Abigail, Abigail, & Gretchen - and a CIA Trick Called "Limited Hangout"

First: Abbie, I "criticize" (your word, but I'll accept it) women so much because I care about women and their role in the proverbial "scheme of things" more than anyone else and anything other. I criticize black Americans' attitudes and what they say for a similar reason.

A coach who cares doesn't criticize the champions on his team; he criticized the ones he wants to be champions. We're either going to get there all together or we won't get there at all. Say or do something that's right and I'll agree. Say or do something wrong, and I won't be quiet. "Friends don't let friends drive drunk", you know.

You're wrong. That ("Mother") nature assigns roles in her creation is so gigantically apparent that I have to find suspect anyone who ignores or denies it. That man and his societies have to subordinate themselves to the planet and the ecosystem they live on and in is equally obvious, and to speak and argue that all of women's problems were caused by men is like arguing that pollution of the air is caused by trees (that happens to be the latest nitwit nostrum that comes to mind).

One, more, time (frankly, I think I'm wasting my time with the subject - read what the lady "ravenqueen" had to say a while back - this has become a lesson only experience can teach): For women and girls to go obliviously about, alone and dressed as sexually tantalizingly as possible (hell, I love it - I'm a man), in a culture and nation like this one constitutes some kind of schizophrenia; and no asinine "ism" and its rhetoric can change that. Delusions don't serve as armor when the inevitable happens, either.

You'll note that "ravenqueen" says, "If you are serious in your views of women, then you are mentally ill. I'm sorry to break it to you. Everyone has a right to some risk in order to live fully. Everyone has a right to make these decisions for themselves. In your mind women are property and have no right to make choices, because they are vulnerable."

"Right." Damned right, you have rights. You have a right to put a gun to your head and play Russian Roulette, too. "Raven" also says "Everyone." Really? EVERYone? How about fourteen year olds? How about Carlie Brucia? Natalee Holloway?

"Rights." While I'm "how about"-ing, how about responsibility? Who was responsible for giving Carlie Brucia the idea that her "rights" would protect her against the bastard who took her like you pluck a plumb from a tree? Mom and dad didn't know that for a high school girl like Natalee Holloway, parading alone around places like Aruba was suicidal?

Abbie, I've lived all my life doing the most dangerous things possible. Everything from aerobatic flight to parachuting to rock climbing to hunting dangerous big game to much worse. I'm alive because I never did any of it oblivious of the danger inherent. NO ONE intelligent does. Every daredevil, whatever his "thing," knows everything he can about it before he begins. He checks his equipment, he trains and practices: he studies - including listen to others who have tried it - until he has reduced the risk as much as possible.

And, unless, he is insane, he is scared. Compare all that with what feminism tells girls like Carlie or Natalee. Before we talk about "rights," let's talk about responsibility. You tell women they have a right to go naked in a roomful of drunken men, I'll tell them it's a bad - probably fatal - idea. Maybe you'll feel all right when the inevitable happens. Maybe you'll be able rationalize the next Carlie Brucia (it's the one that haunts me most) the way "ravenqueen" does (actually, she ignores it). I won't. I'll blame myself because I didn't find a better, more effective, way to say to women what human experience already has.

One thing I need to ask, though: you don't really feel any responsibility at all for all the young women like Dru Sjodin, Joanna Rogers, Chandra Levy, Natalee Holloway, Carlie Brucia, and all the rest? None?

Funny that I do, isn't it?

Anyway, that wasn't my damned subject today, and I forgot to mention that it's only a co-incidence that the Abigail who wrote to me and Abigail Adams (whose quote was the Knight-Errant website's "Quote of the Day" yesterday) have the same name. On the other hand, Abigail Adams happens to have been one of my boyhood admirations, such that I've read everything I ever found about her. "There were giants in the land" in those days - and they weren't all men. I'll bet twenty dollars that I know far more about the history "women's struggle" for rights than you do.

Enough! The discussion demonstrates the manner in which we become sidetracked by matters unworthy of the time. While the nation hurtles toward the worse crises it has ever faced, we debate things as obvious as the difference between man and woman. JESUS!

This morning, Don Imus talks (again) about the way the Veteran's Administration has let down soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. For the last several days, it's been in the news - extracted gingerly, of course, from among more important things like what to do with Anna Nicole Smith's remains (There you are, Abbie - "men" and this sick metrosexual, effeminate society are STILL using that poor woman; but, then, she asked for it, too - didn't she?).

Someone tell me - sociology being silent as it is these days - why it is that anybody who's lived through all the 1985-1998 disclosures concerning IRS, the 9-11 hearings, the lying about the WMDS in Iraq, the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita - and on and on for as long as you want to recite - is surprised.

Tell me - The security team bodyguards protecting you from a recent death threat show up late, fall asleep on duty, steal you blind, clean out the refrigerator and cupboard regularly without replacing anything, get their asses kicked by the neighborhood bullies who vandalize your place right under their noses, and generally act like Keystone Kops - but YOU KEEP THEM? You feel safe?

