Democrat Caroline Kennedy, expert on the Constitution

[rayra]

Here's the presumptive nominee to replace HIllary Clinton as Junior Senator from New York.

In the news reports of Caroline Kennedy's aspirations to be a Senator, the talking heads have noted that her qualifications include being a "Constitutional lawyer" who "wrote a book about Constitutional law."

I happen to have that book: In Our Defense, The Bill of Rights in Action, by Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy, William Morrow & Co., NY, 1991. Here is what the Constitutional scholars Alderman and Kennedy had to say about the Second Amendment, on page 100:

<Under the controlling authority of the only Supreme Court case to address the scope of the Second Amendment, U.S. v. Miller, the court concluded that "the right to keep and bear handguns is not guaranteed by the Second Amendment.">

The quotation marks are theirs; this is supposed to be a direct quote from the opinion in U.S. v. Miller. Those words do not appear anywhere in the opinion. Nor is it a paraphrase; nothing even remotely like those words appears in the opinion. The word "handgun" does not appear in the opinion.

Alderman and Kennedy got the opinion wrong, and they used quotation marks around words that were not quotations. What is your opinion? Intentional deception, just making up crap out of thin air a la Bellesiles? Or egregiously bad scholarship? (How hard is it to check the opinion to see if the quotation is accurate, especially a short opinion like Miller?)

[Ford8N]

Originally Posted by rayra

Here's the presumptive nominee to replace HIllary Clinton as Junior Senator from New York.

Typical.

[dfletcher]

I'm guessing in the near future there will be two Kennedys in the US Senate and one of them won't be Ted.

[M. D. Van Norman]

Once again, it comes back to the question of whether the politician is lying or stupid.

[Synergy]

Originally Posted by M. D. Van Norman

Once again, it comes back to the question of whether the politician is lying or stupid.

Both! You cant fix stupid, so they just keep lying!

[RRangel]

Lying or stupid doesn't matter. Since she is Kennedy royalty chances are good she'll be given the empty throne.

[fairfaxjim]

Originally Posted by M. D. Van Norman

Once again, it comes back to the question of whether the politician is lying or stupid.

Most of them are too stupid (or arrogant or both) to know that they lying. They actually believe their own BS. That is how they know so much better than we do what is best for us.

BTW - Obama's great wave of change has sure brought back a lot of old familiar names.

[otalps]

Wasn't/Isn't Obama supposed to be some kind of "Constitutional lawyer" as well? I think it's a new term the press has come up with for leftist idiot that mentions the 2nd amendment in a sentence.

[N6ATF]

Again with calling evil politicians stupid. They are not stupid. They are smart enough to realize that acting stupid en masse will let them get away with treason.

[dixieD]

Originally Posted by N6ATF

Again with calling evil politicians stupid. They are not stupid. They are smart enough to realize that acting stupid en masse will let them get away with treason.

I think that since the Constitution and Bill of Rights was written for Americans and meant to be understood by the People, and the language is so plainly obvious in meaning and intent that that the term constitutional lawyer when used by a democant is in fact a code word for individual open to subverting the constitution.

I know this isn't really fair as we have constitutional lawyers on the our side of the issue, but they are certainly in the minority.

[chris]

Originally Posted by M. D. Van Norman

Once again, it comes back to the question of whether the politician is lying or stupid.

in this day and age i would say both.

[Gator Monroe]

She is not and has never been a Politician ...

[AaronHorrocks]

Originally Posted by otalps

Wasn't/Isn't Obama supposed to be some kind of "Constitutional lawyer" as well? I think it's a new term the press has come up with for leftist idiot that mentions the 2nd amendment in a sentence.

The claim was he was a "Constitutional Law Professor"
The fact is he was a "Guest Speaker" one day in a classroon.

[tombinghamthegreat]

U.S. v. Miller did not even address the 2nd amendment issue nor mentioned handguns.....another idiot....

[cadurand]

Sadly, it's not the politicians who are stupid.

