There is an episode of “Night Court” where the characters believe that one of their colleagues had died. The hold an impromptu memorial service for him and all of them try really hard to say something nice about him. One by one they all get up and one by one they all fail to produce anything. Luckily for him, they only thought he was dead. He was in the back soaking all of this.

One wonders whether that will be Majorie Taylor Greene someday. In her latest statements I have to wonder if her goal is to sit in back of that court room and watch her colleagues to fail to come up with anything. Apparently, she questioned why anyone would want to join the military. According to her they are just throwing their life away.

It’s a remarkable turn of events that somehow echoes the former president. So, are her comments an extraordinary example of someone trying to curry favor the leader of the abyss. Lemmings will follow each other off the cliff. Salmon will swim upstream only to die in the end. Republicans will echo the words of a sadist until they cease to be what they once were.

It doesn’t take much to remember a time when conservatives were the ones that loved the military. They would spend on them with reckless abandon. They would heap love on them with every opportunity and would accuse the other side of a failure to love them. Whether their love was true or not, they certainly wanted you to believe it was.

In its place is some kind of cultural nihilism. Nothing is sacred. Nothing outside of self is paramount. There is no high honor. We instead focus on invisible sex traffickers while we ignore the sex traffickers sitting right next to them in Congress. These are all empty pursuits in the name of owning the liberals and maintaining power.

Keith Olbermann used to have his “worst person in the world” segment on his old MSNBC show. Even then it seemed that the moniker was temporary. Someone else would hold that honor the next day. I’m not sure anyone can at this point. MTG is stealing good oxygen from the rest of us. It’s high time that she went away never to be heard from again.

“Living is easy with eyes closed Misunderstanding all you see.” — John Lennon

The time of death is fairly easy to report. The patient had been clinging to life on life support, but finally decided to pull its own plug when the RNC decided to censure Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. That by itself was horrific news for any fan of democracy.

Mind you, the simple act of censuring a politician is almost completely symbolic. It can be loosely defined as an expression of official disapproval. So, what exactly are they disapproving? Kinzinger and Cheney were the lone Republicans to participate in the House January 6th committee.

It wasn’t for lack of effort. One thing Democrats are always guilty of doing is reaching out in the interest of fairness. In a process that took nearly three months, they tried to get more Republicans on board. It was never going to happen. Republicans can only say no at this point. They’ve somehow regressed into the mind of a two year old.

Mind you, the commission itself is not the cause of death. There are dozens of plausible reasons for not participating. Often, these things become more political than useful. The death officially came when the RNC declared that January 6th was legitimate political discourse.

This is not one of those play on words. I’ve heard these before on the other side. I’ve had people tell me the Democrats are dead in terms of electoral politics. They said this back in the Bush administration. Ironically, Bush have been the only Republican politicians to win a popular vote in the presidential elections since 1988.

Yet, this isn’t some dramatic postmortem that will turn out the other way. Conservatism is not dead. It is alive and well. Patriotism certainly isn’t dead. There are still more than enough people that love their country. The zombie version of the party has managed to rig enough elections to send the undead in the halls of Congress for generations to come. The bodies will be there, but something will definitely be lacking.

Cities perform autopsies when the cause of death is undetermined or material to a criminal case. Countries should do the same when one of the major political parties dies. We should pour over all of the relevant information to determine if a homicide has occurred. It would either be a homicide or a suicide depending on your point of view.

The outlook on that largely depends on whether you believe the forces that took over the party were ever conservative in the first place. They said they were. They still insist they are. Yet, all of the available evidence suggests that they have abandoned every principle they held dear. That is ultimately the cause of death. It was essentially self immolation.

Believing things that are plainly untrue is a sign of mental illness or denial on a galactic level. When you force fealty to that delusion you cease to be a party. You become a cult. The Republican party isn’t a democratic party anymore. It’s a death cult dedicated to the rule of one man minus the law. Democracies don’t die in a blaze of glory. They atrophy when people honor the man over the mission.

This is one of those topics that seems to be hitting me a lot lately. It is especially acute when holidays like Independence Day come rolling around. People fly their flags and you can see all kinds of posts and personal messages about how much they love freedom, their religion, and their guns. Heck, I love two out of three of those. I’ve talked about the first two, so it is time to address the last one.

A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Technically speaking I’m not an English teacher. I primarily support English teachers and I did teach it for three years, but I would be remiss to call myself an expert on grammar. At one grammar workshop, the instrusctor admitted that the two weeks we had was not nearly enough time. I’ve always been an intuitive writer, so diagraming sentences is not my strength. That being said, I will give the second amendment my best shot.

It is made up of a dependent clause and an independent clause. The technical term for this is a complex sentence. In this case, the independent clause relies on the dependent clause. In plain English, the right of the people to keep and bear arms is dependent on a well-regulated militia befing necessary for the security of a free state. Obviously, one cannot know precisely whether a majority intended for guns to be necessary in the absence of a well-regulated militia. It should be noted that case law is at the very best divided on this as well.

Ignorance of the law bothers me, but it is understandable. Ignorance of history is also understandable. That bothers me even more as a historian. Blatantly flauting both the law and history in a faux expression of patiotism is enough to make me lose my lunch. The same people that are so gung ho to respect and appreciate the original intent of the framers have no idea how offbase they are.

If we look at the Bill of Rights we see that both the second and third amendments address large standing armies directly. This was the forefathers biggest fear. They addressed it in multiple amendments and one of them is seen as a throwaway now. Students always asked me why it was even there. Admittedly, the idea of how the framers felt about private gun ownership of guns on their own is murky at best. It is hard to separate people from the realities they exist in.

In addition to large standing armies encroaching on people’s freedoms, they were virtually useless in defending private citizens. So, guns were in fact necessary. Yet, today we have the largest standing army (counting advanced technology) in the history of the planet. So, we are supposed to follow the letter of the law and the original intent of the framers on guns and yet we should ignore it on large standing armies. Furthermore, how would the framers have felt about the state of policing we have now?

So, it is wrong to infringe on the rights of private citizens to own and operate guns, but it is perfectly fine to trample all of the framers and their desire to limit large standing armies. The same folks that argue for private gun ownership and against limits on the same also argue for more defense spending and are first in line to argue for more policing and against police reform. Interesting isn’t it?

There is nothing worse than hypocrisy. If one wants to be an originalist they need to be an originalist. If one wants to pick and choose what precepts they want to follow they need to be up front about that. That’s the world most of us live in. We allow circumstances to mold our beliefs on any number of issues. As long as we admit that we can have discussions in good faith. It should be added that case law is consistent on legislatures rights to regulate gun ownership. If we can stop wrapping ourselves in the flag long enough maybe we can finally have some frank conversations about private gun ownership.