Tell me how the hell that can be with you. Are you nuts (if this sounds like those young women running around the wrong side of town in their short shorts and halter tops, just ignore it - "co-incidence;" I suppose).

While you're "telling," tell me how it happens that the crusader knights of the nation's fourth estate NEVER seem to notice what is sure as hell the very hallmark of federal government behavior these days. How does the media in the their "analyses" of national events fail to note any series of pompous pratfalls so thunderously obvious?

Your watchdog sleeps most of the time, and spends his waking hours barking at the neighbor's dog, and you not only keep him, you run to the door every time he barks? What the hell is going on?!

The other day, I wrote about Unity08, http://www.unity08.com/ the new internet campaign to restore government to semblance of competence (frankly, I don't believe a nation this corrupt is capable of truly good government; you can't trust a capitalist - sure as hell not the U.S. version). This is important. Put aside the Anna Nicole Smith, who's doing whom in Hollywood, feministic clap-trap garbage-sucking, and wake up.

I promise you that when the proverbial shit hits the fan here in the Land of the Fee, and you don't have the "fee," the pandering press won't be able to get your attention with things like what's going to happen to Anna Nicole's over-used body. Among the things you probably weren't able to pick from the garbage of the media's latest version of the famed "bimbo break-out" - I mentioned the VA hospital mess, didn't I? - was the stock market's dive. Frankly, and as I've been saying for several years now, I think this might be the beginning of the end. You can't - individual or nation - go on bungling like this.

I shake my head in amazement whenever someone - like "FoxNews" Gretchen Carlson this AM - speaks of the Congress "cutting off funding for the troops in Iraq" (notice the careful - carefully scripted, that is - choice of words). Hey, Gretch - How about the way Mr. Bush is cutting off funding for Social Security recipients? I mean, you don't recognize the fact that every time the Bush League grabs more to spend on his Brobdingnagian boondoggle in Iraq, they loot the Social Security fund? Or is the blonde joke personified just the role you play for that "Fair and Balanced" soap opera?

You haven't noticed that every damned year, Congress in both its "party" forms - in this case I mean Democrat and Republican, not male and female - claims it wants to save Social Security, and the public behaves just like the the crowd at the Miss America pageant? What - you're also more interested in your hair and how your legs look than silly stuff like the retirement "benefits" (we paid for it - how is it a "benefit?")? Every year, Keystone Kops on the Potomac does what would get any insurance company in the country put out of business for larceny, and people like you and Fox find something else - Anna Nicole's list of studs, for instance - interesting?

Well, you ARE giving your viewers what they want, that's plain to see. And, of course, I mean the double entendre.

At the time I write this, the total amount stolen from what is cynically called the Social Security "Trust (choke) Fund" is something like $1,600,000,000,000 (one, point six trillion dollars). Did I say "Brobdingnagian?" There is no plan - except George W.s announced plans to cut those "benefits" - to pay anything back. Isn't that cutting off funding, Gretchen? Gretchen?

If all that weren't enough, Gretchen and company seem particularly diffident - speechless, actually - about a story from Seymour Hersh (one of a very few seemingly trustworthy reporters these days). That one has it that the CIA - the White House's hackamore in its mouth, of course - is pulling another Iran-Contra to siphon off funds for operations in Iran. Remember the missing twelve (it seems to be up to twenty-one now) billion? No, maybe not - you were supposed to lose that one in all the Anna Nicole smoke and mirrors - but I trust it was always clear that all that money, most of it supposedly construction funds, didn't just vanish. And since it was in one hundred dollar bills, it's pretty sure it took some real logistical wherewithal to handle and transport it.

Of course, if you believe that Saddam Hussein hid weapons of mass destruction and chemical weapons factories in his garage or the like, you wouldn't have much trouble believing that a couple guys got away with twenty-one billion in hundreds stuffed it in their pants pockets.

Gretchen, Steve, and Brian do, of course. And they report the missing billions, too - the press doing its job. Sure. Kiddies, there's a name for that - "limited hangout" (look it up). You're as dishonest as the people paying you to help with it.

And that's just one - or two, or three; four, is it? - of the disasters being wreaked upon and brought down on us by the incredible bumbling, fumbling, and stealing of our government. Folks, if you think the crap you see on the media is news, you need to pay more attention to the other thespians on the boob tube. The "soaps," for instance. If you don't recognize the latter in the former, you're too far gone to help.

Meanwhile, the rest of us need to get busy with a real chance to change things. Unity08 http://www.unity08.com/ is that chance. A while back, I pointed out that to vote was to take part in what's happening to our country. Truism it may be, but to contribute to, to participate in, a crime is a crime. Now I'm on Fox's side (remember, they said that voting for Democrat Party candidates was aid and comfort to the enemy).

Well, a vote for anyone in Washington. D.C. is treason. It gives aid and comfort to enemies of the United States.