Musings After Midnight--I get a vote, you get a vote, all God's children get a vote! That's right, Mr. President, and that includes gun rights activists!

Hello, my friend, and thanks for stopping by on a cold winter's evening. Many of you in various parts of the country have been hit with record snowfalls, blizzards of historic proportions, and other severe weather. While I have managed to avoid most of that here, we are nonetheless in the midst of a cool down, and the next two days apparently will be fairly cold.

Of course, "cold" depends on one's perspective and area of the country. I know that there are those of you in Erie, Penn. who would love to have some of my version of "cold," which to you would seem warm.

Anyway, glad you are all here.

It's time for some more late-night/early morning chat about the state of the "union" which we call the United States, although one can hardly call it united anymore. The current occupant of the White House has done more to divide America than perhaps any other president in history.

His state of the union address displayed more of the same. Class warfare. Rich pitted against the middle class and vice versa. Entitlement hungry government dependents vs. independent, conscientious citizens who pay the taxes, do the work, and keep the nation from going under.

If there is one term that could be used to describe the entirety of the Obama presidency in a nutshell, it would be, "He says one thing and then does the opposite."

When has Obama ever lived up to his rhetoric? He talks about uniting Americans while doing the very things that divide them. He talks about reaching across the aisles in bipartisanship while refusing to budge one inch from his extremist agenda and expecting the Republicans to make all of the concessions. He claims he has cut the budget deficit, but the record shows the national debt has increased by over $6 trillion in less than four years -- double the pace that the debt grew during the Bush administration. One cannot reduce the deficit when the overall debt continues to rise with each passing day. Thus, Obama did not merely say one thing and do another, but he lied. There is no other way to describe it. He lied.

The fact that a significant number of Americans can watch this despicable display of duplicity and nod their heads in agreement with it, smiling the whole while, happy that we have "such a nice man" in the White House, is a testament to our overall demise as a country. We are going down the tubes. It is not just the fact that Americans make poor choices at the voting booth. It is the mentality that leads to those poor choices.

Note this telltale fact. Obama repeatedly promised during the campaign that he would never raise taxes on the middle class, that he only wants "the rich to pay their fair share." Yet in January, every single American who works, who holds down a regular job, got an extra 3 percent of their paycheck withheld from their take-home pay.

Why? Because Obama raised your payroll taxes by 3 percent. And that means everyone. The working poor. The lower middle class. The upper middle class. Every worker was slapped with a 3 percent increase in taxes.

Yet somehow there is a vast disconnect with reality on the part of a significant portion of the population. Where is the outcry, the demands that somebody answer the question, "Obama promised that nobody making less than $250,000 per year would get a tax increase. I make only $30,000 per year, but my paycheck was 3 percent less in January than it was in December. WHY? How could Obama get away with this lie he told during the campaign, knowing full well that come January everyone would get slapped with a 3 percent tax increase?"

I am hearing no such protests. Are you? Why not?

Because most of the dumbed down masses have been bitten by the denial bug. They are in a perpetual state of denial, under a demonic spell cast by Obama that causes otherwise normal people to avoid holding the master deceiver accountable for his lies.

Benghazi is another example. Any normal human being with an IQ just above that of a moron can figure out that the story told by Obama and his lackeys is horse ca-ca. You know it, and I know it. Yet nobody is holding him accountable, except for those conservative voices crying in the wilderness and the few in Congress who actually care.

And we still have had ZERO accountability for Fast and Furious.

Now, many if not most of us who consider ourselves to be thinking conservatives knew going in that Obama's speech last night would be full of lies and distortions. That was a given. This has been his pattern from day one, and there was absolutely no reason to think this time would be any different. But the problem is with those who swallow his bilge hook, line, and sinker, and the ones in Congress who are just as sleazy and deceptive as he is.

Take, for example, Obama's rhetorical use of the phrase, "They get a vote," to make his case for highly restrictive, draconian, and unconstitutional gun control. He had all of his props there to help him make his case -- some of the victims of Sandy Hook, former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, some of the survivors of the Denver shooting at the movie theater, and the like. Naming each group of these survivors, Obama declared, "They get a vote."

Now, obviously, Obama was referring to the distinct possibility that his gun control proposals are so unpopular that they may not even get to the floor of the House and Senate for an up or down vote. But beyond that issue is the notion, which Obama deftly implied, that only victims and family members of victims are deserving of a vote on gun control.

The fact is, however, we all get a vote. I get a vote, you get a vote, all God's children get a vote. And if Congress passes one single Obama proposal concerning guns and ammo, we will make sure those elected representatives never get the chance to pass any more laws in the future. It will be a career-ender.

There is, however, an even more crucial point to be made in Obama's subtle suggestion that only victims are deserving of a vote on gun control. Let's assume that is the case, that only those whose lives have been adversely impacted by a criminal with a gun deserve a say in whether or not we approve new gun control laws.

Mr. President, are you aware that hundreds if not thousands of victims of crime are some of the most ardent and vocal supporters of complete, unfettered gun rights?

Even some of the fathers and mothers of Sandy Hook victims believe in guns as the best means of self-defense against armed criminals.

