Barack Obama supports a citizen's right to bear arms, as stated in the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

Sort of. Sometimes. Except when he doesn't, which is usually. Got it ? Me neither. I'll try to sort it out.

On the campaign trail in rural Iowa in 2007, Obama said the following: (link)

"I respect the Second Amendment. I think lawful gun owners should be able to hunt, be sportsmen, protect their families."

About three sentences later in the same speech, Obama said this:

"So the point is, though, we should be able to do that, and we should be able to enforce laws that keep guns off the streets in inner cities…"

See what I mean ? Obama say he supports the right to bear arms for people in rural areas, but then turns around and says guns should be banned in urban areas. I recall no such distinction in the Constitution. In addition, who needs to protect their families the most, low crime rate rural america, or high crime rate urban america ? The question is rhetorical, because the answer is self-evident.

Here's more of Obama's nuanced position on guns, as reported by Bob Owens:

In his answers to the 1998 Illinois State Legislative National Political Awareness Test, Obama said he favored a ban on “the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons.”

By definition, this would include all pistols ever made, from .22 target pistols used in the Olympics to rarely-fired pistols kept in nightstands and sock drawers for the defense of families, and every pistol in between. Obama’s strident stand would also ban all semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, whatever their previously legal purpose.

In 1999, Obama proposed to make it a felony for the gun owner if a firearm stolen from his residence and used in a crime was not “securely stored” — effectively negating the homeowner’s right to self-defense.

For someone who claims to support the Second Amendment, Obama sure doesn't support the Second Amendment. Did you get a load of the part where Obama wants you to be charged with a felony if someone breaks into your house and steals your gun, and then uses it to commit a crime ? What kind of Orwellian police state garbage is that ? If your gun is "securely stored", it won't be much use to defend your family in case of an emergency. By the time you unlocked and loaded the weapon ("securely stored" means the bullets are stored in a separate place), you and your entire family could be dead. So much for self-defense.

The gun issue is also one of those where Obama has weakly voted "present" in the past. In 1999, he voted "present" on Illinois legislation that would have required teens 15 and older to be tried as adults for firing weapons on or near school grounds. There's leadership for you.

Obama has voiced support for the Washington D.C. ban on handguns, which is a direct contradiction of his alleged support of the Second Amendment. He also voted against protecting gun manufacturers from lawsuits, and invariably votes on the side of gun control. He's against concealed carry laws. The National Rifle Association gives Obama a grade of 'F' on supporting the Second Amendment. You can find some of Obama's voting record on guns here.

In 1996, on an Illinois voter group’s questionaire, filed under his name during his bid for a state Senate seat, Obama responded that he supported bans on the sale, possession, and manufacture of guns. Obama denied ever having taken such a stance, and denied even having filled out the questionaire, until handwriting analysis determined it was Obama's handwriting on some notes that were written in the margins of the questionaire. (Link). Oops, you're busted Barack. I can't wait for the "I misspoke" or "I misremembered" excuse that will surely come if the media every bothers to mention this, which they probably won't.

This issue appears to me to be Obama attempting to have it both ways, like a good little double-talking politician. You can't say you support the right to bear arms and then vote against it at every turn. The Second Amendment doesn't mean Iowa can have guns, but Illinois and D.C. can't. It appears Obama really supports the standard liberal doctrine on guns (ban them), like he does on every other issue, but he doesn't want to come out and say so, because it will cost him votes in the general election. Instead, he's trying to tell everybody what they want to hear, in order to get as many votes as possible. If this is what Obama calls "change you can believe in", then, sorry Barack, but I don't believe you.

Too bad the media is too busy getting a tingle up their leg to notice stuff like this.

The Emperor's Club…is that the 796 Democratic superdelegates who are poised to trump the will of the people at their whim during the Democratic primaries ? Or is that the Democratic National Committee, who disenfranchised voters in two entire states during the Democratic primaries ?

Naw, it isn't a group of politicians at all. It's a different kind of prostitute, the kind that sell their bodies to emperors like Eliot Spitzer, Democratic governor of New York.

I guess I should write about what a hypocrite Spitzer is, and ask how a former prosecutor and attorney general who ran for governor on a platform of high ethical standards and cracking down on crime could prosecute people like the Emperor's Club and patronize them at the same time, but all you have to do is turn on the television to hear that stuff. Spitzer's hypocrisy is plain for all to see. I guess I could politicize this and talk about a "culture of corruption" within the Democratic party, like Nancy Pelosi did when Republicans were caught being corrupt, but that would only be partisanship, and basically dishonest, so I'll leave the dishonesty to Pelosi and her ilk. For every Democrat caught doing something like this, there is also a Republican caught doing something like this. There is no political party that has a monopoly on corruption. I could reel off at least twenty corrupt politicians from both parties right off the top of my head, and I imagine most of you reading this could also.

So, I'll take a different tack.

Spitzer spent $4,300 for a hooker ? For one night ? Are you kidding me ? And now they are saying he spent $80,000 for hookers ! That's a lot of booty for booty.

