Tag Archives: Andrew Napolitano

Judge Napolitano: Second Amendment ‘protects your right to shoot tyrants’

Andrew Napolitano screenshot

Judge Napolitano is right about one thing: it is a dirty little secret that pro-assault weapon advocates have been pushing the notion that they use their weapons for protection and for hunting when in fact there is a more sinister reason.

Assault weapon advocates have been backed in a corner about using their “weapons for hunting”, so it appears the consensus is that they may as well expose their “dirty little secret” as Napolitano calls it, and tell the world the truth:

The reason for the second amendment, which protect the right of American citizens to bear arms, is among other things, a protection of a citizen’s right to shoot government “tyrants”.

Here’s my problem with that scenario, who is defining the term “government tyrants”.  Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly?  Drudge, Newsmax, WND?  The gun bearer?

How many government tyrants are there?  Or perhaps, there is one “head enchilada” tyrant that needs to be taken out.  How many gun toting Americans will decide who that person is?

Will there be a new revolution as Alex what-his-name stated on The Piers Morgan Show a few days ago?  Or will it be some lone gunman who has determined (with the help of right-wing talk radio and websites) that a particular target or more is the reason for the country’s ills or it’s anti-gun stance, as perceived by the future “shooter”?

The Judge seems to have opened up more questions than answers…

The Raw Story

In a video published Thursday on the Gretawire blog, Andrew Napolitano, the senior judicial analyst for Fox News, said the Second Amendment allowed Americans to kill “tyrants.”

“You know with all the debate about guns, I’ve been doing some writing and doing a lot of thinking, and Greta and the rest of us at Fox want to know what you think about it,” the former New Jersey Superior Court Judge said. “The Constitution specifically and directly insulates the right to keep and bear arms from interference from the government. It could not be more clear: ‘…the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’”

“So since the Congress can’t change the Constitution, how could they possibly take away your right to keep and bear arms?” Napolitano continued. “Here’s the dirty little secret about the Second Amendment, the Second Amendment was not written in order to protect your right to shoot deer, it was written to protect your right to shoot tyrants if they take over the government. How about chewing on that one.”

Watch video, uploaded to YouTube, below:

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Beck calls Gingrich a stealth progressive, his tea party supporters racists

Some of us would have preferred that Glenn Beck stayed in the dark hole he made for himself after Fox News let him go.   However, the following story is worth sharing…

The Raw Story

Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich had a tense head-to-head earlier this week. The two sparred on multiple topics, but the final straw for Beck was apparently when he asked Gingrich to name his favorite president. Gingrich answered Theodore Roosevelt, and as a result, Beck has decreed that Gingrich is a “progressive”.

On these grounds, Beck has declared that Gingrich is the only one of the current crop of Republican hopefuls for whom he could never vote. In an appearance on Fox Business Channel’s Freedom Watch with Andrew Napolitano, Judge Napolitano agrees with Beck, calling Teddy Roosevelt “the original Nanny State-r” and echoing Beck’s assessment of Gingrich as a stealth progressive.

Beck goes off on one of his colorful rants, saying, “Newt, I read history. I know exactly who Teddy Roosevelt was. I know he did the FDA, and it’s not just about sausages. He says ‘Well we want to make sure that people falling into sausage factories.’ Yeah, we do need that. It’s ridiculous, it’s ridiculous.”

Beck then issues a challenge to tea party Republicans, saying that if Gingrich is a “big-government progressive,” he’s the same as Obama, and the only reason they would support Gingrich over Obama would be “Obama’s race.”

It’s an inflammatory charge to make, especially after all of the time and energy tea party supporters have spent since the group’s inception insisting that their animus toward President Obama has nothing to do with his race and everything to do with taxes and government spending.

Napolitano frets that Gingrich’s “personality and personal background” are so polarizing that they will turn the discussion away from what he calls Obama’s “miserable three years in Washington.”

You can watch this discussion, embedded via Mediaite.

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VIDEO: The Truth About GOP Hero Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

In keeping with our “fact checking” theme for today, Think Progress has an article that’s apropos for today’s topic…

Think Progress  

H/t – Yankee Clipper

A film adaptation of the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, opened this past Friday. The release of the film has coincided with a resurgence of popularity for Rand on the American Right. The trailer for Atlas Shrugged had its world premier at this year’s CPAC conference, the Tea Party group FreedomWorks has rolled outa massive campaign to promote the film, and the story’s opening line — “Who is John Galt?” — has appeared on numerous signs at Tea Party rallies.

At the same time, some of the right’s leading political and media lights have heaped praise upon Rand. The author of the Republicans’ new budget plan to gut Medicare and Medicaid, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), has said Rand is the reason he entered politics, and requires his staff to read her work. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) have both declared themselves devotees of her writing. Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has his law clerks watch the film adaptation of Rand’s book The Fountainhead. She’s also received accolades from right-wing pundits Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, John Stossel, and Andrew Napolitano.

During her lifetime, Rand advocated “the virtue of selfishness,” declared altruism to be “evil,” opposed Medicare and all forms of government support for the middle-class and the poor, and condemned Christianity for advocating love and compassion for the less fortunate:

Continue reading here…

More from Yankee Clipper: 

Ayn Rand Received Social Security, Medicare

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Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano says Bush and Cheney ‘should have been indicted.’

Think Progress

Although Fox News legal analyst and former New Jersey district judge Andrew Napolitano is usually a reliable right-wing voice for the network, he has often criticized of President Bush and his national security policies. When the law authorizing Bush’s wiretapping program expired in 2008, Napolitano used the railed against the program as an affront to the Constitution. He has also blasted Bush last year for authorizing the use of torture, saying that he had “committed a felony for each act of torture.” In an interview with Ralph Nader on C-SPAN this weekend, Napolitano said Bush and Vice President Cheney “should have been indicted” for torture:

NADER: What’s the sanction for President Bush and Vice President Cheney? [...]

NAPOLITANO: They should have been indicted. They absolutely should have been indicted for torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrants. I’d like to say they should be indicted for lying but believe it or not, unless you’re under oath, lying is not a crime. At least not an indictable crime. It’s a moral crime.

NADER: So you think George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should even though they’ve left office, they haven’t escaped the criminal laws, they should be indicted and prosecuted?

NAPOLITANO: The evidence in this book and in others, our colleague the great Vincent Bugliosi has amassed an incredible amount of evidence. The purpose of this book was not to amass that evidence but I do discuss it, is overwhelming when you compare it to the level of evidence required for a normal indictment that George W. Bush as President and Dick Cheney as Vice President participated in criminal conspiracies to violate the federal law and the guaranteed civil liberties of hundreds, maybe thousands of human beings.

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