Peter Sellers — Cigarettes and Whiskey, from The Muppet Show.

What’s on your mind?

(by twolf)

It’s hard to consider this the most serious indignity that liberals have been forced to suffer  since the start of the supposed Democratic-majority era a year and a half ago, but chalk it up as adding insult to injury, in more ways than one (via The Hill):

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will put forth his party’s case for regaining its congressional majorities this fall during a speech Thursday in Washington…. In his remarks, the Kentucky Republican will say his party was portrayed as broken and beaten down following the swearing-in of President Obama in 2009, but is ready to lead again in 2010.

… “We shared [ordinary Americans'] frustration. And we girded for the fight, confident that we had supporters behind us. We broke out of the Washington echo chamber and fought the government-driven solutions that Democrats were proposing. We got our groove back.“

I’ve been more lenient than many of the writers here in assessing Barack Obama’s shortcomings as President, but allowing Mitch McConnell to think he has anything resembling a “groove”… well, that’s just unforgivable.

But that’s what happens when you cede control of the political debate as Obama and the Democrats have done.  An article in the New York Times today accidentally underlines this point through the surreal, what-planet-are-they-on feeling generated by the lead paragraphs:

Photo by Dunechaser

I’m terribly confused.  Is the GOP the Law and Order Anti-Terrorist Party, or the Protect Serial Killers and Let Any Random Maniac Buy a Gun Party?

Daytona Beach police have determined through forensic evidence that the same kind of weapon was used to kill three women (and maybe a fourth) over the past few years, so they have taken what could be considered a logical next step. They didn’t go on a fishing expedition (in fact this is exactly the way a gun dealer who cooperated put it), but asked gun dealers located in the specific counties where the homicides took place if they could see their records during a specific period of time (2004 and 2005), to determine who might have bought this weapon and used it to kill people.

(…)

[T]he police have only “asked” for, not demanded the records, and they are only seeking to look at them, not copy them. But for those who run the NRA, who would consider a law disarming Ayman al-Zawahiri a ride along the slippery slope to a general handgun ban, this is just beyond the pale. So they trotted out one of their lobbyist friends in Tallahassee to lie about the law, to say what the police were doing was illegal — and of course launched the requisite faux-populist appeals to the same conspiratorial, anti-government, pearl-clutchers who Sarah Palin makes millions scaring the bejesus out of via rationality-challenged Facebook missives.

This kind of steely opposition to helping the police stop violent crime is echoed in the Tiahrt Amendment, which makes it effectively impossible to identify crooked dealers who knowingly sell guns to criminals.  And  conservatives have the nerve to argue that law-abiding citizens need to protect themselves from bad guys who can easily obtain guns thanks to all the loopholes those same conservatives fought for.