I thought being in DC on Wednesday for the Kennedy retirement was news proximity enough for one week. Today I found out I was sadly mistaken. Sitting on my deck working with an Ashton in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other this afternoon, I suddenly heard sirens, an uncommon occurrence in my neck of the woods. I blew it off as a fire or a rare miscreant chase. But when I went inside I discovered about two miles from where I live some lunatic with a crazy grudge against an innocuous medium-sized newspaper took a shotgun and murdered five innocent people. Here in Annapolis, a town that sits on the banks of Maryland’s Severn River, this kind of thing doesn’t happen. Well, it has now.
If you’ve heard of us you probably know it’s the state capitol and that the US Naval Academy is here. We’ve also got a great college, St. John’s, that sports a classical curriculum and we’re equidistant from DC and Baltimore. Almost four hundred years old with a really pub crawly downtown replete with numerous nautical bars, it’s an excellent place for an old Florida beach bum like me to call home.
We’ve got an Aussie restaurateur for mayor and Pat Sajak is the hometown boy who made good. To top if off, right by the water is the best cigar lounge in Maryland, Annapolis Cigar Company, where, if you ask him nicely, the owner will sing circa-1930s Italian military marching songs. So yeah, a cool place.
Downtown Annapolis, MD. (Credit: Facebook/Irma Gonzalez)
But what’s not cool is how, when this tragedy struck, the usual suspects stuck their heads out of the gutter and tried to politicize it. These poor victims were not cold yet as, let’s take one example, our US Senator Chris Van Hollen tweeted that “we must unite to end the violence.”
Ever notice that when a leftist says, “unite” it means under their terms? I mean, the National Socialist regime in Germany was “united” in a big way. And let’s say we take him at his implied word and enact legislation he no doubt thinks will “end the violence.” How in the name of all that is holy and profane is that going to stop an aggrieved maniac with a shotgun?
But you guys know this or you wouldn’t have the good sense to be reading OpsLens.
Public safety officials at Capital Gazette in Annapolis, MD where a gunman murdered five staffers. (Credit: Facebook/Next of Kin Registry NOKR)
I’d like to end violence too. The killing kind, for sure. But there is also a violence against logic, against reason, against empirical evidence that kills slower but just as deadly in the long run. The Left is familiar with that type of violence because it is their stock and trade. Using it like ghouls hovering over a multiple-murder reminds us what a class act they are, for they feed off misery like a vulture off carrion.
Death tax? Sure! When families are grieving the first thing they want to deal with is the IRS. Can a person die knowing that they passed on a material legacy to provide for their family’s financial security? Not if the likes of Van Hollen has anything to do with it.
Kill a baby a couple of weeks before the child would be born? Snip, snip say the Dems. All done! And hey, just a blob of non-sentient cells anyway, right? Well, if that were the true standard then why haven’t they aborted Nancy Pelosi yet? Over the top? Yeah, granted.
But their dark exploitation of every facet of American life into something that has to garner reflected sympathy for them is a bane to this society. What happened to reticence and stoicism? Must everything bring out the wailers and gnashers of teeth? What in the Sam Hill have we come to?
Which brings us back to Annapolis. Maybe it’s the presence of the Naval Academy and the ramrod-straight young men and women we see on our streets who remind us that duty and discipline still mean something. Perhaps it’s the location here of the Frederick Douglas Museum that serves to put in proper context the actual meaning of oppression and what free men will do to stop it.
However, not only here but in many places in America that nobility of message and purpose is sadly contrasted with various crocodile-teared politicians emoting all over themselves professing their grief while cynically attempting to score cheap political points. Such does Van Hollen. Such does the national Democratic Party. And to what purpose?
Do they actually believe that stunts like this will bring them more popularity and victory at the polls? Look around; the situation on the battlefield doesn’t look too promising for them right about now.
What they have always failed to grasp is that the majority of the American people are not obsessed with politics either at the policy or operational level. They have real lives that revolve around their families and making a living. The Dems think that non-attention to every political detail makes them vulnerable to nonsensical emotional appeals. But they’re wrong.
An average American, while still focusing on the need for school clothes for their kids or the next paycheck to pay the bills, can still smell a hypocritical fraud when confronted with one. You know, the type who calls for gun control while guarded by armed security. Like, on Capitol Hill.
If the Left continues to murder integrity and simple human decency like this, then not only on the Severn but many other places where people are trying to come to grips with a tragic event, they will find out their badly devised plans will be met by revulsion and a steep price at the ballot box.
I guess that wouldn’t quite qualify as murder. More like suicide.
