of its secrecy. Reason is for the few, not the many. The Enlightenment, the exposing of reason, was the beginning of the disaster. A reliance on reason, as opposed to religion, produced “modernity” which is nothing more than nihilism made political.

Jeffrey Steinberg expands on this:

The hallmark of Strauss’ approach to philosophy was his hatred of the modern world, his belief in a totalitarian system, run by “philosophers,” who rejected all universal principles of natural law, but saw their mission as absolute rulers, who lied and deceived a foolish “populist” mass, and used both religion and politics as a means of disseminating myths that kept the general population in clueless servitude. For Strauss and all of his protégés (Strauss personally had 100 Ph.D. students, and the “Straussians” now dominate most university political science and philosophy departments), the greatest object of hatred was the United States itself, which they viewed as nothing better than a weak, pathetic replay of “liberal democratic” Weimar Germany.

It stands to reason, then, that the hated, resented, and feared masses should be stripped of all rights, including the bedrock right promised by the Second Amendment, as they may eventually come to their senses, abandon Faux News and propaganda catapulted, storm the castle, and bring the warmongering and liberty hating protégés of Strauss to justice.

As Hitler, Mao, and Stalin realized — in fact as all dictators and tyrants understand — in order to run roughshod over the people and enslave them, you have to disarm them first and foremost.

It is the job of U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement to begin this process.