Dope charges of racism apparently ignored in MS runoff

Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith won the MS runoff election last night. Hyde-Smith had been in some trouble for an offhanded comment about attending a public hanging.  The Demo-Dope immediately conflated hangings with lynchings and deemed the comment racist. 

Words mean things.  Is a hanging the same as a lynching?  I do not think so.  Neither do the people who make their living defining words. 

Hanging (noun) a form of capital punishment; victim is suspended by the neck from a gallows or gibbet until dead. 

Lynching (transitive verb) to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal approval or permission.

Sadam Hussein was hanged.  Atticus Finch stopped a mob from lynching Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird. There’s a big difference.

Was Hyde-Smith’s comment stupid?  Absolutely, but she’s a politician so stupid is pretty much a given…right?  Now everyone in the Dope camp is claiming that Hyde-Smith a racist, something they’d do if she’d not said one thing wrong.

Had Hyde-Smith been quicker on her feet she'd have used the episode to explain to blacks in MS that it was the Dope Party engaging in lynchings in the south and Republicans who were attempting to guarantee black voter rights during reconstruction.

Instead Hyde-Smith was reduced to insisting that she wasn't a racist. Not a good look for politician to have a slogan - Cindy Hyde-Smith not a racist.  She shuld have used history to turn the tables on the Dopes.     

Because the ever-present charge of racism is pretty much baked into the cake for any Republican candidate, Dope charges against Hyde-Smith were ho hummed by MS voters, and Hyde-Smith won handily. Dopes are really PO’d that the Dope candidate, Mike Espy, actually conceded on election night.  Trunk loads of votes from Dope precincts all over the country were headed to MS for the inevitable recount.

In addition to the charge of racism, Dope conjured up a charge that Hyde-Smith has been known to tell sexist jokes on several occasions.  Just one question – were they funny? If they were funny who gives a crapola? If they weren't funny, that’s a crime or at least a faux pas.  Don’t tell them any more.

The Hyde-Smith word crime reminds me of the time a Caligula, D.C. city official used the word “niggardly” at a meeting.  He was literally run out of government for correctly using a word that means stingy.  But like the Dope opinion about the never defined “assault weapon” the word just looked ugly and so has now been pretty much banned.

I tutored young boys after school for a while.  Once I used a globe of the world to do some geography.  One boy saw the label for the country of Niger and about fainted.  I said, “remember, when there is a single consonant after the vowel, the vowel takes the long vowel sound”? The glazed over look told me that the young man didn’t have a clue.  So we spent the rest of the time going over that.  To this day I’ll bet that young man knows that Niger is okay and ni**er isn’t and why.

I don’t much care about any of this.  I’d never used the niggardly and didn’t even have a clear understanding of its meaning before the D.C. brouhaha.  I only use it now for this story.  But niggardly is banned because idiots do not know what it means and Niger needs to change the name of the country because a sizable percentage of people might look at it printed on a globe and not know it’s long vowel sound.

I dunno are we just getting dumber?          

Today’s JG rant
George Emmert used nearly 300 words to target the 27 plain words of the Second Amendment.  What a waste.  Why not just come up with 27 new words to replace and update what the founders penned? 

27 not enough?  Use 300.  Use 1,300.  Use all you want, but stop with the mealy mouthed “national religiosity”, “half right”, “settled law”, “sanely overseeing gun ownership” gibberish, and just tell us what an updated Second Amendment should look like.

It took the founders just 27 words to establish the original right.  It cannot be that hard.

Emmert can use Article VIII of the US Constitution that dictates how registration of motor vehicles in the country is to be accomplished.  Note for JG editors: That’s sarcasm.  There is no Article VIII of the US Constitution.

Which is the point.  Emmert is ill-advised to compare a money making scheme devised state by state to annually tax your right to freely operate a motor vehicle with the federally guaranteed, Constitutionally protected right of the people to keep and bear arms.  

I can tell you this, I do not trust anyone in Caligula, D.C. to “sanely oversee” anything least of all how I choose to protect myself and family.

Sides must compromise on gun-safety concerns

I'm struck and motivated by Dr. Jaques Mathers' Nov. 18 oped, “Reconciling Second Amendment, 10 Commandments.”

Dr. Mathers, a trauma surgeon, pointedly, empathetically and with quiet anger calls upon the presumed goodness of our national religiosity to move toward a truce to reduce senseless gun deaths.

The NRA insists that people, not guns, are the problem. The NRA is half right. In malevolent or careless hands, any gun might quickly become an accessory to a tragedy.

Identifying and responding to such momentary occurrences can strain presumptions of our democracy. Laws, such as Indiana's red flag law – temporarily disarming troubled individuals – propose mechanisms that might acceptably pre-empt such moments and warrant consideration.

The longer game will test the durability of the Second Amendment. To heed the NRA's dictum of “people, not guns,” the closest likely approach is to develop a much more detailed, instantly accessible record of which guns, which people, which settings.

Firearms for home protection and for hunting are settled law. Perhaps especially for combat veterans and others, possessing certain military-style weapons has a strong appeal which, regulated, could remain acceptable. Certain accessories – extended magazines, even bump stocks, as artifacts of weapon fanciers – owned, registered and used responsibly needn't be automatically forbidden.

The issue is whether we are willing to create, enforce, fully fund and wrap our love/hate affair with guns in a sufficiently detailed, constantly updated, comprehensive accounting system.

As eyes roll, consider that we have largely done that with (nearly?) every motor vehicle in our country.

Some will shout about abridgment of gun rights, yet a national commitment to truly effective, rigorously enforced firearm accounting offers our best hope of sanely overseeing gun ownership and preserving the best about Second Amendment rights for generations to come.

George Emmert

Huntington