Pat Toomey is a
Pennsylvania senator who we all thought was a constitutionalist,
Tea-Party sort of conservative. Now, after his failed campaign to
enact a new scheme for expanded background checks on gun buyers, it
is clear he is no such thing. It happens. Guys go to Washington and
they forget why they were sent there, or they get duped by other
legislators and lobbyists into supporting things they don't
understand. Or they simply succumb to the
I'm-a-big-important-guy-and-the-people-who-elected-me-are-dopes
syndrome. In Toomey's case, it appears that all these things played
a role in his descent into Beltway thinking and Beltway culture.
If you support the right
of free Americans to bear arms, the Toomey-Manchin Amendment was a
truly dreadful bill. It did basically nothing about systematically
identifying loonies who should be denied guns. It did nothing about
felons obtaining guns illegally. It imposed enormous criminal
penalties on various types of private gun transfers that have never
been shown to cause any sort of problem. And, despite the
caterwauling of Toomey, Manchin, Obama, and a thousand newspapers
that no such a thing could ever happen, the bill would have allowed
the federal government to set up a national gun registry.
I know these things
because I read the amendment. It's not easy because there are
references to other laws and regulations and you have to find out
what those things say before you can understand exactly what the
Toomey-Manchin Amendment does. It took a couple of hours, and that
is time most people will not be willing to spend.
So here's a shortcut for
the time-challenged citizen.
When Pat Toomey started
speaking out in the press and in public forums to generate support
for his proposal, he did something he has never done before in his
public life. He started saying that his plan contained “common
sense” gun proposals. This is never a good sign. When a
politician, rather than telling you what the bill says or presenting
arguments for it, tells you what your conclusion must be, the only
rational response from the citizenry is to reject that politician's
proposal (and that politician as well). I mean, it takes some nerve
to do this, doesn't it? As a public servant, Toomey's job is to
present his legislation, explain it to me and present his arguments
in favor of it. But the conclusion is MY job. I'll decide whether
the bill is a good one or whether it's “common sense” or simply
nonsense. When a politician assumes a conclusion in this manner,
it's an insult to his audience. Are we fools? Are we morons? Are
we incapable of assessing data and weighing arguments and deciding
what we think?
Assuming one's conclusion,
or “begging the question,” was a cheap rhetorical trick when
Aristotle started bitching about it 2300 years ago (and it wasn't
exactly new when he showed up). Yet today, left-wing ideologues use
it constantly. I put “common sense gun control” in my browser and
got 68 million hits, and the first twenty pages of them were all from
Democratic politicians or left-wing newspapers. EVERY leftie does
this. Obama has not given a speech about guns in which he does not
refer to “common sense” gun laws. Pelosi does it. Bill Clinton
does it. Ed Rendell. Michael Nutter (constantly). Bloomberg (of
course). And now, sadly, we must add Pat Toomey to that list.
You have all seen these
phrases: “sensible laws,” “reasonable measures,”
“common-sense regulations.” The left does it because their
supporters don't care much about reasons or arguments; they just need
to be told what the right people are thinking. (You may have
noticed, for example, that approval for gay marriage has spiked
upwards among black voters now that Obama has changed his public
position on it. These folks were not persuaded to change their
minds---they simply “evolved” once Obama did.) The left is also
the home of the newly-identified low-information voter, a group that
is completely uninformed and highly opinionated. They have no time
for, or interest in, arguments or persuasion. The time required for
a slogan or bumper sticker is the measure of their attention span for
matters political. Arguments are wasted on them, but the phrase
“common-sense gun control” tells them all they need to know.
This is done with every
issue, not just gun control. The gay marriage issue is now called
the ”marriage equality” issue by the left, for example. This
turns it into a question solely of discrimination, and we all hate
discrimination, don't we? Suddenly it has nothing to do with
traditional values, the protection of children, inheritance law or
anything else. Similarly, regarding the treatment of captured
terrorists, the left tells us we need to decide whether we approve
of “torture.” We do not, of course, but neither are we entirely
certain that waterboarding or playing loud music fits the definition.
For most of us, that is the question. For the left, however, the
conclusion is simply assumed. Whatever practice they disapprove of
is “torture,” and no further argument is permitted.
For you time-challenged
voters, or for those who just can't be much bothered with political
blather, my suggestion here can save you a lot of time. It doesn't
even matter what the issue is. If a politician is presenting you
with arguments for his proposal or his point of view, support him.
Vote for him. Occasionally, he will be wrong but occasionally all of
us are wrong. In the long run, we will all be better off. But if
instead he tells you what to think and what to conclude, walk away.
Show him the contempt he is showing for you. Scorn him, mock him,
and vote against him the first chance you get, whether his name is
Barack Obama or Pat Toomey.
Copyright2013MichaelKubacki
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