The South Will Secede Over Guns! Randi Rhodes is Sure Of It!
Wow, talk about being stuck in the '60s -- the 1860s.
With all the certitude of an arrested adolescent, left-wing radio host Randi Rhodes is convinced the South will secede once again, this time over the Second Amendment. (audio clip after page break)
Here she is on her radio show this week, condemning Fox News before veering off on a peculiar rant about secession (audio) --
The people they're serving, the 3 million viewers, and that's what they have at Fox News, 3 million viewers, sad but it's true, the 3 million viewers that they are catering to are radical, separatist, uh, survivalist, I don't even know what to call them anymore. They're white supremacists who believe that they understand the government, the Constitution, the intention of the Founding Fathers, which in their minds was, we're going to take this whole country into a war to win our independence from the evil British and then after that we're going to set up the Articles of Confederation and then when that fails we'll finally have a Continental Congress and we'll set up a Constitution whose premise is domestic tranquility and then we'll lay out the rules of road.
And one of those rules of the road is, you're all going to get guns so you can kill us, if you don't like what we're doing. Really? And those are the people that are being super-served by Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Fox News, Sean Hannity, the whole, the whole crowd over there, OK? That's who's being served, a bunch of far right, male, mostly Southern, paranoid extremists who are preparing for armed revolution against their government 'cause the South's gonna do it again. Mark my words! The South is gonna do it again. They are! And you know, this time, I would say, if they wanna go, let's not stop them. I just don't think it's worth it.
There you have it -- Rhodes condemning secessionists, to the extent they represent a significant political movement, which they don't, while she proclaims, come to think of it, secession would be nifty. The contradiction is clearly lost to her.
Rhodes is all the more deluded if she believes enthusiasm for the Second Amendment is limited to those states that once formed the Confederacy. How then to explain newly elected senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota, breaking ranks with her party and condemning President Obama's anti-gun agenda as extreme?
The western state Utah allows teachers to arm themselves in classrooms if they so desire. (Utah also experiencing a dearth in school shootings, go figure). As was case with North Dakota, Utah wasn't a state at the time of the Civil War. Even Rhodes without recourse to Google might be aware of this.
Perhaps she's also noticed the conspicuous retience on gun control from Sen. Bernie Sanders, Bolshevik of Vermont, even though the man heartily opines on everything else when given the chance.
Sanders, it turns out, represents a state with one of the least restrictive concealed carry laws in the country (which helps explains why mass shootings in Vermont are rare). A visitor to Sanders' congressional website will search in vain to find gun control among the 16 issues he deems most important. One doubts that the ardor of Vermonters for their continuing legal access to firearms has anything to do with them wanting to join the Confederacy 2.0.
Since Rhodes is fond of predictions, I'd like to offer one. Long before any secessionist movement motivated by a government ban on guns gained traction, something else would happen to make secession all the less likely -- police refusing to comply with an inherently unconstitutional law ordering confiscation of guns.
