Seriously, Mr. Boehner?  Just shut up.  There is no scenario or spin under which the conduct of the spendthrift Republican majority of 2000-2006, or of the Republican minority from 2007-present, can be explained as the behavior of people who, “believe that a smaller, less costly government gives us a healthier economy and a healthier society.”

Some of us out here in the cheap seats actually believe that.  You and your colleagues, in contrast, are demonstrably poseurs trying to play us for votes.  The Democratic Party pursues a frightfully wrongheaded agenda of big-government communitarianism, but at least they’re reasonably honest about it, and don’t claim to be devotees of personal and economic liberty, and financial responsibility, while overseeing some of the biggest expansions of the federal government, and of the federal debt, in history.

Want to credibly pose as a fiscally-responsible small-government type?  Start acting like one.  The country will be better off having a clear choice between competing visions of how far government control should extend over the lives and livelihoods of the citizenry.  Right now, all the country’s got is a clear choice between a party of utopian collectivists and a party that needs to be fitted for clown shoes.

If you go to the whitehouse.gov Urban Policy agenda page and scroll about 2/3 the way down, you’ll find the following, under the heading of “Crime and Law Enforcement”:

Address Gun Violence in Cities: Obama and Biden would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important gun trace information, and give police officers across the nation the tools they need to solve gun crimes and fight the illegal arms trade. Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent.

All sounds pretty reasonable, doesn’t it?  We’re going to reform laws to give law enforcement the tools they need to fight the illegal arms trade, close loopholes in the law, make guns childproof, revive an expired law that bans assault weapons, and keep guns away from children and criminals while still respecting the Second Amendment rights of gun owners.  Definitely seems like the kind of public-policy pragmatism that Mr. Obama associated himself with in his inaugural address — commonsense, indeed.  Right?

Just one problem: it’s actually a dishonestly-framed grab bag of proposals from the gun-ban lobby’s Christmas list that erodes, not respects, the Second Amendment rights of gun owners.  It’s a perfect example of faux pragmatism in the service of an ideological agenda, rather than a ruthlessly empirical approach to solving national problems.

In a series of posts I’m going to be detailing the dishonesty and the hostility to private gun ownership pervading these proposals.  The posts will be long.  They will be technical.  But they will be fair, and they will be fact-based.

Part 1 will deal with the Tiahrt Amendment: where it came from, what it is, what it does, and what it doesn’t do.

Part 2 will deal with the federal assault weapons ban, and will among other things answer the question: “What is an assault weapon, anyway?”

Part 3 will deal with the gun show loophole, and explain how guns are bought and sold in the United States.

Part 4 will cover gun childproofing, as well as what is usually meant by “keeping guns away from children and criminals”.

The purpose of this series is not to stir up angry arguments, but because I want devotees of the new President to understand: I voted against Barack Obama and oppose his agenda not because I’m some monstrous, torture-loving, fascist Neanderthal who thought the Bush years were in all ways peachy, but because of things like this.  This an example of why I voted against Mr. Obama.  This is an example of why I remain a cynic rather than being swayed by gaseous promises of Hope and Change.  This is an example of why I don’t share Mr. Obama’s vision for the country, and why I want no part of his efforts to remake it.

I thought the speech was filled with the same soaring but gaseous rhetoric that is quickly becoming Mr. Obama’s stock-in-trade, and sprinkled with what I thought were some unnecessary jabs at his predecessor.  Prediction: the professional bloviators will be tripping all over themselves to praise it on the cable-news gabfests over the next couple of days, but in two weeks nobody will be able to recall a single line except lefty bloggers endlessly tittering over the “greed and irresponsibility on the part of some” and “restore science to its rightful place” bits.

