Did The NRA Kill The Gun Bill?

Or was it the Tea Party?

Either way, good for them.

[Update a couple minutes later]

This seems related. Why community-organizer tactics don’t work for the president:

Community organizers’ main efforts are to stir up public sentiment to achieve special goals without implementing any solutions. Solutions are the province of someone else. The present administration has used this tactic endlessly, most noticeably with the White House tour shutdown during spring break and now flight-controller furloughs. This is definitely not an effort to solve problems but rather an attempt to stampede citizens to a desired result. We don’t need a community organizer in the White House. We need an executive, but of course Mr. Obama abhors that category of human endeavor.

Though actually, was he really even a good community organizer?

[Update a few minutes later]

The Barry Munchkin syndrome:

Barack Obama knows how to do one thing: elect Barack Obama to public office. And that’s not ‘elect Democrats.’ Or ‘elect liberals.’ Or even ‘elect people that Barack Obama likes.’ It’s just him: his team is trying pretty hard right now to figure out how to use their over-specialized skill more generally, but they don’t have much time to figure it out and the system is actually rigged against them in this case. Barack Obama certainly doesn’t know how to govern effectively; take away a Congress that will rubber-stamp the Democratic agenda and he flails about. He’s so bad at this, in fact, that when confronted with a situation where all he had to do was do nothing to fulfill a campaign promise (the tax cuts) we somehow ended up with a situation where Obama gave in on 98% of those tax cuts and voluntarily signed up to take the blame for the AMT fix. In short: Obama was woefully unprepared for the Presidency, and he hasn’t really spent the last four years trying to catch up. Instead, he goes from situation to situation either trying to recast the problem in ways that he does have some skill in (permanent campaigning for office), or else… flail about on the scene while hitting people’s buttons quickly and/or at random, in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway.

Actually, the Barry Munchkin syndrome sounds like the title of an episode of the Big Bang Theory.

4 thoughts on “Did The NRA Kill The Gun Bill?”

  1. Actually, I am with Mickey Kaus. I think it is a disaster that the Republicans (and many Democrats) got their way on the gun bill.

    You see Mr. Kaus thinks that the gun bill, raising taxes (again) on “the rich”, the Sequester are all small ball. The big leagues is Immigration Reform. Immigration Reform done wrong (which days, is every proposal to emerge so far), has the potential to completely change the country in an irreversible way.

    You can always pass a tax cut to reverse a tax increase, you can always repeal a bad gun law, you can always wheel and deal on various trades between taxes and government spending. If you let as many as 30 million people on a “path to citizenship”, you can’t strip them of citizenship and send them back to home countries.

    Like Mr. Rubio, I am of immigrant heritage, heck, I am a “Miami Cuban” in more ways than he knows, and I am sympathetic to people who want to come to the U.S. and remain in the U.S. in search of a better life. But the Congress and the President have this track record of cobbling together legislation where the consequences are poorly thought out, and the consequences of this legislation are totally irreversible in a way that even Health Care isn’t.

    So what does this have to do with the Gun Law. You see, if the Republicans had lost on the Gun Law, they would be under much more pressure from the base to save face and would have stopped Immigration Reform. Now that the Republicans sorta kinda won on the Fiscal Cliff, won on the Sequester, won on the Gun Law, they are probably going all bipartisan Good Government and cooperative on Immigration, which is the worst possible outcome.

    On the other hand, maybe as the President is 0 for 3 right now, 0 for 4 is a possible if the ‘Pubs don’t mind being bad sports and “running up the score”?

    For example, what is the better life sought by many of the people who have broken laws to be here? Do they really want to be American citizens, not just with the bennies of citizenship but with the many duties and responsibilities, some of which are written into law and some of which are customs? Or is their cultural view that the way things ought to be are the way things are back in the rodina, only the United States is simply a wealthier version of back home that will stay wealthier once all of the traditions and customs that kept the back home are transplanted over here?

  2. Saul Alinsky’s tactics for undermining The Man backfire when The Man himself tries to use them, even if The Man is black. Who could have seen that coming?

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