So you can stop reading here, Ms. Paglia.

This is about guns and the Second Amendment. I was reading about the lead-up to the Civil War, after the election of Abraham Lincoln, and something struck me. The militia system in the constitution had been a joke, of course. The militias didn't win the Revolution, of course. The Continental Army did, with help from state-run groups. Inexperienced farmers made a lousy invasion army for Canada, and hadn't been able to stop the British from torching Washington. Every 4th of July, paunchy old men paraded with rusty rifles. But once Lincoln was elected, the militias formed up, South first and then the North. The Confederate Army, in particular, came directly from its militias. How's that Second Amendment for ya, Billy Bob? And after the Union Army freed the slaves, state militias fade into blessed oblivion, taking their proper role as institutions like the National Guard and state police.

I'm not against guns. I think common law and state law are fine for regulating the basic rights to hunting and self-defense and target practice. The idea that the Second Amendment has anything to do with individual ownership of weapons is a modern and very stupid idea. The Second Amendment should be changed to read something like this: "State national guards are administered by the governor, subject to the ultimate authority of the congress and the president. Unregulated militias constitute unlawful assemblies and will be dispersed with the full force of the Army. Questions of the individual ownership of weapons are left to the states."

In the last twenty years, we've had the Clinton administration, a center-left presidency during which countless yahoos marched around in defense of... something or other. No income tax, whatever the loons are into that moment. And in this decade? The militias are quiet, yet our civil liberties and the constitution itself are in more danger than ever before. Der Leader stands up and says "I can grab any American citizen as an enemy combatant and imprison him indefinitely without even giving the charges." Where are our friends of liberty, the Michigan militia? The guys in camo running around the hills? Why, they're nowhere to be seen. Where's the alleged power of men with guns to safeguard liberty? Out in back of the garage, drinking Lone Star and listening to Lee Greenwood, it seems.

Do we need any more proof that the modern reading of the Second Amendment is complete, partisan, right-wing paranoia? Little spindly lawyers working for the ACLU, those are the friends of liberty.

He was a marvel as a legislator. Cajoling, wheedling, threatening, he lined up the votes and he got them. JFK didn't pass the Civil Rights bill, Lyndon did. And Medicare. Like it or not, he ended segregation, not the northern liberals, but good ol' corrupt, Brown & Root, mysterious votes cast in alphabetical order Lyndon.

There's a telling episode in a PBS documentary about Lyndon and the war: in 1966, he convened a meeting of all the Experts, from the winter of '67, first. They all said: stay the course. There's a light at the end of the tunnel. Sooner or later, the Vietnamese will come to the table. After Tet, he convened the same group. No hope, they all said. You must use nukes. Kill everything or get out.

And every night, LBJ came down to the Situation Room to watch what was happening, real-time. It shortened his life. It was a problem that wasn't amenable to his hard-charging, straight ahead style. But he didn't use nukes.

Anybody think that Bush spends more than a half-second thinking of the consequences of any of his actions?

Except there's no party establishment to rescue him.

And after he won the primaries, we all know how well the Kerry thing turned out.

We're like the US in 1968, when Nixon was elected on a peace platform-- with honor-- and proceeded to bomb the hell out of North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia while he threw LBJ's agreement to the ground and spat on it. According to the new book by Bob Dallek, they knew and completely accepted the fact that they couldn't win in 1971. So they'd have to sign an almost identical treaty to the one that LBJ had 23,000 deaths ago. The only thing that had to be arranged was the blame. When they knew they would lose, they also knew that Vietnamization would lose. But they held out hope. They exploited the Sino-Soviet split to get a "decent interval" between the signing of the treaty and the eventual takeover by the North after Nixon left. When he was gone, unexpectedly, in 1974, the North's takeover began under Ford. It was over rather quickly. And it would have made zero difference if the Dems had kept the weapons pipeline flowing. The only thing that would have changed, or delayed, the results would have been the reintroduction of large numbers of American troops. But there was absolutely no possibility of that. So, who "lost" Vietnam? Truman let the French back in. Eisenhower endorsed the North-South split, JFK defined Vietnam as a vital stand against communism, LBJ over-commited and Nixon tried simple homicide, and when that didn't work, he blamed it on the Dems.