Good for the Goose

Remember when Sarah Palin caused the shooting of Gabriella Giffords by having target shapes on her website?  Remember how stupid that argument was, especially since the shooter was a wack job completely unassociated with any conservative causes?  What?   You didn't know that second part?  Amazing.   You'd think that would have been the lead story when it was discovered soon after the shooting, but I guess that wasn't as important as blaming conservatives and Palin.

Anyway,  this was posted on The Daily Beast.  Waiting for the outrage about our culture of violence.



*crickets chirp*

Where's the outrage?

Valerie Plame was inadvertantly "outed" by Richard Armitage during the Bush Administration.  There was never one bit of evidence that it was coordinated or planned by the administration and Armitage himself stated that he didn't realize that she was considered a covert operative by the CIA when he talked to Bob Novak about her.  That didn't stop the left from conducting a giant witch hunt (even though they knew the source of the leak before the witch hunt started).  For the record, Plame was not working undercover at the time and was well known (amongst government types) to be a CIA employee.

The media is now falling over themselves to excuse the outing of the Kabul, Afghanistan CIA station chief by the Obama Administration as "a mistake".  Even Valerie Plame herself has jumped in, stating that it was "colossally stupid" but "a mistake, not retribution".

Given that a hostile investigator was able to find not one shred of evidence that Plame's outing was anything other than a mistake (and not a colossally stupid one, at that, but an actual slip up), and that publishing the name of a station chief on a list is not only colossally stupid but criminally negligent, one has to wonder about the double standard.

Or perhaps we don't.  Everything the Right does is motivated by an unquenchable thirst for power, including slipping up and mentioning a low level CIA employee in the context of a long interview.  The Left, however, can fail to act on intelligence in Benghazi resulting the deaths of four Americans, lie for months about the cause of the attacks in Benghazi, allow the IRS to target conservative groups in the run-up to an election in violation of numerous laws, illegally wiretap the phones of American journalists who are hostile to the current Administration, completely botch the rollout of a health care computer system, allow the NSA to record the emails and phone calls of millions of Americans with no probable cause, and leak the name of an acting CIA station chief in one of the most sensitive and dangerous parts of the world, and it's either right wing paranoia or a mistake.

Don't get me wrong.  Republican Administrations have had their share of issues and I have condemned many of them over the years, but they don't get excused by the mainstream media.  I am perfectly OK with condemning both stupidity and government over-reach, but let's call a spade a spade and admit that if it isn't OK when one party does it, it also isn't OK for the other.

Armitage's slip was a mistake and the fact that he was never charged suggests that the investigator did not find that it rose to the level of criminality.  The recent exposure was also a mistake but suggests far more incompetence than Plame's outing.  Should charges be filed?  I don't know.  I'm not a lawyer.  But at the very least someone who makes that kind of idiotic decision should be removed from a position that allows them access to sensitive information.

The Police Loophole

This is great.  A blog called The Police Loophole.  You know, or maybe you don't, that every time there is a restriction on we, the people, the police are exempted.  Even when they aren't exempted, they are exempted.  When sound suppressors were illegal here in Washington state, the police could be seen out at the range practicing with their illegal sound suppressors, even though there was no exemption in the law for them.  When all the talk is about prohibiting semi-automatic AR-15 rifles for us, the police get fully automatic M-16 rifles (real weapons of war instead of scary looking versions of regular rifles).

When there is a legal way for us to do something the anti-gunners don't like, they call it "a loophole".  Buy a guy through a dealer, there is a background check.  Buy a gun from your friend, there is no background check.  To us that's just obeying the law.  It's still illegal to buy a gun if you are a felon and it's still illegal to sell a gun to a felon, so you still have to obey the law.  To the anti-gunners it's the "private sale" loophole.

So what is the ultimate loophole?  The one that lets the police and the government do all the things that are prohibited for we, the people.

Well some companies have decided that enough is enough, and whoever started The Police Loophole is giving them the publicity they deserve.  These companies will no longer sell any product to a government agency if that locale does not allow the average citizen to own the same product.  So, for example, New York just banned AR style rifles for their citizens, Olympic Arms will no longer sell their AR products to any branch of government in the state of New York.

Good for them.  If we can't be trusted, why can the police? They can deal with the same restrictions as us.  I hope even more manufacturers sign on.  As of right now, the list he has compiled has 64 companies, the biggest of which are Olympic, Barrett, and Rock River.  I hope some of the big names will jump on board.  I'll be dropping a line to my favorites.