Memorial Day, and a "Grateful Nation Remembers;" Really? – What Bullshit!

“'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
“Was there a man dismay'd ?
“Not tho' the soldier knew
“Some one had blunder'd:
“Theirs not to make reply,
“Theirs not to reason why,
“Theirs but to do and die,
“Into the valley of Death
“Rode the six hundred.

“Cannon to right of them,
“Cannon to left of them,
“Cannon in front of them
“Volley'd and thunder'd;
“Storm'd at with shot and shell,
“Boldly they rode and well,
“Into the jaws of Death,
“Into the mouth of Hell
“Rode the six hundred.

“When can their glory fade?
“O the wild charge they made!
“All the world wonder'd.
“Honour the charge they made!
“Honour the Light Brigade,
“Noble six hundred!”

That, of course, is an excerpt from the famed poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson commemorating the famed Charge of the Light Brigade in the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. Anyone who doesn’t see the parallel between the blundering, misguided, and disastrous charge and what is going on now in Iraq is either brain-dead or in an altered state produced by CIA and federal U.S. Government Operation Mockingbird propaganda, and of no use in either a discussion of the Iraq war or Memorial Day efforts to honor the men and women who have died for our country there and elsewhere.
The phrase, “Theirs but to do and die" has made Lord Cardigan’s charge a symbol of warfare at its most courageous, its most tragic, and its most stupid. It is also my answer to the “Did Not Serve,” FoxNews patriot who chooses to further the purposes of the corporate dictatorship he sucks up to by pretending that anyone who sees the war in Iraq as anything but another idiotic Charge of the Light Brigade ordered by a latter-day Lord Cardigan is somehow a traitor.
I was a soldier. I was a soldier and I know the truth about the relationship between the rich and politically powerful – in a capitalist society, let us not forget, they are the same – and the soldier. I know, too, what Memorial Day remembrances held by those same rich and powerful – who “did not serve” – are worth. I know what they are about, too.
The Bill O’Reillys, the Sean Hannitys, the Britt Humes, and the like are not honoring – not even encouraging – those who stand on a wall and remain awake while those whom they love sleep. History has recorded faithfully the names of men like the Leonidas at Thermopylae, Byrhtnoth at Waldron, and Horatius at the bridge in Rome. Protectors, those men stood between those they loved and their enemies. All left history a record like the legendary missive of the Spartan to his people. “Stranger, go and tell Sparta that we lie here in obedience to her command.”
“Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die,” in other words.

While still a kid in high school and obliged by the Catholic grandparents’ rearing me to attend church every Sunday, I marveled at the way parishioners’ hour-or- two long piety turned quickly to the very behavior their services condemned. Walking into the church sacristy one evening to find the priestly pastor of the church mounted on a lady parishioner, I recollected as I beat a hasty retreat both the “sins of the flesh” sermon the priest had delivered the Sunday before and the angelic expression on the woman’s face that same day as she returned to her pew from the communion railing.

Daily, now, I listen to the same tone and tenor, the same fervor as Sean Hannity excoriates “traitors” who “undermine the morale of our men and women in Iraq.” I’m listening to it as I type this, in the voice of President George W. Bush as he “honors our men and women in uniform” on this Memorial Day.

And, of course, I listen as “a grateful nation remembers,” 2007.

I listen and I remember landing in Keflavik, Iceland, en route to the “Z.I.” – the United States - and listening as Armed Forces Radio recapped the 1956 World Series I had missed during the time I spent in infiltrating “Communist” – then, all socialist countries automatically devolved immediately into communism – Hungary in order to possibly rescue revolt leaders like Pal Maleter. It was just before Christmas, and as anxious as I was to get home, something about the broadcast relates here. A few weeks before, in a firefight I was still dealing with in my mind, I had not only brought to fruition years of self-imposed physical training the like of which no military on this planet can boast, I had killed in lethal combat three men in literally less than seconds.

As I would relate decades later in an autobiographical work, all three of the men that night were killed and were dead before the body of the first stuck by the big slugs from my .45 caliber pistol had fallen to the ground. It was one hell of a feat, one the teenage Hungarian girl being raped by the soldiers probably never forgot. In my personal de-briefing of the incident in preparation for the military one I knew was coming, I was feeling pretty good about myself. Until, that is, the newspaper or magazine I was reading made me realize.

Realize? Yeah, I realized that the nation that every year protests and postures as it does on this Memorial Day, 2007, was interested mostly in men named Don Larson, Mickey Mantle, Enos Slaughter, and Don Newcombe – the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball teams. Men who stood in a pass, on a bridge, or on a wall and defended with their lives the people and nation the pass, bridge, or wall led to were comparatively expendable, insignificant. They were, after all, cheaply bought and menial servants who did chores none of the celebrated would stoop to do.

A few weeks ago, in Building Eighteen at Walter Reed Army Hospital, I heard the echoes of my mind that day a few days before Christmas at St. Peters Church, in my home town, the same echoes I heard that day a short time before Christmas in 1956. Duty, so like morality of the priest that day in my home town, so like the interests and priorities of the public in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolt, and so like the posturing of the cynical Operations Mockingbird media like FoxNews of today, is easily imposed by authority and the powerfully rich who own it – in a capitalist society, there is no other real possibility, as I’ve noted - on those who are poor and therefore politically weak.

You may have yourselves and your time fooled, “America,” but you haven’t fooled me and you haven’t fooled your soldiers.

The fact is that the economically dependent and the poor fight and die in wars enriching and empowering those already rich and in power, and Memorial Days are only more of the propaganda wielded by the powerful in order to keep full the ranks of those like the Spartans at the Thermopylae Pass, the Saxons at the Battle of Waldron, and Light Brigades at Balaclava. With only a few hours of newspaper, radio, and television time, a nation’s plutocrats purchase the mind, spirits, bodies, and limbs of the poor who are “commemorated.” On this Memorial Day, look up the word you will hear, and hypocritically use again and again – ad nauseam. “To commemorate” means only to keep in mind. Only, and once a year.

