FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED NOV. 6, 1998
Despite the advantage of having interviewed almost every candidate on the ballot in person (one of the fringe benefits of writing editorials for the largest newspaper in the state), I walked into the polls Tuesday with one big question mark on my sample ballot: the race for United States Senate.
Everyone knew Nevada's Senate race was too close to call. As it turned out, incumbent Democrat Harry Reid's margin of victory over Republican Congressman John Ensign (pending a likely recount -- in a race with more than 420,000 ballots cast) was 459 votes.
More than in any other race in the country, the seductive rationale of the "lesser of two evils" applied here. If instead of voting for Ensign, one were to vote for Michael Emerling Cloud -- the Libertarian third-party candidate who rated an "A" from Gun Owners of America based on his call for repeal of all victim disarmament laws -- the net effect might be to return "D"-rated Harry Reid to the U.S. Senate.
And in the end, that's exactly what happened. Michael Emerling Cloud received 7,651 votes. Natural Law Party candidate Michael Williams netted 2,644. Some 7,749 voters selected "None of these candidates." Reid won by a figure smaller than any of those three.
Harry Reid is a typical west-of-the-Alleghenies Democrat. That is to say, he spends five-and-half years as a happy resident of Washington, D&C, voting to raise our taxes and spend the loot on the most fantastic assemblage of money-wasting boondoggles ever imagined by the mind of man. (Last week, I hear they actually launched a 77-year-old granddad into outer space, at a cost of hundreds of millions of your tax dollars and mine, to study "the effects of space travel on aging." When he got back nine days later, it turned out he was nine days older. Wow.) Then, six months before the election, Harry Reid comes home, pulls on a pair of bluejeans, and makes TV commercials explaining how he's actually a conservative, Nevada country boy, born in a mining shack.
On the other hand, John Ensign is one of those Republicans of the class of 1994 who went to Washington promising us lower taxes, smaller, less intrusive government, and a vote on the floor of the House to repeal of the Clinton-Schumer-Feinstein so-called "assault weapons ban."
Four years later, our taxes are higher than ever, the federal government is bigger than ever, not a single intrusive regulatory bureaucracy is gone, and guess what ... no floor vote has ever been held on repealing the assault weapons ban, a law which actually outlaws some 160 militia-style semi-automatic (one shot per trigger-pull) weapons by name, in blatant violation of the Second Amendment, which specifies the reason the American people must remain armed is because we constitute the "militia."
I asked Craig Fields, who watches such matters for Gun Owners of America, the nation's largest gun rights organization, if he thinks I was alone in deciding my Senate vote on a single issue, based on novelist L. Neil Smith's now-famous dictum that "You can't trust a politician who won't trust you with a gun."
"Considering the extremely close margin of victory in this race (459 votes), and 'None of the Above' plus Cloud pulling 16,000 votes, Ensign's failure to be a gun owner's champion might well have cost him this election," Craig responded Thursday. "As you know, we beat up on him somewhat."
I asked him to clarify that.
"We tried to get him to take a principled stand. We insisted that he pledge on his GOA survey to introduce repeal legislation. He wouldn't, so we told our Nevada supporters of that fact. When they complained to him about his refusal to step up to the plate, he responded to them with the usual 'I-support-the-Second' dodge. He would not address his refusal to make a commitment. That may have hurt him at the polls, and certainly no way was he going to be able to pull any Libertarian voters who knew about it. Maybe, just maybe, if he would have said 'I will be your champion,' 460 of the 16,000 votes that neither he nor Reid pulled would have gone his way."
Specifically, the three bills for which Ensign was marked "wrong" by GOA (netting him a rating of 70 percent from the nation's largest gun rights organization) were his refusal to agree to co-sponsor HR 1009, the repeal of the Lautenberg Domestic Gun Ban; his refusal to agree to co-sponsor HR 1147, repeal of the 1994 Clinton Magazine and Semi-Auto Ban; and his vote in favor of HR 424, which according to GOA "could empower anti-gun prosecutors to punish gun owners who use a gun in self-defense."
The full GOA tally sheet is at web site http://www.gunowners.org/105hvote.htm. And those tempted to write in, pointing out that the National Rifle Association is larger than Gun Owners of America, need not waste the stamp. Having expressly endorsed in writing the Gun Control Act of 1968, the Brady Bill with its Instant Check (that is to say, national gun registration, coming to your local gun store Dec. 1), and the notion that Americans must apply for permits and receive "training" in order to carry concealed weapons, the NRA is in fact the nation's largest gun control organization.
Although most national pundits have claimed the electorate rewarded "moderation" this week, the opposite is true. There's nothing "moderate" about re-elected Senators Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray and Senator-elect Charles Schumer of New York -- they're screaming members of the fascist victim-disarmament gang, who want to take away the weapons of civilian rape victims, while arming the ATF and IRS and the FBI's Hostage Execution Team with machine guns and attack aircraft. When this gang agree to encourage one defensive machine gun per household -- as in peaceful, law-abiding Switzerland -- I'll agree they've "moderated."
On the other end of the spectrum, "far right" pro-gun Republicans like Helen Chenoweth of Idaho cruised home to easy victories, even after the White House illegally used their FBI files to try to embarrass them with their constituents. And you couldn't get much more radical than former professional wrestler Jesse "The Body" Ventura, described even in the mainstream press as "libertarian," who dared to speak of legalizing drugs and prostitution, and so won the governorship of bedrock Democratic Minnesota, while some guy named Humphrey ran third.
