House passes bill to expand background checks for gun sales

[Eric the Green]

(06-07-2022, 07:46 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(06-03-2022, 12:30 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: That depends on your definition of dictator. The USA has had continued slavery in all but name in many southern states, and racial profiling, red lining and discrimination in most states. Most people (including blacks, women, young people and poor people) not being allowed to vote until recently, and now efforts and supreme court decisions to restrict voting again, is not the definition of a free society. Arguably, Woodrow Wilson was a dictator and a racist during world war one. Lincoln and FDR did some questionable wartime restrictive measures. The Patriot Act, National Defense Acts and other policies put the USA on the path to dictatorship under W. Bush. Trump organized a coup and used his office to empower himself to cheat others. Guns did not prevent any of this. Citizens owning guns and weapons of war have nothing at all to do with whether our president is a dictator. You fail to make that connection historically. Arguments that dictators restrict gun ownership is often false, as the history of the Third Reich showed.

I agree with you this far, as I have said: I don't agree that juntas, dictators and thugs should have a monopoly on weapons, if people power does not work, which is the case today in a number of countries-- although the only alternative then is civil war/revolution and an alternative state, not anarchy and chaotic individual violence. But in the USA, those who want no restrictions on owning guns happen to be the thugs and would-be dictators themselves. Those who genuinely want more freedom and more justice in the USA, who are those on the left and not the right, have many means left to them yet that they can use to achieve political and social goals without forming armies or stockpiling weapons of war. People in many countries need to be careful that they don't vote themselves into dictatorship, which seems to be the case in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, The Phillipines, Nicaragua, Brazil, some African countries, arguably India, and possibly the USA.

Notice that even a militarized state oppressing another people like Israel strictly regulates citizen gun onwership. No country besides the United States of America holds this fantasy that individuals owning weapons of war without any restriction guarantees our freedom. And no other country suffers the inevitable results of this fantasy. And that's not the only fantasies that Americans hold these days, with also poor results.

My answer to this is quite simple: my definition of a dictator requires that they have the power and intention not to leave when voted out of office. Trump leaving after 4 years (and telling all the protestors to go home)? ....no, that's not a dictator. The only arguable case which could be made might be FDR, but he kicked the bucket in office, so we'll never know. Calling someone a dictator who voluntarily leaves when they're voted out is just...dramatic.

It's a neat slogan to avoid the fact that the USA has been a dictatorship for many, and in many ways, and to claim gun ownership had something to do with the tradition that presidents leave office when no longer elected or their term is up, which it had absolutely nothing to do with. And Trump definitely refused to leave office, but instead organized and staged a coup, and then let it go for 4 hours, and had already asked state leaders to find votes for him or legislators to change electoral votes, and is now organizing takeovers of election officials and secretaries of state who will do the same in 2024. He spread the BIG LIE that he won the election, which fomented the Jan 6 riot and now still foments efforts to restrict voting rights and change election results, which he and his lunatic, tyrannical, monster political Party are now pursuing. Trump is a would-be dictator, and the way he will be installed as such is to minimize and ignore the many ways he tried to be a dictator while in office, as you are doing, and ignore and thus approve of the ways he plans to install himself as dictator if he can cheat his way into the presidency again. Any support for Trump by those who rationalize gun ownership is full support for dictatorship in the USA. And it will be the phony militias composed of crazy gun owners whom Trump will use to enforce his will; an American gestapo and brown shirt army.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/woodwa...tol-attack

On the eve of the first public hearings on January 6, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein join us now.

And we welcome both of you back to the "NewsHour," Carl and Bob.

Bob Woodward, Co-Author, "All the President's Men": Thank you.

Judy Woodruff:

And, Bob, I want to start with you.

Carl Bernstein, Co-Author, "All the President's Men": Good to be with you.

Judy Woodruff:

Over the years — thank you both — there have been many narratives about what Watergate was about.

It has been called all about a third-rate burglary, that the cover-up was worse than the crime. You have had plenty of time to reflect on it. What was it about?

Bob Woodward:

Well, it was really an effort to destroy the process of nominating candidates for the Democratic Party, I mean, extraordinary.

Nixon came along and said, gee, I'd like to run against this person, George McGovern. And he launched a covert campaign of espionage and sabotage and cover-up. And it worked. In the end, he got a weaker candidate, George McGovern, and he won 49 states.

It was one of the great crimes of not just politics, but never seen anything like this, until recently.

Judy Woodruff:

Yes. And that's what I want to ask you about.

As we think back, though, to President Nixon, Carl, one of the just enduring memories was from the Senate hearings, the late Senator Sam Ervin, and in one of those hearings, that famous moment when we heard the actual audio recording from inside the White House.

Would Richard Nixon have been brought down if that hadn't happened?

Carl Bernstein:

It was the so-called smoking gun tape.

It's very possible he would not have been brought down. We don't know. It's if history. But it's very important to understand the progression from Richard Nixon's criminality to Donald Trump's criminality. They are both criminal presidents of the United States.

But then Trump went further. He is the first seditious president in our history. How did that happen? He decided he would not abide by the election, the duly constituted, free election of Joe Biden as the president of the United States, and staged a coup to keep Biden from taking office.

The law calls for the election of the president of the United States to take place at 1:00 p.m. on January 6. And there was a great effort, a conspiracy extending to the president, to keep that 1:00 p.m. appointment from happening. And the object of all of this, including the demonstrations and breaking into the Capitol of the United States by the insurrectionists, was to keep this election of the president from happening, so Trump could stay in office, and Biden could not.

But the idea of the president of the United States trying to stage a coup such as this is extraordinary, insidious, and we have never seen anything like it in our history.