This proves what I always say about government spending. Your average Democrat will always spend way more than your average Republican. Compare Spitzer to Larry Craig, Republican governor of Idaho. When Craig allegedly went looking for a little something, he went to the airport restroom. That's called being a FISCAL CONSERVATIVE, folks. Craig didn't waste no $4,300 just to get laid. Just think, all that money Eliot Spitzer wasted on hookers could have been used to buy little Johnny a new kidney, or buy food for those who are hungry in the world. Instead, Spitzer just throws all that money down a hole (pun intended). Larry Craig didn't waste money like that. I bet Craig, had he been able to complete his transaction, would have been in and out (pun intended) for twenty bucks, maybe less. THAT'S a public servant, ladies and gentlemen.

People are saying that Eliot Spitzer was a potential presidential candidate prior to this sex scandal, so I have to ask this question - Since when does a sex scandal disqualify a Democrat from being president or in a position of government power ? Hello ??? McFly ??? Just how short ARE everyone's memories ?

And haven't we seen enough of the wives of these cheaters standing beside them at the press conference, looking like they've just been hit with a club, but "standing by their man" (who didn't stand by them) ? The only time I ever want to see this again is if the wife wacks the sob over the head with a frying pan right on national tv. Stand by this.

As always, the message here is - power corrupts. It always has, and it always will. There is no way to eliminate it, but in order to minimize it, here's a suggestion:

Don't hand all the power over to the government in the first place. That's where those low taxes, limited government, free market ideas come from. Too bad we don't have political parties that actually follow them, as our founders intended.

Clinton/Spitzer in '08. I hear Obama turned down Hillary's offer of the VP job. Pretty rude of him after Mrs. Clinton was kind enough to offer, don't you think, lol ? Sounds like the Clintons are still in denial. I figure Spitzer would be a good fallback choice for Hillary. She's used to handling cheaters. Plus, with both Spitzer and Bubba in the White House, the Emperor's Club would probably go public and become a good growth stock.

Liberal policies of coddling criminals are responsible for the murders of more americans in the last 50 years than the totals of all americans killed in all wars during the same time period. Liberal notions of blaming crime on society rather than on the perpetrators, of eschewing punishment for criminals, of fighting against the police instead of the criminals, all contributed to the unnecessary murders of hundreds of thousands of americans, the majority of whom were poor and/or black. Liberals went from their crowning achievement, the success of the civil rights movement, to the depths of their own depravity in near record time, as crime came to be seen as a sort of social protest, a reaction against "the man". 1960's riots in Watts and Detroit weren't even met with much of a response from the police. In the words of Ramsay Clark, uber-liberal attorney general with the Johnson administration, "punishment as an end in itself is itself a crime in our times…Rehabilitation must be the goal of modern corrections. Every other consideration should be subordinated to it". Or listen to James Vorenberg, a member of Johnson's' crime commission, "To a considerable degree, law enforcement cannot deal with criminal behavior". It is no coincidence whatsoever that with the mainstreaming of liberalism, the 1960's, the violent crime rate in the US increased 226%. The murder rate increased 122% from 1963 to 1980. The number of violent crimes jumped from 1 million in 1960 to 2.9 million in 1970, while the number of prison sentences handed out by the liberal courts went from 40,000 in 1960 to 37,000 in 1970. In inner cities all over the country, people were afraid to go out of their houses at night. Liberals were coddling the criminals, but they weren't doing a whole lot for the ever-increasing number of victims, who were overwhelmingly the very people liberals claimed they wanted to help, the poor and minorities. Those people were virtual prisoners in their own homes, as gangs and thugs ruled the streets of their neighborhoods.

The poster child city for failed liberal crime policy was New York. The decaying, graffiti-covered city was a cesspool of crime. At a time when the citizenry of inner-city america was getting sick of living in fear, Rudolph Giuliani became the mayor of New York. He started by cracking down on what he termed "quality of life" crimes. He cleared the thugs out of the subway system and cleaned up the subway cars. He increased the number of police by 7,000. He targeted the high-crime areas that the police had previously steered clear of. Subway crime dropped by two-thirds in four years. His police chief Willian Bratton closed down chop shops, fences, drug and prostitution rings. The results were amazing. Within five years, felonies in NYC declined by 50 percent. Murder had decreased by 68 percent. The 2,600 murders in the city in the early 90's dropped to less than 800 by 1997. In five years, crime in Harlem fell 39%, in the South Bronx it fell 42%.

The liberals were utterly perplexed. The NY Times wrote, "The continued divergence between the shrinking crime rate and the rising rate of incarceration raises a series of troublesome questions, said criminologists and law enforcement experts". The Times was trying to blame Giuliani for taking criminals off the street and locking them up, thus making New York a far safer place. What probably really ticked them off was that Giuliani had single-handedly disproved all the liberals soft-on-crime bilge, for which libs will probably never forgive him.

Giuliani's methods were widely copied in the rest of the country. The liberal policy-inspired three plus decade countrywide crime wave ebbed. By 2002, there were 21 million fewer american crime victims than there were in 1973. Liberals still haven't figured out what happened, but they are sure Republicans did something wrong (yeah, they stopped listening to the liberals, and they made poor and minority people safer instead, along with the rest of us).

The data for this post came from Mona Charen's excellent book, Do-Gooders.