I think they know exactly what they are doing.

It's the voters who aren't paying attention. I won't call us stupid since there are all kinds of people included in "the voters" but the politicians say what they think the voters want to hear. I have liberal relatives who say Obama isn't against people owning handguns because "He said he supports the 2nd Amendment."

Don't look at his actions, just what his website says.

The politicians know most people are never going to validate their statements. If they do get caught in a lie it's after the fact. Their erroneous statements are still out there forever. Especially with the internet, nothing really goes away.

Back in the late 80s when I first got on the Internet there was a .sig that I particularly liked. I don't know if I have the wording exactly right but it goes something like this:

"Never attribute to malice that which can reasonably attributed to ignorance."

I am quite convinced that this is excellent advice when dealing with 99% of the population.

I am quite convinced that politicians fall into the other 1%

[rbgaynor]

Originally Posted by DDT

"Never attribute to malice that which can reasonably attributed to ignorance."

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Hanlon's Razor: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_J._Hanlon

I was close, thanks for clarifying.

[rbgaynor]

Originally Posted by rayra

Here's the presumptive nominee to replace HIllary Clinton as Junior Senator from New York.

In the news reports of Caroline Kennedy's aspirations to be a Senator, the talking heads have noted that her qualifications include being a "Constitutional lawyer" who "wrote a book about Constitutional law."

I happen to have that book: In Our Defense, The Bill of Rights in Action, by Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy, William Morrow & Co., NY, 1991. Here is what the Constitutional scholars Alderman and Kennedy had to say about the Second Amendment, on page 100:

<Under the controlling authority of the only Supreme Court case to address the scope of the Second Amendment, U.S. v. Miller, the court concluded that "the right to keep and bear handguns is not guaranteed by the Second Amendment.">

The quotation marks are theirs; this is supposed to be a direct quote from the opinion in U.S. v. Miller. Those words do not appear anywhere in the opinion. Nor is it a paraphrase; nothing even remotely like those words appears in the opinion. The word "handgun" does not appear in the opinion.

Alderman and Kennedy got the opinion wrong, and they used quotation marks around words that were not quotations. What is your opinion? Intentional deception, just making up crap out of thin air a la Bellesiles? Or egregiously bad scholarship? (How hard is it to check the opinion to see if the quotation is accurate, especially a short opinion like Miller?)

Actually, whoever you quoted here (hard to know since there is no citation) got it wrong. Kennedy and Alderman are not quoting from the Miller decision, they're quoting from the Seventh Circuit's decision in the Morton Grove case. Plenty of reasons to be suspicious of the name Kennedy, but this is not one of them.

For anyone who is interested, you can go to Amazon and use the "Look Inside" feature and read it yourself. Search for Miller and pick the page 100 link from the search results.

[sb_pete]

"Constitutional lawyer" in media speak seems to = "person with law degree who has written something or worked on a case involving the US constitution." Hardly a guarantor of expertise .

[MolonLabe2008]

She has zero experience to be Senator and she is being called on it.

The only experience she has is having "Kennedy" as her last name and being chauffeured around in a limousine.

[Shotgun Man]

Originally Posted by rbgaynor

Actually, whoever you quoted here (hard to know since there is no citation) got it wrong. Kennedy and Alderman are not quoting from the Miller decision, they're quoting from the Seventh Circuit's decision in the Morton Grove case. Plenty of reasons to be suspicious of the name Kennedy, but this is not one of them.

For anyone who is interested, you can go to Amazon and use the "Look Inside" feature and read it yourself. Search for Miller and pick the page 100 link from the search results.

Try as I might, I was unable to search inside the book or read any part of it on amazon. I couldn't find the feature.

[RomanDad]

I have a fairly good friend who was very close to John Jr and spent substantial time with them all...

His opinion of caroline, to put it kindly is, "shes not the sharpest knife in the drawer."

[Shotgun Man]

Originally Posted by RomanDad

I have a fairly good friend who was very close to John Jr and spent substantial time with them all...

