Posted on 10/14/2004 11:30:22 AM PDT by anonymous_user
The National Rifle Association has switched its endorsement in the US House race to Democrat Stephanie Herseth.
The gun-rights group had endorsed her Republican challenger, Larry Diedrich, in the June special election. Herseth won that election and faces Diedrich again in next month's general election.
The National Republican Congressional Committee says the NRA bases its endorsements on votes taken by incumbents. Since Herseth voted to lift a ban on most guns in Washington DC, the NRA gave her its endorsement.
(Excerpt) Read more at keloland.com ...
Just damn.
If you want on the list, FReepmail me. This IS a high-volume PING list...
Don't think they would like to hear what I have to say! One vote and you can bet she will never vote that way again. Cheap trick by the Dems this summer to vote when they knew something was failing so they could look conservative! Dems have no moral compass when it comes to casting votes -- they will do anything to get elected.
Even if she were legitimately pro 2nd amendment rights, she will vote for house leadership that will decimate it.
Most intelligent Americans that frequent this site don't need the NRA or anyone else to tell them who to vote for.
The NRA is not a Republican organization, it is a Second Amendment organization. Democrats ought to be encouraged to support the Second Amendment; some do, and the RKBA would be far weaker if that wasn't the case.
Virtually every important change in public policy this country has EVER undertaken has been, in some significant part, bi-partisan. Reversing a 30-year-trend of eroding the Second Amendment DEFINITELY will be achieved by politicians of both parties, or not at all.
Please do not tar the entire NRA with this. The NRA actually does a lot of good things, notably in education and support of Second Amendment rights, shooting sports and so forth.
The NRA-ILA is the political money-moving arm. I am not sure what criteria they use to score elected officials, but they obviously do not think about party affiliation or the implications thereof.
Wisdom
Can you back that up?
Was the civil war and Reconstruction a 1 party or bi-partisan effort?
Was the new deal a 1 or 2 party effort?
Was the weakening of intelligence and defense post Watergate a 1 or 2 party effort?
I'll bet there is little historical correlation between significant changes and whether it was or was not bi-partisan.
Unless the pubbies fear losing our 2A votes, we will be taken for granted.
It is the same as the relationship between Blacks and the Dems. Until they start to vote Republican in any numbers, the Dems will just pay them lip service.
The Civil War was absolutely a bi-partisan effort. There were many Democrats in the North/Union, and that's to say nothing of the fact that the Republican Party of the early 1860s was, itself, effectively a multi-partisan coalition formed only a few years before by Whigs, disaffected Democrats, and a stragglers of a number of othe rmovements.
The Restruction as initially conceived was not bipartisan, but as it was actually settled was completely bipartisan, albeit a distasteful version of the same (essentially, the Democrats agreed to give up on Tilden's claim to the White House if the Republicans agreed to withdraw the Army to its barracks and give the Democrats back control over the South).
The New Deal was bipartisan in its own way. The most obvious argument is that a profoundly Republican-leaning country, measured by the votes of the 1920s, chose to elect a Democrat by a landslide in 1932 and a greater one in 1936, allegiances which began to revert to the mean almost as soon as the New Deal was in the main accomplished. The second is that it was Republican/Conservative concession on key points in the late 1930s which permitted the major New Deal initiatives to actually take effect. Finally, the rejections of Taft and other anti-New Dealers in favor of Dewey and Eisenhower, who were pro-New Dealers, cemented the New Deal as a permanent change.
The weakening of defense post-Watergate was a 4 year aberation, not a change. Cuts took place in the FY75-FY78 budgets; by the FY79 budget process, in the spring of 1978, Carter began to increase spending which only picked up under Reagan.
The weakening of intelligence was, alas, a bi-partisan thing as well. Skepticism of the intelligence community was universal on Capitol Hill of the 1970s, and it wasn't without some justification, even if the ends to which that skepticism was put were regretable. The CIA seemed ineffective where Congress wanted it to be effective (e.g., Vietnam) and all too effective where Congress was hesitant (e.g., Chile).
Bingo. And if anyone think that strengthens gun owner's rights, I'll sell them my South Dakota oceanfront villa.
It is powerful enough to sway some fence sitters into thinking, "Well, she can't be that bad if the NRA likes her."
If South Dakotans buy into the fairy tale of "conservative Democrats" that's ignorant. When the NRA buys into an endorsement based on one House vote, that's just plain sloppy and disingenuous to their supporters.
I guarantee they won't endorse her in 2006, and they will have played a pretty major role in getting her in Washington (if elected) in 2004.
The SD Senate race is exponentially more important than the at-large House seat.
Exactly right!
I am a lifetime member of the GOA, but will never join the NRA as long it endorses Democrats over Republicans.
They are cutting gun-owners throats by ignoring the fact that every Democrat elected gets them closer to a majority and the Democratic party is anti-gun-period.
Thune was endorsed with an A. Dasshole got an F+.
We read this in our local paper,The Rapid City Journal, yesterday morning.
This morning we cancelled four lifetime memberships from this household.
I don't understand all the angles they may be working at this particular moment but I know that a fish rots from the head down. And this fish stinks bad.
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