PRAISE THE LORD AND PASS THE FETTUCCINI!



Sour Grapes

It is with mixed emotions that WOOF turns its attentions once again to the topic of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who is a somewhat sore subject hereabouts, we having been ejected from the “Conservative” forum on Reddit for publishing a previous screed that held the Garden State’s abdominous first administrator in unvarnished derision. True, in the name of 100% factual blogospherical candor we feel obliged to admit we were, on the occasion of our expulsion from Reddit’s chief conservative subreddit, officially accused of “spamming” by a site moderator—but consider these facts: First, nobody in the WOOF cave knows how to “spam,” nor harbors any inclination to “spam,” and nobody at Reddit voiced any objection to any of our activities prior to the advent of our anti-Christie article seven months ago. Add to this the curious fact that immediately upon banning us, the very same moderator took it upon him-or-herself to post a sidebar praising Governor Christie as “a pragmatic conservative executive, who is not afraid to take on the main pillars of the Democratic Political Machine” calling him “likeable to the electorate” and “the man of the moment.” These encomia were accompanied by a cavalcade of you-tube links summarized as the “Best of Chris Christie.”

Okay, so we get it—our contentious mod really likes the governor, and that’s fine with everyone in the WOOF cave—really it is. But why should our vastly superior and considerably more entertaining insights be banished in perpetuity (by this unilaterally inclined browbeater who is no longer, we note, listed among the site’s moderators) when spritely debate is so much healthier than ham-fisted repression? Okay, that’s enough about this sordid business—too much, in fact. But WOOF wants everyone at “Conservative” to know that we harbor no ill feelings and are prepared to graciously accept reinstatement once cooler heads prevail and evenhandedness is restored! That’s just how magnanimous we are.

But as usual, gentle readers, we digress! This is not an article intended to criticize the inner workings (however lamentable we may consider them in the above-mentioned instance) of Reddit. No, it is, in fact, an article intended to further deprecate the gubernatorial comportment of Chris Christie, and in particular his exasperatingly irresolute relationship to the 2nd amendment, which inalienable right he clearly seems incapable of embracing with nearly the ardor he famously exhibited toward Barack Obama on the occasion of the First Marxist’s Halloween stopover in Atlantic City following Hurricane Sandy.

To ban, or not to ban—a difficult question?

And this brings us to that other modern miracle of social networking, Twitter. Despite initially insisting that no proper gentleman would ever “tweet,” at least not publicly, WOOF was eventually talked into opening a Twitter account, and does very well on that social medium. We know this because “Tech Elf” Noah, who manages our Twitter affairs and talked us into tweeting to begin with, has assured us it is the case, and we know him to be a probative lad. He also submitted a morning briefing to the effect that Twitter is ablaze with appeals to Governor Christie to veto the New Jersey magazine ban, as well as numerous tweets featuring pro-gun stories, all bearing the same general sentiment, usually something along the lines of, “Gov. Christie will surely veto the magazine ban if he watches this video!” or some similar example of wishful thinking– but what really drew our notice was the span over which these tweets have been appearing. Apparently, Governor Christie has been doing his Prince Hamlet act over the magazine ban for weeks and weeks now—since May 22nd in fact when bill A2006 found its way to his desk–and this might set the average American to wondering, what on earth is so intellectually challenging about this straightforward assault on the 2nd amendment? Does it require lengthy analyses by armies of weaponological and Decalogical consultants? Are we missing some overriding complexity that makes this issue somehow—thorny?

The intolerable act

Late in May the liberals of the blue, blue New Jersey State Assembly decided that they agreed with Bryan Miller, executive director of the anti-gun group Heeding God’s Call, that “No law abiding citizen needs 15-round magazines” [because] “nobody needs a 15-round ammunition magazine unless they are a domestic terrorist or a gangster!” Brother Miller (who is apparently the next Jeff Cooper, so packed with weaponological insights is he) added that, “Our top priority is a 10-round limit on magazine size.” It may have escaped Miller’s attention that most law enforcement officers carry guns with a greater magazine capacity than ten rounds because they anticipate actually having to shoot at real people, and often more than one. In fact, a good many honest, hardworking citizens, insouciant of Miller’s pronounceomento, are walking around with handguns on their persons or in their homes that contain magazines with capacities in excess of ten rounds. Just as examples, the Beretta 92 model pistols customarily contain 15 rounds per magazine. Para Ordnance’s popular P14-45 1911s hold 14 rounds in their double-stacked magazines, and these pistols are hardly oddball defense choices, they typify respectable handguns on the market currently that offer standard magazine capacities in excess of ten rounds. [By the way, we know liberals read our website because we get their hate mail, so for the benefit of liberal readers WOOF wishes to clarify that one round equals what you more probably refer to as “one bullet,” and so on, progressing along a one-to-one basis of numeric equivalency. This has been an across-the-aisle moment of sociopolitical outreach.]