But perhaps you never heard of Suzanna Hupp, Mr. President, the woman from Killeen, Texas who watched in horror as her parents were gunned down and murdered in cold blood by a shooter in the infamous Luby's Cafeteria massacre a few decades ago. While treating her parents to lunch at Luby's in 1991, a crazed lunatic with a gun drove his pickup truck through the front windows of Luby's, got out of his truck, and opened fire on the patrons, picking them off one by one.

By the time he finished, 23 people, including Hupp's parents, were dead.

The problem? Hupp had a gun but had removed it from her purse and locked it in her car for the fear of running afoul of firearms laws. She said that had she kept the gun on her person, she could have taken out the lunatic long before he finished his bloodfest.

Hupp became a fierce advocate for the right to concealed carry of firearms and a loosening of gun control restrictions. She was elected to the Texas state legislature in 1997 and served until 2007.

The moving and heart-wrenching story that Hupp tells is but one out of thousands from citizens who have found themselves staring in the face of armed criminals. While their stories may not be anywhere near as dramatic as Hupp's, they nonetheless tell a story that is every bit as important -- had it not been for the fact that they had a gun, they would be dead and/or their closest loved ones, including children, would be dead.

Perhaps the president doesn't care about THOSE children. The ones who are slaughtered because no one who was armed was around to take out a crazed gunman are the ones Obama wishes to use for political purposes.

But what about the countless children who are alive today because a parent, a grandparent, a neighbor, or a bystander used a gun to blow away a crazed lunatic who was intent on killing them?

Suzanna Hupp says that her only regret in the Luby's Cafeteria massacre was leaving her gun in the car.

So, Mr. President, why not get Suzanna Hupp to tell the OTHER side of the story? I mean, it's only fair, right? But who in their right mind would ever claim you were fair? We know you don't want citizens to hear Hupp's story because it does not fit your template. It is antithetical to your agenda.

And this is precisely what's wrong with your gun control proposals. They are entirely politically motivated and have no basis in fact. Banning semiautomatic guns will not end mass shootings. Banning large capacity magazines will not stop them, either. In fact, in a situation like the Luby's massacre, a citizen with a gun that could fire 15 or more rounds would be absolutely necessary, given the circumstances and the chaos that ensued.

So, why are you telling us we cannot have any more than 10 bullets? Gov. Cuomo in New York says a citizen cannot have more than 7 bullets.

Why not just go for broke and make us all like Barney Fife, who was allowed to keep only one bullet in his pocket, but not in his gun?

You guys have obviously been sucking on a hookah pipe full of bad ju ju. In a world as dangerous as the one in which we find ourselves, limiting the ammunition we can have to protect ourselves against criminals who are armed to the hilt with loads of ammo out the wazoo is tantamount to forcing one lone unfortunate bloke armed only with a pocket knife to face a thousand Huns with swords.

What do you want to do, make sure we are all dead?

If you don't want us to have all we need for self-defense, then the only logical conclusion to which we can come is that you had just as soon we are killed in an encounter with a thug. This makes you cold, heartless, mean-spirited, and bordering on the barbaric. And that pleasant outward demeanor is nothing but an act.

Friends, those of you who come here often to read these pages, you know that what I am saying is entirely sane and reasonable. But the sane sounds like insanity in a society that is infected throughout with insanity. Reasoned thinking sounds like the irrational when the society itself is overrun with people whose thinking is shown time and again to be irrational.

The sad, damning truth, however, about our opponents is that some of them, a minority, know that what I am saying is the truth. But they use the befuddled thinking of ignoramuses to push their irrational agenda anyway. After all, it was none other than the quintessential gun-grabber Dianne Feinstein who bought and carried a gun when she and her family were targeted by terrorists in San Francisco back when she was mayor in the years prior to her election to the U.S. Senate.

Yet Feinstein would deny that right to average citizens, proving once again the adage that Marxists and other totalitarians will readily keep for themselves all of the rights they deny to the general population. This is why so many of our elected officials show no fear of government tyranny or being deprived of their rights. They know that since they will be part of the ruling class, none of the new laws restricting citizens will apply to them.

But in her heart of hearts, Feinstein knows the truth. She proved it when she bought and carried a gun for protection back in the day. And that is why she is one of the biggest and most despicable hypocrites in government. She is not fit to serve in any government capacity anywhere. One can only hope that since she did, in fact, do the sane and rational thing by buying a gun for protection, that still somewhere deep within her mind and heart there is an acute awareness of the real truth. Can someone who has been so blinded by leftwing ideology ever truly regain their sanity? One can hope.

So, to answer Obama's rhetorical deception with his mantra, "They get a vote," I have a message for him and the other tyrants who wish to rob me of my rights. Suzanna Hupp gets a vote, Mr. President. The single mother down in Georgia who prevented a burglar from possibly killing her and her children, because she fired at him with her gun, gets a vote. The man in Upstate South Carolina who was confronted at a restaurant by an armed robber who planned to clean out the cash register and force patrons to empty their pockets, but stopped the criminal by pulling out his gun that he was licensed to carry legally, gets a vote. The woman who was ambushed by a stalker as she walked to her car after work at midnight, but shot the man with her gun before he could cut her throat with his knife, gets a vote.

They all get a vote, Mr. President.

And do you know what these and millions of other Americans are saying to you and Congress and state legislatures? GET YOUR DAMN HANDS OFF OF OUR GUNS AND AMMO!