Wiretap: The latest NRA position is that guns don’t kill, they fight off the ‘socialist wave’

As the gun-violence argument seems to taking hold, the NRA seems to be shifting its argument. If you watched the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre at the CPAC conference, writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, he was basically saying that the right to own a gun is its own argument against the “socialist wave.” As Gopnik put it, LaPierre’s argument is that you are the gun that you own.

The students at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland took their first tentative steps in returning to school Sunday. They came by the thousands — students and parents — to reconnect and to hug and to begin what school administrators are calling a “phased reopening.” Students are scheduled to return for classes on Wednesday. Via The New York Times.

The controversy over the Parkland shooting is both political and personal for Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, whose department is now at the center of a state investigation. Via The Miami Herald.

From a National Review editorial with the headline “Broward’s Cowards,” the editors argue that Sheriff Israel should resign or be fired.

The Democratic rebuttal to the Nunes Memo was released Saturday afternoon, the timing of which is the only good news for Devin Nunes, the California Republican who wrote the infamous document. In his rebuttal, Adam Schiff, the California Democrat, wrote that Nunes’ memo was rife with “distortions and misrepresentations.” That was the nice way to put it. And then Schiff went about making his case, tearing up, and tearing into, the document piece by piece. Via Vox.

Now that Rick Gates has cut a deal with Robert Mueller, it’s obvious to everyone that Paul Manafort is cooked — with the one possible exception being Paul Manafort. There are at least two Manafort questions yet to be answered: When will see he’s out of options and what happens when he does see that? Via The Atlantic.

Two takes in The Washington Post on why conservatism in the Trump era has changed dramatically for the worse and how the Republican Party has gone along for the ride — one from the right by Max Boot and one from the left by E.J. Dionne.

Mona Charen: I’m glad I got booed at CPAC. Via The New York Times.

This may not surprise you, but a New York Times report shows the web of conservative donors who have been the critical force in taking a key anti-labor case to the Supreme Court. If the unions lose, it will be a blow not only to labor but also, of course, to the Democratic Party.

Go to California if you want to see the Democrats’ Bernie-ite base in action. At the state Democratic convention,  activists blocked a party endorsement for California Sen. Dianne Feinstein , who is running for her fifth full term. She is being challenged in a primary by state Senate leader Kevin de Leon, who is running to her left on issues like universal healthcare and free college tuition. Via The Los Angeles Times.

In an essay for Vanity Fair, Monica Lewinsky  is writing in gratitude for the #MeToo movement and says she is beginning — just beginning, she admits — to understand the implications of the power differential between the president of the United States and an intern.

Photo by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr: Creative Commons. NRA executive vice-president and chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland.

3 COMMENTS

  1. The commies are a-comin’! And the only way to fight them off is with weapons of war – AR-15’s with large capacity magazines, hollow-point bullets, bump stocks and silencers. And you should have enough of these weapons to supply your entire dinner party in case those commies come knocking on your door and accosting you with pamphlets during a dinner party or back yard barbeque!

    I’m not sure how you fight ideas with bullets, but maybe that’s what happened to JFK, MLK, and RFK.

    It breaks my heart to watch our country go down the drain like this. We were the leaders of the free world at one time.

  2. This should surprise, well, no one but Democrats fervor for gun control is apparently contingent on (gasp) politics. Writing in The Hill Amie Parnes and Mike Lillis ”(Support for an expansion of background checks) is a delicate one for party leaders hoping to flip both chambers in this year’s midterm elections by defeating Republicans in conservative-leaning districts where tougher gun laws can be radioactive.”

    http://thehill.com/homenews/house/374961-dems-want-gun-control-but-worry-it-could-cost-them-midterms

    The Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 50% of likely U.S. Voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. Forty-nine percent (49%) disapprove.

    http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/trump_administration/prez_track_feb23

    The shamefully biased CNN anti-gun town hall was, according to David Harsanyi, “an event where a student could compare Sen. Marco Rubio to a mass murderer and question whether NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch truly cares about her children without ever being challenged.” In other words, another quintessential CNN event.

    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/02/23/cnns_shameful_town_hall_is_a_clarifying_moment_on_guns_136351.html

    The liberal media meltdown continues: First CNN’s Van Jones compares the NRA to the KKK and then, unwilling to be outdone, MSNBC hosts Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle compare President Trump’s CPAC speech to speeches reminiscent of Fidel Castro and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

    https://townhall.com/tipsheet/laurettabrown/2018/02/23/cnns-van-jones-for-young-people-nra-is-like-the-kkk-n2453005
    https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/scott-whitlock/2018/02/23/msnbc-freaks-lying-trumps-strange-speech-was-dictators-cuba

    The National Review’s Conrad Black believes “It is both dismal and amusing to see the rationalizations of the diehard Kremlin collusionists after Robert Mueller’s spurious indictment of the 13 Russians who will never encounter the vagaries of U.S. justice. It is all, and always has been, nonsense.”

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/exit-pursuing-a-bear/

    An Investor’s Business Daily editorial claims, “For more than a year, Democrats have been pushing the story that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. But the evidence keeps piling up indicating that it was Democrats, wittingly or not, who’ve been helping Russia achieve its real meddling goals.”

    https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/mueller-investigation-13-indictments-trump-russia-collusion/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PoliticRss+%28Politic+RSS%29

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