Danny and the Liberal Gun

Speaking of Liberals, they, in fact, might wish to give special consideration to this point, because we have observed that Liberals are perhaps even more reliant than non-Liberals on high capacity magazines. Why do we say this? Well, it was first brought to our attention in the ‘70s, (back when WOOF operated as a kind of Samizdat publication), by a friend of ours named Danny. Danny house-sat in the Washington DC area, and because he was good at it, he babysat a lot of town houses and Georgetown apartments for dedicated inside-the-beltway liberals. Danny said that one day he was looking for something-or-other in a town house’s bedroom, and accidentally came across a gun. This surprised him because the leftist homeowners were ardently anti-gun—but despite their politics, they obviously owned one. Danny noted that it was a 9mm Browning High Power. Let’s face it, even principled anti-gun liberals might have to defend themselves, and like most good liberals (who can’t afford heavily armed body guards) they exceptionalize themselves out of self interest. Remember the Carl Rowan shooting? [It’s an oldie but a goodie reviewable by clicking here]

His surprise discovery inspired Danny to launch a kind of one-man investigatory probe. He began checking all the houses and apartments that fell under his custodianship for firearms, and according to Danny, he repeatedly discovered a gun, and it was almost always a Browning 9mm similar to his original discovery. The singularity baffled him, so one day he mentioned the oddity to an acquaintance who owned a gun store. The store owner was quick to agree that liberals liked the Browning, explaining that liberals purchased guns in case they needed them, but were typically equivocal about the idea and rarely planned to invest any time in mastering the weapon. They tended to gravitate toward the Browning, the store owner said, because it was a 9mm, which sounded easier to manage than a .45 or a .357 magnum, and because they were unfamiliar with the basics of handgunning and determined to stay that way, they went for the High Power because its 13-round box magazine (an exceptional capacity for the 1970s) offered, they reasoned, repeated opportunities to hit a home invader despite a lack of prowess. Thus, through no real fault of its own, John Browning’s venerable 9mm autoloader became what the gun store proprietor called “the liberal handgun.”

Because Fabianism takes time…

The liberal metanarrative is always more compelling to leftists, ultimately, than matters of practical necessity, thus practical considerations will sacrifice themselves again and again to the larger purpose, in this case the humbling of America and its gun-loving culture of freedom and independence. The bitter clingers must be pried loose of their treasured thunder sticks, even if it means that the liberal homeowner must give up his shiny, unfired Browning autoloader because “No law abiding citizen needs 15-round magazines.” Or 13-round ones, either! No, apparently the Gods of the Copybook Headings have hit upon ten rounds as the perfect number of “bullets” with which to defend hearth and home. For now, that is. Obviously only revolvers holding a maximum of six rounds will be okay later on—and then perhaps only flintlocks. Fabianism, by definition, takes time.

Original understanding…?

Also weighing heavily (no dig intended) on Governor Christie must be the fastidiously marshaled arguments involving original understanding of the 2nd Amendment. Such arguments maintain an appeal because it is, after all, the crazy Bork-ites of the political Right (and we include ourselves here) who fuss endlessly about the importance of retaining an “original understanding” of constitutional writ, and it is they, the liberal argument goes, who should be the first to acknowledge that flintlock pistols and Kentucky squirrel rifles were all the Founders ever envisioned Americans keeping and bearing in the first place! What would Jefferson, for instance, remark, if presented with, let’s say, the M-1 carbine with a 30-round banana clip? Well for starters, he might say, “Cool, that’s ten more rounds than the rifles Lewis and Clarke are outfitted with!” (It’s true, Woofketeers; the 46 caliber Girardoni Windbüchse rifle with which Jefferson equipped Charlton Heston and Fred MacMurray before Donna Reed led them on their legendary westward expedition were 20-shot repeaters—check it out here!) And trust us, we could inundate you with descriptions of guns firing more than ten times without reloading from the 19th century onwards, but you know us–we’d just distract ourselves!

