Jerry Salcido [send him mail] is a trial and appellate lawyer in Salt Lake City, a former Republican Party county chairman, and the former legal chair of Homeschool Association of California.

Save Those Bullets for the Monsters

John Quincy Adams once said that the United States does not go "abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." We all know that ceased to be true a long time ago. Over the last hundred years or so America has identified (created) a number of monsters and in most instances has been unsuccessful in destroying them (the communist threats in Korea, Vietnam, Central America, and the Soviet Union (which destroyed itself economically), and the terrorist threats of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, etc.).

Our global search for monsters has resulted in a national debt which has increased from about $3 billion in 1914 to more than $12 trillion today. Our War on Monsters has cost the lives of more than 600,000 American military personnel since World War I. The world has also paid untold amounts of treasure and innocent lives in America's offensive assault on the monsters.

With so much money spent and so many people dead, one would naturally expect to see the result promised by our dear leaders who tout the movement for a strong national offense -- a safer America. America is not safer.

It was this flawed foreign policy that led me and a couple of other executive officers (Walter Stanley III and David Latour) of the Alameda County Republican Party ("ACRP") to introduce a resolution advocating a non-interventionist foreign policy for the ACRP to adopt. Read the resolution here. Alameda County, which includes the anti-war capital of the world, Berkeley, California, was a natural place to bring such a resolution. Certainly the Republicans of Alameda County must have been influenced by some of that anti-war spirit resonating throughout the East Bay between 2003 and 2008. Nope.

The resolution failed with 20 votes against and 13 in support, but most interesting was the response elicited by the resolution. Even before the resolution was presented to the ACRP's central committee a sixty-ish year old woman from Oakland exclaimed that the resolution was "despicable!"

After the resolution was read discussion ensued and one tirade after another followed, with morsels of common sense interjected between the diatribe by the various liberty lovers scattered throughout the audience. The first objection raised to the resolution, on which the rest of the discussion was based, was that the resolution states that the terrorist threat "has nothing to do with us being free and prosperous." How dare we say that the terrorists don't hate us because we're free? This was more than the statists on the committee could handle. They insisted one after another that terrorism is the result of our being free. Imagine the nonsense.

The same lady who made the "despicable" comment asked if anyone advocating the resolution was present at Ground Zero on 9/11 to smell the burning buildings or if we witnessed the massacre of Ft. Hood, to which many nodded in support of her non sequitur and mumbled their "yeahs" and "uh huhs." When asked what that has to do with her argument that terrorists hate us because we're free, she returned a confused look, obviously not knowing how to respond.

The pro-interventionists were then asked if they really believed that Mr. Terrorist's initial thought upon waking up in the morning is "I hate America because they are free; and, since they are free I will kill them." The neocons unanimously answered with a resounding "Yes." The ignorance of their statement spoke for itself and did not merit a response, so the discussion moved on.

When the fact was raised that America's foreign policy is based on undeclared wars in violation of the Constitution, none of the statists seemed concerned. What Constitution? When the point was made that the Republican Party, through the likes of Senator Robert Taft and the Old Right, has a tradition of advocating a non-interventionist foreign policy, they scoffed. Taft who?

One neocon objected that this resolution is based on a political philosophy advocated by Ron Paul, as though that by itself is reason enough to reject it. The anti-war faction responded that it is also a political philosophy to which Washington, Jefferson, and most of our Founders ascribed. Scoffs again from the warmongers.

A rather large lady with an even larger mouth bellowed that if we were to adopt the resolution (that is, if we were to renounce war and advocate peace) that most Republicans would say a simple "screw you" to the Republican Party.

One liberty lover recounted how Bush II ran on a platform of a humble foreign policy and that his failure to practice what he preached resulted in a significant decrease in Republican registrations in Alameda County and throughout the country. No response.

Nonetheless, the warmongers had their way and defeated the resolution.

What is really ironic (idiotic) is that these same statists were presented with a pro-Second Amendment resolution, but also rejected that. The Governator signed into law California Assembly Bill 962 ("A.B. 962"), which will go into effect on February 1, 2011. A.B. 962 mandates that individuals purchasing ammunition be fingerprinted and registered at the time of sale. It requires ammunition retailers to maintain the fingerprints and registrations for at least five years and they must make them available for inspection by the California Department of Justice upon request. A.B. 962 also requires all ammunition sales to be effected face to face, and outlaws Internet and mail order ammunition purchases throughout the State of California. As an additional burden, ammunition retailers are also required to store ammunition in locked containers away from purchasers, and become certified with the State of California.

Since the Second Amendment is supposedly a core Republican issue -- at least according to the California Republican Party platform it is, which even recognizes that "One of the first acts of a totalitarian society is to disarm its people" -- a liberty lover proposed a resolution to support the repeal of A.B. 962. How then does a resolution like this fail in a Republican body?

I can only assume that the statists of the ACRP figured that if it were easier for individuals to buy ammunition that it would be harder for the U.S. military to obtain the ammunition it needs to fight its War on Monsters around the world. The failure of the pro-gun resolution, therefore, was entirely consistent with the statists' rejection of a non-interventionist foreign policy.

At least the statists are consistent.


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