Sipsey Street Irregulars: To Dan III and the anonymous posters and emailers who are telling me what a thug Jay Dobyns is.

Monday, October 27, 2014

To Dan III and the anonymous posters and emailers who are telling me what a thug Jay Dobyns is.

Of Jay Dobyns and his fight with the ATF, Dan III writes:

Never forget Dobyns was one of the ATF thugs who attacked the Constitution in the course of his ATF "duties". He's just another badged thug, now former, who compromised his principles and his oath to defend the Constitution. May he rot in hell with all the other badged, tyrannical, .gov scum.

Another anonymous commenter writes:

There are no "good guys" in the ATF. All of them are domestic enemies of the Constitution. Internal spats like this may be a source of amusement, but under no circumstances should anyone who has ever arrested someone for a "federal firearms violation" be considered an ally of the freedom movement.

I have had emails in a similar vein, many of them more vehement and obscene than these. To that I would respond with this inconvenient fact: The Fast and Furious scandal would not have been uncovered without the assistance of Jay Dobyns, Vince Cefalu and the agents of CleanUpATF.org. Go that? Would. NOT. Jay Dobyns is hardly a perfect person. Nor is Vince Cefalu. Nor am I. Nor, I daresay, are any of you readers. Philosophically we disagree on many things, Dobyns, Cefalu and I. If you are looking for perfect people to restore liberty in this country you will come up short of the required number.

Another observation: People change and what seems to be right to them, even to their own understanding of how the universe works, can be changed -- in an instant or over time -- in the face of newly-demonstrated realities. I offer myself and my Benedict Arnold-period embrace of communism as a perfect example of that. Yet God chooses many imperfect instruments to carry out His will. The longer I live, the more convinced I am of that. As I said Cefalu and Dobyns would still disagree with me on many things and I with them, but what we discovered in the crucible of working on Fast and Furious and other ATF scandals was that men and women who disagree about many things can still find common cause in certain other, bigger, things. Among these are truth, fairness, and resistance to arbitrary power and the secrecy that it covets.

Try also to remember that if Michael Collins had adopted the attitude that there were "no good guys" in the Royal Irish Constabulary, all of Ireland would still be British.

5 comments:

wyowanderer said...: Very well said. Better not to cast stones when you're less than perfect.; October 27, 2014 at 9:27 AM
Anonymous said...: "men and women who disagree about many things can still find common cause in certain other, bigger, things. Among these are truth, fairness, and resistance to arbitrary power and the secrecy that it covets."

This is why I read you.

Very well said sir.; October 27, 2014 at 9:44 AM
brassbryan said...: principles, its what we're mad from. that, and how we may reserve the right to get smarter.

thanks mike

signed,
another imperfect soul, but smarter for it.; October 27, 2014 at 12:41 PM
GaryM said...: Well Said! We're all works in progress until we're dead.; October 27, 2014 at 1:28 PM
Anonymous said...: I think the comments listed are correct. I also think mikes words about them are correct.

Remember this folks -
Without the ATF, we could not so easily demonstrate WHY the ATF itself shouldn't exist in the first place. See, we are now WINNING the gun rights battles BECAUSE of governmental oversteps and overreaches perpetrated BY the ATF.

Infiltration of the enemy is a great way to destroy it from within.; October 27, 2014 at 2:59 PM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Monday, October 27, 2014

To Dan III and the anonymous posters and emailers who are telling me what a thug Jay Dobyns is.

5 comments:

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