I thought one paragraph was illustrative of the basic disconnect between Mr. Obama and myself:

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

I would respond to the words of our 44th president with the words of our first: “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”  I’m not altogether certain Mr. Obama truly believes what he’s saying, but assuming he does, it boils down to the notion that the sine qua non of government is making the proverbial trains run on time.  This is a popular view.  But what its adherents either fail to appreciate or don’t credit is that some of us don’t really give a damn if the trains run on time if it’s achieved at the cost of a government that controls more of our lives and confiscates more of our wealth.  I seek a government that is efficient at protecting my rights (my real rights, and not New Deal-esque “positive rights” that are nothing more than gussied-up collectivist entitlements) and leaving me alone, not one that is efficient at delivering bread and circuses.  Good jobs, affordable healthcare, and dignified retirements are incidents of prosperity, not incidents of freedom, and, well, malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium.

There’s also a whiff of disingenuousness, here.  Jonah Goldberg is frequently a clown, but he had a good point a while back when he noted that politicians are frequently hiding their ideological biases in words like “pragmatism” while mocking their political opponents as un-empirical ideologues.  The world loves a pragmatist — somebody who’s not unduly hidebound and wedded to cant or dogma.  And Mr. Obama strikes the pose of a pragmatist as well as anybody; we’ll assure jobs, healthcare, and retirements by keeping government programs that work, and throwing over the gunwhals any that don’t.  But the ideological bias is hiding in plain sight: that government can, should, and will solve these problems.  Even assuming, generously, that Mr. Obama does as promised and endeavors to assure jobs, healthcare, and retirements through the most empirically-sound government programs, he’s left off the table, as Daniel Griswold says, “the very real possibility that government intervention has made each of those problems more difficult for Americans to solve, and that the answer really is a smaller role for government”.  It’s all a bit like the King of Swamp Castle, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, exhorting his guests, “Please!  This is supposed to be a happpy occasion.  Let’s not bicker and argue over who killed who.”

History teaches us that when politicians say things like, “What’s important isn’t big government or small government, but good government,” we’d all better hang onto our wallets because we’re about to get big government good and hard (albeit possibly in good government drag).  Cynicism?  Maybe — but does anybody want to hold their breath waiting for Mr. Obama to prove me wrong?

I’ll have more to say about Mr. Obama’s pragmatism and empiricism in the coming days.

Tonight is the final night of the Bush term; tomorrow dawns the Age of Obama.  And at the risk of being declared a churlish misanthrope, I have to say that all the inauguration hoopla has grown rather nauseating.  One would think that having lived through eight years of what has frequently been criticized as an “imperial presidency”, the electorate would look upon politicians and political theater with a much more jaundiced eye.  Yet such are the days that merely uttering the phrase, “Hope and change,” induces grotesque, self-parodying displays of cultish fawning.  (I would like to associate myself with Andrew Breitbart’s take on the celebrity vid, by the way.)

I am not a fan of Mr. Obama, but he’s always struck me as an intelligent man.  One is tempted to wonder if, privately, he’s not a little creeped out by all this.  And if not, please permit me to suggest that we have an aide whispering, “Respica te, hominem te memento,” to him amid this latter-day Roman triumph.

Reason magazine’s Hit & Run blog has debuted a Hackwatch feature to track the pirouetting of pundits based on the party identification of the Current Occupant.  This is undoubtedly going to be a target-rich environment in the coming weeks and months; E.J. Dionne and Joe Conason alone will probably keep the Hit & Runners amply busy.  Appropos of the inauguration, we have Slate’s Eric Boehlert, whinging about the cost of Bush’s second inauguration in 2005, but excoriating critics of the as-expensive-or-moreso Obama inaugural festivities in 2009 on the grounds that the cost comparisons being thrown around in the media aren’t apples-to-apples.  Let’s say that’s true, Mr. Boehlert, and Bush’s 2005 inauguration and Obama’s 2009 inauguration will end up costing roughly the same.  Since you were complaining in 2005 that Bush’s inaugural was a garish extravagance, surely Mr. Obama’s deserves about the same condemnation.  Right?