(Gun Owners of America report Mr. Ventura was the only one of the three Minnesota gubernatorial candidates to even bother returning their questionnaire.)
It was only those who sold out conservative or libertarian principles in the mistaken belief that their actual constituencies are the socialist news media of New York, Washington, and Los Angeles who took a dive.
California Attorney General Dan Lungren, once considered an ally of gun rights, reversed himself after he decided to run for governor last year, actually going so far as to write back to a man who had moved into his state from Florida, reversing an earlier ruling that the man could bring his little SKS semi-automatic rifle with him. William Doss, after receiving the second letter, presented the gun to California authorities for confiscation under the draconian Roberti-Roos civilian disarmament law.
Wading toward "the center" and away from his principles, Lungren managed to lose California's governorship to a Democrat for the first time in 16 years.
The list of "deaths by compromise" goes on and on. In Maryland, Republican Ellen Sauerbrey had run a close race for the governorship in 1994 "on a solid pro-gun platform," recalls Dennis Fusaro, also of GOA's Northern Virginia headquarters. "But she started moderating this year. She wasn't hard core, she wasn't committed, she moderated. So what happened? The Washington Post says the white male Christian vote was down, the white males in their 40s and 50s who tend to care about gun rights didn't bother to show up; they could no longer see any difference between the parties. Yet Sauerbrey still got attacked with being an extremist, so she got the worst of both worlds."
The Washington Post reports national turnout dropped to 36 percent -- lowest since 1942 -- and that in Maryland Democratic incumbent Parris Glendening, running neck-and-neck with Sauerbrey in most pre-election polls, ended up "with a surprisingly lop-sided win."
"The same thing with (defeated first-term Gov. David) Beasley in South Carolina," Fusaro continues. "He tried to take down the Stars and Bars and he issued an executive order instituting the Brady Act. I wrote him and asked him to rescind his executive order, but he refused to do so. So that's when we dumped everything we had in the state; we did a mailing against him. He was going to spend state money to take the heat off Reno and Clinton, to institute this ungodly gun registration bill."
"I note that Ron Paul (of Texas, the GOP congressman who was once the Libertarian Party's presidential nominee) increased his margin of victory" this year, points out Craig Fields of GOA. "He was able to raise boatloads of money by being a true champion" of the Second Amendment. "All year long people from all over the country were contacting us, asking how to go about giving him money.
"Libertarians vote for Ron Paul because they know that the R beside his name is just there so that he can get the party-line vote," Fields continues. "They would have done the same for Ensign -- were he a champion. But he isn't, so he doesn't deserve to get treated like one."
Here in Nevada, one gun rights activist, father of a young person who has worked full-time in Rep. Ensign's Washington office, confided to me he was "on him" repeatedly last winter and spring, warning Mr. Ensign he'd "better do something for the gun owners" if he wanted their continued support.
Mr. Ensign instead decided to take the "moderate" road, betraying a vital, core constituency. So, like 7,650 other Nevadans, I cast my single precious vote for the "hopeless" candidacy of Libertarian Michael Emerling Cloud. And you know what? I've been feeling better and better about voting my principles, ever since.
Because it's not true my vote "accomplished nothing."
John Ensign had four years in Washington. Time enough to prove himself a traitor to the cause of firearm rights -- the one right without which all our other rights will wither in the blink of an eye. (What, you thought after Hitler took away the Jews' guns, he still afforded them jury trials and allowed them to keep publishing anti-Nazi newspapers?) And traitors must be punished if we are ever to get just and honest representation, and a restoration of our stolen liberties.
John Ensign's line of work is now "veterinarian." He is now unlikely to ever break a promise to gun owners on the floor of the United States Senate. That's what 7,651 Libertarian voters accomplished in Nevada this year, and I'm proud of them.
What? Things will only be worse with another Democrat returning to Washington? Please, tell me how. Once Republicans sent the message that there would be no tax cut and no vote on a national right-to-work law, that they would go along with Clinton's "100,000 new teachers" budget-buster to pay off the Democratic teachers unions, that they would not even try to close the federal departments of Energy and Education, let alone end the income tax or privatize the Social Security Ponzi scheme or repeal gun laws that now jail decent, honest citizens for failure to file the right forms, the party of Robert A. Taft and Barry Goldwater was Dead on Arrival at the polls. Failing to define themselves via any of those popular reforms, they left Democrats free to define Republicans as the party that would punish girl-on-boy White House sex, while favoring crucifixion of gays, the sniper murder of obstetricians, and a return to back-alley, coat-hanger abortions.
Wow, what an attractive package.
Bill Clinton himself said it was the votes of gun owners that cost the Democrats control of Congress in 1994. Well, the gutless Republicans didn't get our votes this time, did they? How do they like it? And what do you think is going to happen to them if they keep ignoring their sacred oath of office -- which requires them to protect and defend our Second Amendment rights, regardless of how it plays with their tea-and-doily "focus groups" -- for another two years?
Care to find out? Just try us.
Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127.
The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases to discriminate between good and evil. He becomes a slave in body and soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don't adjust! Revolt against the reality! -- Mordechai Anielewicz, Warsaw, 1943