Ah, the political winds blow fickle between the election cycles....

Her Highness Nancy Pelosi was the first one to play party pooper with the Obama administration's sudden announcement that they wanted to revisit the Clinton AWB:

Attorney General Eric Holder raised the prospect Wednesday that the administration would push to bring back the ban. But Pelosi (D-Calif.) indicated on Thursday that he never talked to her. The Speaker gave a flat “no” when asked if she had talked to administration officials about the ban.

“On that score, I think we need to enforce the laws we have right now,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference. “I think it's clear the Bush administration didn’t do that.”

The esteemed Senate Majority Leader Harry "We've Lost" Reid soon joined in:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will join Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in opposing any effort to revive the 1994 assault weapons ban, putting them on the opposite side of the Obama administration.

Reid spokesman Jim Manley said the Nevada Democrat will preserve his traditional pro-gun rights voting record.

"Senator Reid would oppose an effort (to) reinstate the ban if the Senate were to vote on it in the future," Manley told The Hill in an e-mail late Thursday night.

Why the lack of support for a traditional leftist issue? It's simple, really: the entire House of Representatives comes up for election again in November of 2010, and 36 Senate seats also go up for election that year. The balance in the House is 254 Dem/178 Repub (with 3 vacant seats sure to be filled by Dems) and in the Senate of the 36 slated for reelection, 19 are Repub and 17 are Dem. After the last ban passed in '94, more than a few Democratic Representatives were targeted by the NRA and other pro-gun groups, and lost reelection. In 2004, when the original AWB sunsetted and was brought up for renewal, the Democrats in Congress knew it was a losing issue, and treated it accordingly.

Toss one more rough economic year on top of things, and every Democrat in Congress with an election coming up in 2010 is probably going to be scrambling for reelection as it is, without the added pressure of the NRA bearing down on top of them over a piece of legislation that has very little upside, only a ton of downside.

One is left to wonder why President Obama would send AG Eric Holder out to basically sign a bunch of Congressmen up for political suicide without even consulting them first? Is the administration going to make a habit of floating ideas out in the press to measure reaction, all the while without consulting its own allies in Congress beforehand? I must have skipped that chapter in How To Make Friends and Influence People.

While I do not for a moment believe the issue is dead, hopefully the past two days has been a lesson to President Obama et al that there are limits even within his own party to how much liberal rhetoric he can float out there without repercussions.

So it begins. Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the administration's intention to renew the 1994 Clinton Assault Weapons Ban.

It is not a surprise, since Joe Biden was one of the authors of the original bill, which still stands as one of the most useless pieces of legislation in the history of legislation...and that's saying alot.

What is even more galling, however, isn't just the reintroduction of the ban. This has been expected by most firearms owners, to be honest. We knew toward the end of the campaign when Obama looked dead into a t.v. camera and said, "Look, I'm not going to take your guns," that he was lying through his teeth. He has to give the far left voters something, and this looks like a gimme.

What's really galling is the how, when and why of the announcement:

Holder said that putting the ban back in place would not only be a positive move by the United States, it would help cut down on the flow of guns going across the border into Mexico, which is struggling with heavy violence among drug cartels along the border.

"I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico, at a minimum." Holder said at a news conference on the arrest of more than 700 people in a drug enforcement crackdown on Mexican drug cartels operating in the U.S.

A positive impact in Mexico? Now we're seriously considering trampling the Constitution of the United States of America because Mexico can't take care of its own problems? Seriously? And the words "at a minimum" are especially ridiculous. He just basically acknowledged this ban has no real purpose, except it might do some good for Mexico. Maybe. We're now pissing on the Constitution because it might help out the Mexicans.

That is not the minimum, Mr. Holder, that is the maximum and you damn well know it. Anyone who's ever looked at the real math behind the original AWB knows it was a spurious piece of legislation. Traditionally, the rates of assault weapons used in violent crimes have run around 1/5th of 1% (.2%). The ban had absolutely no measurable effect on violent crime in the United States.

Then why bring it up now? Several reasons come to mind:

1) The administration has to look like it's doing something about the border problem.

2) The administration is not going to be able to carry through on many of the promises that it made to the more radical leftists of the country to garner votes, and as I said before, this looks like an easy measure to push over to show that the lefties got some return on investment.

3) It is a quintessential stepping stone. As the Washington Post said about the original ban back in '94:

No one should have any illusions about what was accomplished (by the ban). Assault weapons play a part in only a small percentage of crime. The provision is mainly symbolic; its virtue will be if it turns out to be, as hoped, a stepping stone to broader gun control.

Of course, no one should be surprised at any of this coming from the mouth of Eric Holder. He is primed to easily surpass Janet Reno as the biggest joke of an Attorney General this nation has ever had. As someone who's lawfirm represented 17 Guantanamo Bay detainees and who's former law firm partner represented the mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, we shouldn't be surprised that his legal philosophies are firmly rooted pretty far to the left of the center aisle. His confirmation shows that when it comes to the Constitution, this administration is only interested in upholding the rights of a specific segment of this nation's citizens.

Battle lines are forming, and Americans who screamed bloody murder about the Patriot Act and the treatment of foreign terrorists who wish nothing more than the obliteration of this nation are now going to stand aside and watch real, tangible assaults on our real liberties happen. Hope and change has quickly been replaced with rhetoric and fear mongering. The words of Samuel Adams in 1776 have never been truer than now:

The warm sunshine of influence would melt down the virtue which the violence of the storm rendered more firm and unyielding. In a state of tranquillity, wealth, and luxury, our descendants would forget the arts of war and the noble activity and zeal which made their ancestors invincible. Every art of corruption would be employed to loosen the bond of union which renders our resistance formidable. When the spirit of liberty, which now animates our hearts and gives success to our arms, is extinct, our numbers will accelerate our ruin and render us easier victims to tyranny. Ye abandoned minions of an infatuated ministry, if peradventure any should yet remain among us, remember that a Warren and Montgomery are numbered among the dead. Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, What should be the reward of such sacrifices? Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship, and plow, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude than the animating contest of freedom--go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

The spirit of liberty is something we must recapture as a nation, and before it is too late and our chains do not sit so lightly upon us.