Using the Newtown massacre as the pretext for a gun control crusade always struck me as unwise. Guns are one of those cultural issues that distract us from the real goal: the destruction of the Republican Party and the empowerment of the American worker.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the gun question; the rational approach, it seems to me, would be for each community to regulate the possession and use of firearms as loosely or as tightly as its residents find necessary. The Supreme Court's overturning Washington, DC's ban on handguns was clearly inappropriate; federal authorities should not presume that they know better how to keep residents of a community safe than the duly elected representatives of the community itself. Conversely, a nationwide ban on this or that weapon is an overly broad brush, I think, that is only going to consolidate support for Republicans in communities that value their guns. Tea-partiers whose days should be numbered will instead go on to win elections in 2014 and beyond, thanks to the votes of people who side with them on cultural issues like guns.
President Obama has shown himself to be an excellent campaigner, a mediocre leader, a poor negotiator, and an overall disappointment, even if still vastly preferable to a Romney or Ryan presidency. We saw nothing like FDR's first hundred days from President Obama; indeed, he seemed to have little clue how to tackle the greatest economic crisis in postwar history, preferring to spend precious time and energy campaigning for health care reform which, once it became clear that a single payer system was unachievable, should have been abandoned. The Obama administration's failure to address the fundamental inequities of modern American capitalism, inequities leading directly to the crisis of 2008, gave the Republicans the momentum they needed to win the House in 2010, much as President Clinton's focus on cultural issues led to the speakership of Newt Gingrich in 1994. These inequities continue to be ignored, and we can expect the Republicans to be back in 2014 with a strong case to solidify their grip on the House and perhaps take the Senate as well. I fear this administration will not be treated gently by history, and its record, like that of the Clinton administration, will show there is little real difference between the Democratic and Republican parties where it matters, and both do the bidding of Wall Street. Wall Street, meanwhile, continues in its excesses that have been eroding the American social contract for the last four decades.
If we continue as we are going, we aren't going to have "more and better Democrats"; we're going to have an impoverished country ruled by a deeply corrupt political system that few will mourn when it comes to its inevitable unhappy end.
Our first priority should be to smash the Republican Party, drive it from power from north to south and from sea to sea. We must show these lackeys of the super-rich for what they are, and unmask the robbers and demagogues they hold up as champions of the common man and woman. We mustn't allow ourselves to be distracted by guns, gonads, or Gods; we need to reach out to cultural conservatives, for without their help we'll never get rid of the blood-sucking Republican ticks spreading their poisonous infection across our country.
We didn't win World war II without making common cause with Stalin; we won't win this fight if we don't start building bridges to people we need with us but don't necessarily like. "If Hitler invaded hell," Winston Churchill once said, "I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." It's time we stopped fighting about guns, and start working to tilt the political and economic balance of power in this country in favor of working Americans.