Yuck-Pourri

Some random political thoughts while I sit around and wait for the 2020 Libertarian National Convention to put a name to the space I’m already planning to mark on that November’s ballot:

— President Trump’s in trouble because someone who didn’t hear the actual conversation he had with the president of Ukraine says he suggested a quid pro quo arrangement between military aid and an investigation of Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Hunter Biden was named to the board of directors of a large Ukrainian natural gas firm while his father was vice-president because his history of lobbying, investment fund management and law practice in the United States made him well-suited to understanding how energy corporations in former Soviet republics operated. Anyway, a number of Democratic legislators and presidential candidates think that if the president really did that, he should be impeached. I’d agree, if it wasn’t for the fact that a big chunk of this same group seem to think that winning the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton was an impeachable offense and have conducted themselves accordingly.

— Some people have suggested second amendment activists have used Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke’s position on the possession of AR-15 and similar semi-automatic rifles to scare voters away from supporting all Democratic candidates. O’Rourke supports a “mandatory buy-back” program for these weapons, which I put in quotes to illustrate how those words don’t mean what O’Rourke says they do. If the government forces you to give up property you own (mandatory) and sets the price it will pay you, that’s not really “buying.” And if it didn’t sell you the weapon then it’s not buying anything back, since it never owned the item in question. In any event, as long as anyone quoting O’Rourke includes his qualifying phrase, “When I’m elected President” then the charge of scare-mongering is false, since no one other than O’Rourke thinks that will happen.

— United States Representative Sheila Jackson Lee must have been upset at all the contenders to her crown as the dumbest elected official in Washington because she reminded us why she holds that title. Lee, in arguing for gun control measures, said she had held an AR-15 rifle, which was as “heavy as 10 boxes that you might be moving” and fired .50-caliber rounds. The actual AR-15 weighs about seven and a half pounds and fires a .223-caliber round, under half the size she said. Now, any ordinary person can be dumb enough to make mistakes when listing design specifications for a rifle. But it takes a member of Congress to make the kinds of mistakes thirty seconds of Googling can correct. And it takes Sheila Jackson Lee to suggest that a common-use rifle owned by somewhere near 10 million Americans is as heavy as ten moving boxes and fires a round that comes in a cartridge almost five-and-a-half inches long.

— One of the worst things about having President Trump in office is the realization that when our nation could really use a potential opponent who displays the traits of character, clear-thinking and responsibility he lacks, his adversaries offer so little to choose from. Among his three most likely opponents we find lies about being Native American, the theft of another politician’s life story and claims it was the speaker’s own and a supposed socialist who owns three homes and who dropped “millionaires” from his litany of complaints about “millionaires and billionaires” after his book made him one.