Ruling with an Iron Fist

Dustin Hawkins has called for the death of Julian Assange. He has called for the CIA to kill the Wikileaks releaser of confidential information.

Killing Julian Assange would send a message: Julian Assange is not an American citizen and he has no constitutional rights. So, there's no reason that the CIA can't kill him. . . . Legally, we may not be able to do a lot to Assange since he's not an American, but killing him would do more to protect our classified data than any new security system.

I wonder if there would be any consequences to our Government murdering an Australian Citizen. And let's be clear this can't be "an unexpected heart attack" for Hawkin's strategy to work. It has to be clear (if deniable) that we did this.

Also I am continually depressed at how conservatives fail to understand the founding documents. The Declaration of Independence is for all people, not just for Americans. We might not have the power to enforce it throughout the world, but the idas that Americans have rights and foreigners just don't strikes me as mean and unamerican.

by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

Dustin Hawkins latest article is about illegal immigration, which he opposes. He also opposes any consideration given to those who have entered this country illegal. Rather he'd like to see them rounded up and shipped off. Pat for the course, but the last bit really goes off.

Is this Cuba? Is this Afghanistan? Is this Rwanda? Are we such a garbage dump of a nation that we have to desperately give citizenship to anybody and everybody we can find? Newsflash: This is the greatest nation God has seen fit to raise up in the history of mankind. We can not only have the cream of the crop from other nations; we can ask them to wait in line, obey our laws, and prove themselves -- and the ones worth having will do it because this is the place people all over the world dream of coming one day.

So two points. America is the bestest nation on the earth, which is par for the course I guess. It did put me in mind of the e. e. cummings poem referenced above.

But also Hawkins makes America sound like a sort of exclusive country club. Of course we should have only the best sorts. Which is why there is really no problem with immigration laws that prioritize European immigrants and penalize Latin American immigrants. Only the best for the best nation.

Dirty Tricks

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah for a Conservative to complain about Democratic dirty tricks, given that we live in the age of Rove. It takes double-chutzpah to do so the day after news came out that James Tobin, who tried to jam Democratic get out the vote efforts (this would be, in fact, a dirty trick), had talked to people in the White House dozens of times while doing his dirty deed. And yet that is what Dustin Haskins has chosen to write his latest article about.

Essentially the dirty trick he is complaining about is one played by, at last count, one Democrat. Apparently this enterprising young Democrat set up a website as a Republican, claiming he was fed up with the Republican Party and was considering not voting at all or going Democratic.

Curious about the e-mail, I began a back-and-forth emailing with the “grassroots conservative,” pretended to agree with him, and two days later it became painfully obvious that he was far from a grassroots conservative. When I called the blogger out on his bogus scheme, he responded only with: “Win some, lose some.” The election games have begun.

We'll have to see if this guy has ties to, say, the Senate Minority Leaders office or the DNC.

But that's not really the point of this article I suspect. It's pretty clear to me that there is discontent in the Republican Party right now. The Social/Religious conservatives got Alito, but they still have to put up with abortion and open homosexuality. The Fiscal conservatives got tax cuts, but no spending cuts to go along with them. The Neo-Conservatives got to invade Iraq, but on the other hand, they got to invade Iraq. So it's entirely believable that we are going to see more complaints by Conservatives over the next couple of months leading up to the election.

Hawkins doesn't want Republicans to take such complaints seriously, and, presumably, he doesn't want to have to take them seriously himself. So he's crafted a back door to such complaints; when they pop up, they are probably the work of dirty trickster Democrats. Certainly that must be a comforting thing to believe, but I'm not convinced it is going to actually pan out.