IT'S TIME TO ROAST THE WEENIES by L. Neil Smith About one-third of the "magical" first hundred days has passed, and my e-mailbox is brimming with discussions of the abject failure of the new, Republican-dominated Congress to repeal the Clinton Administration's illegal ban on certain kinds of weapons and magazines over a certain length, or the equally illegal Brady Bill that preceded it. While it's true that they have plenty on their legislative plates -- restoring property rights, getting rid of unfunded mandates, and so on -- any reasonable person would expect that eradicating history's most blatant and violent abrogation of a Constitutional right would have had a higher priority than Republicans seem to have assigned it. Professional Republican Party apologists -- National Rifle Association "spokespersons" in particular -- urge us to be patient and cooperative with the "older and wiser heads" among their number who know the political game so much better than all of us ignorant peasants. Sorry, "older and wiser heads", but to the extent I ever was, I'm no longer in any mood to be patient or cooperative. You see, I remember the Congressional campaign of 1994. I remember the promises Republicans made "way back" then. I remember the promises they should have made but didn't -- promises most people think they made, anyway. I especially remember a conspicuous absence, in Republican rhetoric or their "Contract with America", of any mention of the Bill of Rights. Most of all, I remember watching those "older and wiser heads" endorse Republicans who had voted for the Brady Bill or the Crime Bill, in corrupt preference to the candidates of another party who would certainly have won with such an endorsement -- and acted immediately, not just to repeal those unconstitutional laws, but to jail the perpetrators responsible for them. I take it back -- most of all I remember how those "older and wiser heads" paid for radio spots denouncing the uncompromisingly pro-gun candidates of that other party, so that their crooked friends could get elected, instead. So here we are, hardly a month into the 104th Congress, already listening to whiny excuses -- or "clever" strategies of the same incompetent stripe that got us into this morass -- as a substitute for freely exercising the human rights and Constitutional liberties Republicans and the NRA led us to believe would be promptly returned to us, if we stoically refrained from "wasting" our votes on candidates who actually stood for something. It's time to identify a simple truth that nobody on our side of this historic confrontatiomn seems to want to think about. In all the most important respects, there can never be any significant difference between Republicans and Democrats -- which is to say, between socialists on the right and socialists on the left -- because, slice it however you will, they're still socialists. They're collectivist ideologues who believe a single individual is less important -- has fewer rights -- than two or two hundred million other individuals, and are willing to back that belief up with deadly force. Both parties were specifically created to deprive the rest of us of our lives, our liberties, and -- bottom line -- our property. They only differ in the excuses they offer -- "national security" versus "social welfare" -- for this willingness on their part to beat up and kill those who disagree with them. Sometimes they even agree with one another -- like when they're gleefully raping the American taxpayer to pay for the greedy misdeeds of their fellow socialists in Mexico. And sometimes they find it politically profitable to appear to disagree -- like when they conduct essentially fraudulent debates over the Second Amendment. Yet it should be clear by now to anybody who doesn't have half his brain tied behind his back that Republicans don't really want the people of this country to own effective weapons, any more than Democrats do. It is not in the best interest of socialists -- of collectivist ideologues -- that the population at large be capable of resisting their schemes. Those Republicans that anyone can see are on the dark side of the Force -- like the late Richard "guns are an abomination" Nixon and the sinister "Brady Bill-Bob" Dole -- understand this instinctively. So do semiDemocrats like Kay "Brady" Hutchison and Christy "Friends-of-Feinstein" Whitman. Think I'm being harsh? If I'm wrong, let them prove it. Let the Republicans, right now, without further excuses or any more fake strategy, repeal not only those obnoxious victim-disarmament laws passed recently by the Clinton Administration, but all federal gun laws (not one of which is Constitutional) right back through the illegal National Firearms Act of 1934. If Clinton vetoes these repeals, fine: we'll have been shown that Democrats are the real enemy after all and act accordingly at the polls in 1996. The "older, wiser heads" will be proven right. But if I'm right, instead, and Republicans aren't up to acting within the principles of the Founding Fathers they invariably claim to espouse, if all they really want is to tax and regiment American lives for characteristically Republican -- rather than Democratic -- purposes, then it's time to replace them, too, even at the risk of reinstalling a Democratic majority. We must be courageous enough to take this risk. Republicans must be made to understand that we're willing to do it. If we are courageous, they'll vote the way we want whether or not they have any principles or courage, themselves. And I can make a few suggestions about where those replacements should come from. Who was it who said, "Republicans -- even when they win, they're losers"? Oh yeah -- it was me.