David McElroy

I just read the the Navy’s Blue Angels are going to cancel their flying shows this year because of budget cuts. I’m really upset about this.

If there’s no budget deal by midnight tonight, about $85 billion in budget cuts will kick in. For weeks, I’ve been bombarded with stories about how “draconian” these cuts will be. Even though everybody has known for months that the cuts are coming, Barack Obama and congressional Republicans act like teen-agers in cars playing chicken near a cliff.

Even though Obama gets to decide what cuts are made, he calls them “dumb, arbitrary cuts” that are “unnecessary and inexcusable.”

For instance, Joe Biden isn’t going to be able to fly home on the weekends aboard his Air Force jet. Instead, he’s going to have to go back to riding an Amtrak train. This is horrible. It’s upsetting. How could we let such a thing happen?

Various federal agencies are telling their employees that they’ll be taking one unpaid day off every week through the end of the year unless a budget deal is reached. (The IRS is delaying this particular cut until after tax season, so you can tell what their priorities are.) How will we possibly survive with a 20 percent reduction in the hours worked by these various bureaucrats? It’s outrageous that they won’t be in their offices doing … well, whatever it is that they do.

The White House wants to apply maximum pressure on Congress to keep spending, so it has released a list of what cuts will hit each and every state. Here’s the list of cuts that I’m supposed to be scared about here in Alabama, for instance. And I am. I’m terrified.

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It was a year ago this morning that I had surgery to remove a cancerous lump in my left breast. In a way, it seems as though it was just a few weeks ago. In another way, though, it seems as though it was in another lifetime.

When the hospital gave me the paperwork outlining everything I needed to know about the surgery and how to be prepared for it, the pages were filled with pictures of smiling patients. When I arrived at the waiting area before surgery at 6 a.m. on Jan. 30, 2012, I didn’t see any smiling faces. I saw the faces of people who were just as scared as I was.

It’s a surreal experience to be going through the motions of preparing for something such as surgery. In a way, it was very normal, because I had a checklist of tasks to accomplish before I got there. Mostly, though, it felt as though I was stepping into a world that I’d been able to avoid for all the years of my life until then. If it’s not overly dramatic to say so, it felt like preparing for death.

There was no reason for me to think that morning that I was about to die, but the experience was so foreign — as well as cold and antiseptic — that it was oddly reminiscent of what it must feel like to prepare to die. I can’t even explain that. It’s more something I feel. It was very cold and impersonal. More than anything, I felt very alone.

An old friend brought me to the hospital and waited for me. When the nurses were ready for me to come to the pre-op area to get ready, I left her behind with other people’s families and friends and entered a world that felt like death’s waiting room. I had to take off all of my clothes and put them into a bag. I dressed in a gown with hospital socks and a net over my head. One of the anesthesiologists connected a plastic tube to my arm.

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The Second Amendment wasn’t written to protect hunters. It also wasn’t written just to protect the rights of people to defend their own property from thieves. It was written to make it clear that individuals had the right to own weapons to defend themselves against tyrannical governments.

For too many years, supporters of gun rights allowed the lobbyists of the National Rifle Association to define the arguments of the pro-gun side. As a result, many people are fixated on the historically inaccurate view that the Second Amendment is all about hunters and individual protection. Instead, that amendment is far more radical than the NRA was willing to state.

The Second Amendment was written by people who were very serious about the notion that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of [individual liberty], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it….” The Second Amendment was written by people who had just finished fighting a revolution. It was intended as a guarantee that future Americans would have the ability to fight against a future government that had grown too powerful.

People on the Progressive left tell us that the Second Amendment wasn’t written for today. They say the amendment was written for a day in which weapons were far less powerful. For instance, CNN’s Piers Morgan recently tweeted, “The 2nd amendment was devised with muskets in mind, not high-powered handguns & assault rifles. Fact.” Let’s look briefly at his claim and its implications.

At the time the Second Amendment was written, muskets were the weapons used by individuals and by the government. There wasn’t any difference in the weapons the two could deploy. There wasn’t some high-powered musket technology that the government retained for its exclusive use. The people were on equal footing if it came time to revolt.

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