GAZETTE ED: THE ENEMY WITHIN by John Flannery

  

THE ENEMY WITHIN

By John P. Flannery

What have we learned?

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a wonderful public servant from Tucson, Arizona, named for an angel, took a 9mm bullet through the left side of her brain, back to front, at 10 AM on Saturday, January 8, 2011, outside a Safeway where she was meeting with her constituents.

As I write this, the day after she was shot, she is fighting for her life, in a coma we hope is a sleep of repair, brain swelling receding, consciousness imminent.  Even if she recovers, she may not ever be able to resume her congressional office.  You have to wonder if that wasn’t the objective – to do with bullets what couldn’t be accomplished with ballots.

The skilled shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, 22, wrote before he shot her, “I planned ahead,” and that it was an “assassination.”

Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik of Pima County explained this shooting happened because of the “vitriolic rhetoric” from our political “leaders.”

Last March, after the health care vote, former Governor Sarah Palin published a website that, Congresswoman Giffords complained, “has the crosshairs over our district,” and she rightly said, “[w]hen people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that action.”

When Rep. John Boehner was campaigning last March, he said, if the Obama health care reform passed, it would mean “Armageddon” (Revelations 16:16), as in when the Messiah returns to earth to fight the Anti-Christ.  Asked about his apocalyptic reference, he said they were “just words,” like they meant nothing.

Stieg Larsson fans may remember Lisbeth Salander’s T-shirt, “Armageddon was yesterday … today we have a serious problem.”  We surely do!

Republican T-party Senate Candidate Sharon Angle told those T-party activists they might be forced to resort to “Second Amendment remedies” if dissatisfied with the November election results.  Maybe Ms. Angle also thinks they were “just words.”

I’m not a lawyer because I like to argue.  I’m a lawyer because I believe the rule of law is the alternative to violence.  Some wannabe law makers last year basically told the public to break the law and they made possible, with such recklessness, the violence that they now pretend not to comprehend.

My hero, Sir Thomas More, admonished his son-in-law, Roper, for suggesting that More break the law:

"What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?. And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?  This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?  Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

Our leaders must recant their incitements to break the law - or we won't be able to stand upright in the winds that shall surely blow.