McCain got the NRA on its feet this morning with a tart response to Code Pink protesters:
“Well, my friends, we beat you yesterday,” he said. “We’ll beat you today . . . And we’ll beat you tomorrow!”
I hope he’s not referring to tasers.
Despite the enthusiastic response, politics, for the NRA, seems to stop at the Second Amendment’s edge:
“I wouldn’t vote for him for president,” said Mark Dawkins, a patron NRA member from Winter Park, Fla. “I’ve felt that he has flip-flopped on the issues . . . But I agree with him on Iraq. The same people who come here and do this protest are the same people who would like to see our guns taken away from us.”
If Dawkin is speaking very specifically about the protesters, I think, yes, the Code Pink people might not be huge fans of gun rights. If he’s talking about people who want to get out of Iraq, well, he might not want to say that too loud around Jim Webb or he might find himself looking down the barrel of something Webb himself doesn’t want taken away either.
UPDATE: I thought, out of context, that McCain’s comments sounded kind of weirdly threatening, but in context, the “beating” McCain refers to is clearly the defeat of Democratic attempts to set a timeline to withdraw the troops. He ends the remarks above, “We not choose to lose! We will not choose to lose this conflict.”