His opinion of caroline, to put it kindly is, "shes not the sharpest knife in the drawer."

Okay, we'll just take that as gospel then.

[dawson8r]

You know how to tell if a politician is lying? Their lips are moving!

[rbgaynor]

Originally Posted by Shotgun Man

Try as I might, I was unable to search inside the book or read any part of it on amazon. I couldn't find the feature.

Try this (you may need to be logged into Amazon):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0380...pt#reader-link

[MolonLabe2008]

Besides having no experience, she hasn't voted much either...

Caroline Kennedy wants to be the next senator from New York, but her voting record is already spotty, the Daily News has found. City Board of Elections records show Kennedy has failed to vote in many elections since she registered in the city in 1988 - including votes for the Senate seat she hopes to fill and numerous Democratic faceoffs for mayor.

Records show Caroline Kennedy failed to cast her vote many times since 1988
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/poli...ailed_to_.html

[tcrpe]

Originally Posted by rayra

Here's the presumptive nominee to replace HIllary Clinton as Junior Senator from New York.

Maybe she's even dumber than her brother . . .

[RomanDad]

Originally Posted by Shotgun Man

Okay, we'll just take that as gospel then.

To be unfair, the other term he used was "high functioning retarded".

Originally Posted by tcrpe

Maybe she's even dumber than her brother . . .

Her brother was actually a pretty sharp guy... Remember- He hired Ann Coulter for George.

[tcrpe]

Originally Posted by RomanDad

To be unfair, the other term he used was "high functioning retarded".



Her brother was actually a pretty sharp guy... Remember- He hired Ann Coulter for George.

Her brother killed himself, his wife, and his sister-in-law in an act of extreme aerial stupidity.

Darwin Award

[Scarecrow Repair]

The original, post #1, story appears to be very similar to a gunlaws email newsletter, which was followed up soon after by this correction:

Originally Posted by gunlaws

Possibly the greatest error in the history of Page Nine just occurred in the lead story on Caroline Kennedy. In relying on a usually reliable attorney -- whose anonymity is now saving his sorry butt -- I inaccurately conveyed an element of Ms. Kennedy's book, "In Our Defense, The Bill of Rights in Action" (Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy, 1991, William Morrow & Co.). The attorney, whose anonymity I intend to maintain, corrects himself:

"In accusing Caroline Kennedy of shoddy scholarship, I committed shoddy scholarship.

"The quote, 'the right to keep and bear handguns is not guaranteed by the Second Amendment,' does not appear in U.S. v. MILLER, but (absurd as it is) it does appear in QUILICI v. MORTON GROVE, which Kennedy was citing in her book. She was right, and I was wrong.

"Clearly, Kennedy is hostile to the right of individual citizens to keep and bear arms, but she is not guilty of making up a quote, as I alleged.

"I apologize for my unforgivable error."


The book's discussion of the right to keep and bear arms rests on an examination of the 1982 Morton Grove gun ban, an act by a small town, supported by courts, that denied its citizens rights they had always had beforehand. That lower-court episode is considered by gun-rights advocates as one of the worst blots on the Second Amendment, but Kennedy and Alderman saw it as a proper stage to examine the issue. It would be hard to characterize their position as anything but hostile to the idea that mere citizens have the right to defend themselves with sidearms. The quotation the authors hinge their discussion upon -- inaccurately attributed in my report but accurately quoted -- is completely disparaging of a citizen's right to have or use handguns (and indeed, the MILLER case makes no mention of handguns):

"Under the controlling authority of the only Supreme Court case to address the scope of the Second Amendment, U.S. v. MILLER, the court concluded that 'the right to keep and bear handguns is not guaranteed by the Second Amendment.'"


The erroneous details were published online a few hours ago. I've made every effort to correct this as swiftly as possible. I apologize for letting that slip through, and it serves as proof once again that, despite the rumors, I'm only human.

Sincerely,
Alan Korwin
The Uninvited Ombudsman