Straw Deer

The odd presumption that ten rounds=an honest citizen whereas, say, 15 rounds add up to a nefarious screwball is an offshoot of a favorite liberal straw argument, namely that true adherents to the 2nd amendment are hunters, and hunters only. Thus we have, for example, Governor Cuomo’s classic idiotism: “No one needs ten bullets to kill a deer!” Add to this the liberals’ traditional criticism of firearms they especially reprehend, namely that such weapons are “designed to do one thing, and one thing only—and that’s kill people,” and the planted axiom becomes obvious: Our founders established the 2nd amendment exclusively to defend the right of frontiersmen to take game for nourishment even as they usurped the land of persecuted native populations, and yes, archaic though it be, it also vouchsafes the right of a few modern-day slobs and backward bumpkins to go shoot a few deer now and then, so long as they do so with suitably unmilitary-looking sporting rifles. The corollary axiom is implicit: Any firearm designed to kill anything other than the occasional deer is an assault weapon and no law-abiding citizen would ever own such a weapon, such weapons being the sole province of raging psychopaths the vast majority of whom belong in state institutions for the criminally right wing. But even the most lambent examination of the record proves this interpretation of the 2nd amendment to be balderdash.

John Adams covered all the bases when he remarked that “Arms in the hands of the citizens may be used at individual discretion for the defense of the country, the overthrow of tyranny or private self-defense.” Jefferson, [who never shot a man on the White House lawn, click here for edification] emphasized that, “The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” George Washington summed it up mightily when he wrote that, “Every corner of this land knows firearms, and more than 99 and 99/100 percent of them by their silence indicate that they are in safe and sane hands. The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil influence. They deserve a place of honor with all that’s good. When firearms go, all goes. We need them every hour.” It is interesting, we think, that one can read through a substantial volume of such quotations from the Founders without running across a single mention of putting meat on the table. No, it was the vital role guns played in dispatching assailants, discouraging tyrants, or repelling invaders that preoccupied the framers of our Constitution and the founders of our Republic.

…whithersoever the governor listeth…

It may be emotionally and philosophically wrenching to turn our attention from Adams, Jefferson, and Washington to Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, but we have put off doing so as long as possible. And how stands the Governor on the 2nd amendment? Well, it is no exaggeration to say that this depends heavily on the time of day and the prevailing winds. Lately, Christie prefers to take refuge in the mental health argument that gained prominence in the wake of the Elliot Rodger shootings in Santa Barbara and continues to gather momentum among politicians who fear the NRA too much to confront gun ownership per se, but who wish to maintain credibility as grappling with the issue. Christie told FOX News: “When you look at what we’ve done in New Jersey, we want to control violence. And some of that may involve firearms, but a lot of it doesn’t. In fact, my focus has been on making sure that mental health is done in a much more aggressive way. Every time we see one of these incidents happen across our country, it is almost exclusively with a deeply disturbed person at the helm (sic), and what we need to do is be much more aggressive about how we deal with mental health issues in this country. So I am for violence control.” How bold!

But apart from the fact that his statement is essentially meaningless, a mere summoning of obfuscatory rhetoric to becloud an issue upon which he means to waffle (you should excuse the term), the emphasis on mental health places the Governor on some extremely problematic terrain, as indeed it did the NRA, which was foolish enough to advance similar recommendations in the wake of Sandy Hook. [Readers unacquainted with the hidden perils of dragging psychology into the gun debate are invited to click here]. Of course, the mental health card cannot be easily played in contemplation of magazine capacities, since most Americans will not take seriously the suggestion that wanting more rounds in one’s weapon than Governor Cuomo believes one should have marks the difference between sanity and psychosis. There is something endemically hincty about an adult male taking week upon week to decide how many cartridges the citizens of New Jersey will be permitted to load into their personal firearms. And if the Governor were to decide and declare, “as many as they freely choose,” and veto A2006, what would it cost him? A bro hug from the First Marxist? A return phone call from Bruce Springsteen? Yes, it’s lonely at the top.

The sad fact is, Chris Christie has no more use for the 2nd Amendment than has Rosie O’Donnell or Barbra Streisand—so long as they are surrounded by armed bodyguards, of course, and Christy would gladly autograph the unctuously un-American legislation on his desk if it weren’t for his hesitancy to manifest his utter lack of conservative gravitas just when his bid for the 2016 Republican nomination seems ready to grind into gear. But no conservative need waste a nanosecond taking Christy seriously on this issue—his insincerity is manifested by his record. In 2009, Christie appeared on Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News and announced his support for “some gun control measures.” When Hannity challenged him in this regard, Christie explained that he supported “commonsense laws that will allow people to protect themselves,” but added that he was “very concerned about the safety of our police officers on the streets, very concerned,” and wanted to “make sure that we don’t have an abundance of guns out there.”

