Awesome article from the Washington Times at:
[url]www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010719-19185844.htm[/url]
[center]McCain does it again[/center]
Daniel J. Rabil
Back in its grander colonial days, Great Britain's ruling class had a term for the type of fellow who, when dispatched to some remote corner of the globe, repudiated his home civilization and zealously adopted the ways and customs of the non-Western locals. Such a person had "gone native."
Culturally, Washington is as remote from Arizonan ideals as Pakistan was to Mother England. And like those earlier colonists, Arizona Sen. John McCain has smoked Washington's political opium and "gone native." In fact, the word "McCain" is now so often paired with Rust Belt Democrats, you'd swear it was the maiden name of a liberal newlywed: McCain-Feingold; McCain-Kennedy; McCain-Lieberman.
First, Mr. McCain hogged the stage to push for the colossal tobacco tax grab in 1998. Then he slapped together a campaign-finance "reform" bill that spits on the First Amendment and squashes the only means conservatives have for getting their message across in a Democrat-controlled media. This year, he spitefully voted against America's first income tax relief since the Reagan years, despite Arizona's support for the tax-cutting president.
Arizona has a long history of supporting individual liberty, and I twice voted for Mr. McCain based on his dull but conservative record. But these are strange times indeed, with disputed presidential elections and a Senate that features party-switchers and jilted first ladies. And zinging around through it all, like a random enemy spaceship in a video game, is Mr. McCain blasting this, disrupting that, curbing this freedom, shafting that taxpayer. Since 1998 the "maverick" Republican has lurched from one left-wing cause to the next.
Now, in a continuing quest to become the senator from the New York Times, Mr. McCain has joined Sen. Joe Lieberman to co-sponsor the dangerous McCain-Lieberman gun-control bill. (You remember Joe, that "moral" guy who trashed all those absentee votes cast by sailors in Mr. McCain's old outfit, the U.S. Navy.)
Some perspective on Mr. McCain's priorities: Republican President George W. Bush squeaked into office thanks to Second Amendment voters in Al Gore's Tennessee and in normally Democrat West Virginia. Yet Mr. McCain has resurrected gun-control for the Democrats by pushing to close a so-called gun show loophole that would instead shut down or greatly hinder legal gun shows. Of course, less than two percent of guns used in crimes come from gun shows, and gun shows are particularly popular in Arizona. Mr. McCain's press materials claim that states without gun show background checks are "flooding the rest of the nation with crime guns." Yet Washington, which outlaws virtually all private guns, has 3.8 times the murder rate of Phoenix, where residents can buy a gun in minutes and huge gun shows appear regularly. Why does the senator insult his own state, when by his own hyperbole it's really the "crime states" that are flooding the "gun show states" with criminals?