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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Leading Horses to Water 

...we learned in April that one of the sticky little problems that was going to prolong - perhaps forever - George W. Bush's foray into nation-building in Iraq was the failure of a grateful Iraqi government to fully redeem its responsibility to actually take care of the cool stuff that all of our millions and millions of tax dollars had built for them. Apparently that grateful Iraqi government has figured out a clever, 'outside-the-box' of dealing with this failure: just don't take possession of them in the first place...

So what do ya do when you decide to throw a nation-building party and nobody comes? We are stuck in the middle of an evil mix of sectarian political deadlock and deadly sectarian violence involving a bunch of people who seem neither capable or ready to grow up and start playing like big kids. Despite all the bold talk about progress, we are if anything farther away from anything resembling a finish line than we were the day Gee Dub confidently assured us that the mission was accomplished. For all the talk about "playing out the string" to the end of this misbegotten administration in the firestorm over US Attorney firings and Abu Al Gonzalez's faint familiarity with the concept of "under oath", it looks like the most deadly and expensive bit of playing out the string to which we are being subjected is Bush's Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure...
Posted by: Jack K. / 4:25 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

The Disturbing Confusion for the "Turner Diaries" Gang 

...I have spent my entire life living in the Northwestern portion of the continental United States, most of it in what is sometimes referred to as the intermountain west between the crest of the Cascade Range and the Eastern slopes of the Rockies. In all this time I have known a great many people who, without necessarily realizing it, hold the sorts of values that avowed Libertarians espouse without actually assigning a name to that value set. They don’t like government “intrusion” or interference and some of them don’t like it a lot...

While I never met anyone like Tim McVeigh, I’ve met a number of people who were only a couple small clicks to the left of him. Some of them had read “The Turner Diaries”, which can be readily found at the right kind of guns-and-stuff swap meet/show. They hadn’t exactly joined the Montana Freemen-type movements or started hoarding bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and 35-gallon garbage cans (and the NSA will probably have great sport with my Googling of these subjects), but they had a core distrust for and hatred of the jack-booted storm troopers of the evil Federal overlords in their black helicopters that would certainly capture your attention if your paycheck happened to come from the National Finance Center in New Orleans, LA. The ‘survivalist’ movement of a number of years ago, where earnest people would buy remote land on which they could live lives of self-sufficiency with excellent fields of fire is to a degree a subset of the idea that ‘the people’ would rise up against the oppressing evil government, leading to a civil war and social collapse requiring the need to be able to shoot from long range the desperate hoards coming to rape one’s family and steal all of his food...

Turns out, the joke was on them. All of this mythology and preparation for the coming Dark Times and planning had origin in the singular idea that Liberals were going to impose a draconian dictatorship of wacked-out Socialist/Communist ideals about taking your rights to live freely without federal interference and your guns and your property rights and your privacy. In their cups, they would probably confess that they expected nothing less than the Mark of the Beast being burned onto their foreheads with a branding iron. In response, they took the only civilized path open to them and voted in droves for Republicans who promised small government and no intrusion and protection from an overbearing federal government hungering to create a dictatorship...

As it so happens, they bet on the wrong horse. The very issues that caused these folks to speak of dark events, mutter about revolution, and display a cash-based devotion to the Second Amendment and long-term dehydrated food supplies are now coming to fruition in the very way that they said it would, but it’s a Republican administration and past Republican Congress that are tapping their telephones, requiring them to prove five or six or seven or more decades after their birth within the borders of the United States that they aren’t actually evil immigrant Islamic terrorists when they go to renew their driver’s licenses, and demanding that their papers are in order (“your papers, pleeze”) through a totally overwhelmed passport system (as with many other places along the Canadian and Mexican borders, the coming requirement for a passport to cross over is going to be a huge pain in the butt)...

The fear of an imperial government totally unaccountable to the people and disrespectful of their rights has been one of the core fears of these folks for a long time. That fear is finally beginning to take on its own ugly human form. We are faced with an administration that believes that the shaky concept of a “unitary executive” means little less than the imposition of the Devine Right of Kings. In an ugly twist that is going to seriously rattle their nervous systems down to the deepest ganglia, however, this fear so long nurtured against the supposed danger of Liberal overreaching is being manifested by the very administration for which they voted in order to avoid that which they feared...

If the horrible, confusing, dissonant conundrum in which they find themselves weren’t so sad from a pure raw human standpoint and so dangerous for all the rest of us who knew better, it would be amusing...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:18 PM 0 comments

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