Juxtapose this, dear readers, to George Washington’s belief that “the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil influence.” Are not these two views of the 2nd amendment diametrically opposed? The problem with “common sense gun legislation” is that it seems commonly sensible only on the Left, where the mythos prevails that an armed citizen in a movie theater, for instance, will be safer with a seven round magazine in his handgun should a psychopath with a backpack full of magazines open up on the crowd, than if the honest citizen had ten-plus rounds at his disposal—and of course there is no assuming that the psychopath has dutifully equipped himself with magazines containing no more than ten rounds. The liberal logic accompanying the magazine ban is that law-abiding psychopaths will adhere to the magazine limits and be forced to reload more frequently during shooting sprees, thus affording bystanders a chance to escape. That a safer approach might be well-armed citizens shooting the psychopath before he can discharge a second or third shot into the crowd never seems to occur to anyone to the left of Marlo Thomas. It occurred to the “Batman shooter” (James Holmes) however. He bypassed three more conveniently situated theatres showing the Batman movie in order to open fire at one that did not permit concealed firearms—or, put more objectively, permitted only illegally concealed firearms.

Expanding efforts…

Not that Christy isn’t on record vetoing anti-gun legislation, he even vetoes his own. In April of 2013 Christy assured the media that “the [state] assembly has put some bills forward, the [state] senate’s gonna put some bills forward, I’ve now put bills forward, and now we have to let the process work…” However, after introducing (with not inconsiderable fanfare) the concept of firearm ownership “smart” cards, and mandatory training periods for would-be gun purchasers, and having “let the process work,” he reconsidered and vetoed his own legislation. The governor also vetoed a bill to ban .50-caliber firearms, even though he personally led the initial effort to eliminate them. Had he discovered the joys of the Desert Eagle, or long-range watermelon blasting with the gubernatorial M82 Barrett? No, but WOOF knows Christie changed his mind after he was deluged with mail from angry gun owners in New Hampshire. And why should the governor of the Garden State care what people think in New Hampshire? Our perceptive readers will already have reminded themselves that New Hampshire is the site of the nation’s first presidential primary.

Wishful thinkers who persist in supposing Christie a conservative at heart should consider that just prior to serially vetoing his own anti-gun recommendations, the governor responded to the Newton, Connecticut shootings by signing into law no fewer than 10 gun-control bills including one that mandated his state’s submission of citizen’s mental health records to the FBI for the National Instant Background Checks System. He also created a task force entitled SAFE, which he announced would “expand New Jersey’s strict gun-control measures,” even though they were already among the nation’s strictest. In fact, even before Christie launched his most recent assault on the 2nd amendment his state won accolades from the confiscation advocates at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which lauded New Jersey as the second most anti-gun state in the Union, finishing well ahead of notoriously hoplophobic Massachusetts and only narrowly ceding first place to ultra-blue California. Moreover, Christie’s history is strewn with anti-gun efforts and outbursts.

Thwarting radical plans…

In 1993 Christie registered as a Republican in order to confront Republican state senator John Dorsey in the primaries. When young Christie was scrubbed from the ballot owing to insufficient and often ludicrously invalid signatures on his petition for inclusion, he immediately switched parties and campaigned against Dorsey as a Morris County Democrat—again to no avail. During the campaign, Christie made it plain that his chief objection to Dorsey, and Republicans in general, was their support of gun rights. “The issue which has energized me to get into this race is the recent attempt by certain Republican legislators to repeal New Jersey’s ban on assault weapons,” quoth the budding politico. Defeated but undaunted, Christie discarded the Democratic label, switched back to Republican, and entered another Republican primary, this time for the less ambitious office of Freeholder on the Morris County Legislature. (In New Jersey, “freeholders” are roughly equivalent to city councilmen.) After a whopping two months as an elected Freeholder, Christy launched a primary challenge aimed at denying Patrick Carroll, a conservative’s conservative, a seat in the State Assembly. Christie’s enthusiasm for gun control quickly proved undiminished. He accused Carroll of running a “guns for votes campaign,” warning voters that Carroll was in cahoots with the nefarious NRA and had to be stopped before he could implement his “radical plan to legalize assault weapons.”

But here Christie made a rookie error. He placed his reliance on New Jersey’s liberal electorate, forgetting that Republican primaries bring out conservatives who don’t appreciate gun grabbers. He was roundly (you should forgive the expression) trounced, receiving only 4,376 votes which is to say, he finished dead last in a substantial field. But in this darkest hour, Christie could count at least one important lesson learned—mainly, that his anti-gun sentiments had to be tempered to fit political circumstances. As governor in 2009 Christie confronted a new challenge. Not only was Congress bent on overriding (among other unconstitutional enormities) New Jersey’s ultra-restrictive gun laws, but closer to home the entire Republican delegation to the New Jersey House voted in favor of “right-to-carry reciprocity,” which threatened to allow any American citizen with a valid permit to carry a gun in his home state the right to do likewise in the Garden State. Governor Christie outspokenly opposed these measures. On February 12, 2014, the pesky National Rifle Association together with 19 states, and 34 members of the House of Representatives petitioned the United States Supreme Court to review the 3rd District Court decision in New Jersey’s curtailment of the 2nd amendment rights of American citizens.

Nullify what?

Regarding this and other congressional efforts to defend the precepts of the 2nd amendment, Christie thundered: “I believe that each state should have the right to make firearms laws as they see fit. I don’t believe it’s right for the federal government to get into the middle of this and decide firearms laws for the people of the state of New Jersey!” In so saying, Christie essentially came out for “nullification,” but in a peculiarly topsy turvey sense. Rarely is the Supremacy Clause from Article Six of the constitution, which establishes the U.S. Constitution as “the supreme law of the land” brought to bear in this day and age as a guarantor of our Decalogical rights. It was intended to function as such, of course, but the increasing tendency of the federal government to circumvent the constitution, particularly under Obama and Holder, has cast the Supremacy Clause in a more sinister light. Thus, the separate states are increasingly prone to argue for nullification in their determination to protect their constitutional rights from federal vitiation.

But when elements of congress showed signs of becoming increasingly pro-2nd amendment, Christie stumbled upon the basic philosophy in order, as his quote makes clear, to protect the good people of New Jersey from the Bill of Rights. Imagining a more bizarre application of the legal theory of nullification would be difficult. Christie is quite literally insisting that stripping his state’s citizenry of their constitutional rights is his gubernatorial prerogative, all the while wrapping this sophistry in the banner of federalism. He isn’t doing this, by the way, because he actively seeks to subvert the constitution—he is doing this because he is not a serious thinker. He is, rather, a profoundly immature emotionalist who has reacted throughout his career to various perplexities in ad hoc and philosophically disjointed ways, as the mood takes him. James Madison, who was a serious thinker, foresaw exactly the attitude Christie’s outburst embodied when he wrote in Federalist 44 that if supremacy were not vouchsafed in Article Six, “it would have seen the authority of the whole society everywhere subordinate to the authority of the parts; it would have seen a monster, in which the head was under the direction of the members.” And it is exactly this insight that motivated the NRA and 34 members of congress to petition the Supreme Court.

Painful lessons

And this brings us back to where we began—with thousands of tweeters exhorting the governor to strike down the magazine ban with a slash of his pen. It is widely asserted that a gubernatorial veto, even if forthcoming, would not prove conclusive. But inasmuch as the bill cleared the Assembly by a vote of only 44 to 34, which in New Jersey constitutes a shockingly robust display of right-wing resistance—an override is by no means guaranteed. Yet the governor continues to ponder. Admittedly, he is under considerable pressure from both sides in the issue. The pro-gun factions are outspoken in their righteous opposition to the ban, and the anti-gun polemicists, led by the ubiquitous and aforementioned Bryan Miller of Heeding God’s Call, are equally ardent. In fact, Miller has gone out of his way to bring parents of two of the children slain at Sandy Hook from Connecticut to New Jersey to assist him in lobbying Christie. Their views were summarized by anti-gun Assembly Majority Leader Louis D. Greenwald (D., Camden) who explained, “My children will be safer, and your children will be safer, if we do this [pass the magazine ban] and if we learn the painful lessons from these families.”

And what is this painful lesson? Greenwald explained that reducing the maximum magazine capacity would force gunmen to reload more frequently, giving intended victims a chance to escape. And this is the painful lesson? With all due respect to the suffering of the Sandy Hook parents, one seems well within one’s rights to wonder aloud about Majority Leader Greenwald’s perspective. He means, one supposes, that if shooters stop to reload, they may be more easily avoided. So the “painful lesson” seems to be that the good citizens of New Jersey need more time (after a lawfully equipped maniac expends his limit of ten rounds and dutifully pauses to reload), in order to run for it. But this is a tenuous line of reasoning, put charitably. Much has been debated regarding the Sandy Hook shootings, but one thing is generally agreed upon, and that is that the shooter “reloaded frequently” as reported, for example, by the Hartford Courant of January 6, 2013. Yet the mayhem continued. It also merits mention that Connecticut, where the shootings occurred, prohibits possession or transport of AR style “assault weapons,” (Connecticut general statute 53-202c) so that the shooter, who used a Bushmaster rifle to blast his way through the school’s locked front door, was clearly unimpeded by existing regulations. In the end, the assailant shot himself when he realized armed defenders were on the scene. It is virtually endemic to these horrific events that the shooter shoots himself as soon as men with guns appear. The painful lesson that remains unlearned is that had anybody—any one teacher or administrator at Sandy Hook been armed, it is highly probable that the killer’s shooting spree would have been pre-empted, if not from a round fired by a defender, then by his own hand. One point upon which all sides of the gun debate can presumably agree is that suicide never requires a high capacity magazine.

An intolerable “act”?

And so, the issue remains in play: Will the governor listeth to starboard or port? Will he decide in accordance with his obvious and long-standing partialities and sign the magazine ban, or yield to his ambitions and veto the bill, however reluctantly, to shore up his support on the political right in preparation for 2016? Readers may well wonder why WOOF has plunged into publication with this particular screed, when a few more days will tell the tale and provide a resolution to the matter—but the answer is simple: It doesn’t really matter.

Oh, sure, it matters to citizens of the Garden State who may wish to protect themselves in accordance with their constitutional rights, and who may prefer to confront potential assailants with enough ammo to make survival a likelihood; and it matters on the grander scale of our ceaseless struggle to preserve the Founders’ vision of an armed community of free Americans determined to preserve their liberty. Viewed in these contexts, it diminishes the Republic in spirit and body when even the bluest of states signs away its supernal birthright. But it does not matter an iota as it relates to the governor himself. Christie’s protracted display of ambivalence in this crucial moment, his career-long record of antipathy toward the right to bear arms, and his monumental show of indecision respecting bill A2006 are more than sufficient to disqualify him as presidential material in the eyes of a patriotic electorate. Aware of this at some level, Christie has affected a Hamlet-esque ambivalence as he ponders his options. He has, in other words, endeavored to dissemble purely political calculation as kingly deliberation. We say again, it doesn’t matter. No man who requires 45 days to decide whether the puniest, most ill-advised of assaults on the 2nd amendment ought or ought not to be embraced should be granted a moment’s consideration for higher office. It was George Washington, recall, who said of guns, “We need them every hour,” and it was Chris Christie who when asked by Sean Hannity, “Should every citizen in your state be allowed to get a licensed weapon if they want one?” replied, “In New Jersey, that’s not going to happen!” Any politico capable of voicing so ill-advised an apodicticity deserves to be told exactly the same thing about the American presidency.

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YES, IT’S WOOF’S NEW “INTELLECTUAL BOILER PLATE” GIMMICK!

Wherein the editors strive to even up our columns a bit by inserting images and contact info for old and new books we consider vital to the interest of our readers (old and new readers, for that matter) and sneakily endeavor thereby to avoid those awful “read more” buttons that prevent putting a whole story on the front page and require more work–like turning to some other page in a newspaper to finish reading a story–doesn’t that drive you nuts? Well, it does us, anyhow! And by the way, because we chose the Depo Masthead theme for our blog, the most stubbornly immutable theme in blogging history, this also moves the “sharing and comments” section down below the books part, but you are smart, gentle readers, and we know you would have figured that out without our help! And now, some “boiler plate” (newspaper slang for vicarious column filler) that also happens to constitute some first rate guidance for conservatives in search of exceptional reading!

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WOOF’s LIBRARY OF RECOMMENDED CURRENT & CLASSIC MASTERPIECES:

Purchase American Betrayal it from Amazon here!

Buy New Deal or Raw Deal on Amazon here!

Buy Blacklisted by History on Amazon here!

Buy The Closing of the American Mind on Amazon here

Buy Up from Liberalism on Amazon here

Buy Trouble Maker on Amazon here

Buy Road to Serfdom on Amazon here!

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WOOF WENT GOLD FOR SEPTEMBER, WHICH WAS NATIONAL CHILDHOOD CANCER AWARENESS MONTH!

Check out the details by clicking right here!

Or we’ll sic Auric Goldfinger on you!