Obviously, on this Memorial Day, that is all – exactly all - it means.

The U.S. Male - These Days, Not So Much a Boy Scout

Politics and politicians, and the god-awful mess they’ve made of my country, have me so angry, so pissed off and disgusted, that I have to write about something else. Besides, politics and politicians are what we have let them become – and I’m part of the “we.” We deserve what we’re getting – including high gas prices (pushing the accelerator down, you know, creates demand and raises the damned price). I haven’t been part of the problem, including that last, for at least three decades, but with me, things just aren’t other people’s fault, and I should have done something. I should have done more.

Now we’re in a helluva mess. Something. I should have done something.

And I have to do something now. Our kids are going to grow up in a maelstrom of Hobbes-ian social and societal horror – “continual fear of violent death; and life… solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” to quote Hobbes - and there doesn’t seem to be a damned thing I can do about it. But I have to – I have to!

I don’t pray, implying as it does that god can be lobbied and is therefore as evil and unjust as any of today’s pandering politicians. In fact, to pray as we do today, much the manner with which we petition government, is to me blasphemous. But I know, too, that good deeds and the love of fellow man they demonstrate are obedience to god’s prime directive for man. If there are honest prayers, and praise to god, then they must be chivalry and loving conduct. That’s what I’ll do. Even knowing that all, probably, that I will really accomplish is balm for my own conscience, that is what I will do.

The thing is, though, that I’ve been a knight errant since I was a boy. From the day that I first used my extraordinary ability to cope with the elements and nature (Indians back home dubbed me “Walks-in-Storms”) to rescue a very pregnant women from an Iowa snowbank, and was awarded her grateful hug and kiss on the cheek, I could do nothing else. That hug and kiss, the gratitude in her eyes when I had carried her to the snowplow I had summoned from a nearby farmhouse for her trip to the hospital, addicted me to what is certainly the most powerful drug there is.

So. Let us sit down and reason together for a moment. A while back, seized by another fit like this one, I authored an “Etiquette and Manners” page on my website. Born like this essay out of disgust, what I said that day was due my having observed a number of today’s pitiful excuses for the human male behaving in the manner of the miserable surrogate he is. My remarks then observed that much of our present woes can be attributable to the mess feminism and male weakness derived from loss of contact with real men feminism fomented and demanded have made of the “U.S. male.”

Like the postal version of the word, male has come to mean higher and higher cost for less and less purpose.

I couldn’t help note at the time of 9-11 and the invasion of Iraq, and additionally, that society’s damnable misbehavior in the presence of the Stars and Stripes seems for some reason to parallel the abysmal conduct of men toward our women. I’m pretty sure the two examples of masculine weakness are part of and have the same origins. There are those who will remember my having quoted J.S. Mill at the time, and I’ll do it again here. Writing in his essay entitled “On Liberty,” the great man said, “A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”

I noted, too, that anyone who didn’t recognize today the state Mill spoke of must be sleep-walking, semi-comatose.

But enough of repetition; well, not quite – I also remarked that men so soft, so comfortable and surfeited on the seeming supportive plenty of today’s largely illusory society as to forget their primal role in creation, that of husband to a woman and her child, could hardly be expected to respect the flag of the nation they are also charged with husbanding.

Oh, I can hear the protests from men. I answer with a story from my boyhood, that of the townswoman then who frequented the town’s taverns with her husband. Hearing something I said, or the way I said it, regarding the woman, my grandfather seized my arm in that vise-like grip of his. “You listen,” he said in that scarily quiet tone of his when annoyed, “a woman, any woman, is a lady as far as you are concerned. Always! That doesn’t have anything to do, mind you, with the truth of what the woman is, it has to do with what you are. Don’t you ever forget that.”

I haven’t. That was long ago, of course, but all of my experience since then has made it clear that one’s behavior toward anything must not be derived from the worth of the object, but from his behavior as derived from his evaluation of himself. A man behaves – and treats others – according to his own estimation of what – not who - he is. Men who know themselves to be capable of great things not only dare great things, but dare to become knights errant, samurai, servants of their fellows; men who know themselves to be weaklings think only of themselves. That, you see, is the most worrisome thing to them, the thing most dangerous, the thing most likely to let them down. That simple.

There have been notable exceptions, but I have seldom seen a blustering and bullying male, the kind who inflicts himself on those around him by flaunting his execrable conduct and manner, who didn’t turn in to a sniveling coward when confronted. That or run to a cop or lawyer – for today’s male, the equivalent of “mommy.”

And it is a fact of nature and behavior that one becomes what he does. Ruled by his mind, the individual can become almost anything (in fact, more’s the pity, that’s true of good and bad); more, my life has taught me enormous faith in the power of one determined individual. “One man with courage,” Thomas Jefferson observed, “is a majority.” It’s also true, as anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed, "… that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world, indeed it is the only thing that ever has."

After that experience with the pregnant lady in an Iowa snowbank (I probably tell that story too often, but it was one of the most wondrous things that has ever happened to me) I determined that henceforward I would never leave anywhere I had gone until I had made certain that it was a better place for my having been there. I would never leave another person without having made the effort to assure that they would never fail to remember with pleasure my having been there. I have forgotten that pledge to myself seldom – like I said, it’s an obsessing addiction. So obsessed did I become that I would develop a certain skill with people, especially women (I suppose it’s just far more fun with the opposite sex, for some reason); and, as I related in the book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story, it would all one day make me very powerful.

Powerful? Yes, so powerful that I would successfully stand up to the most powerful government in the history of mankind. I had, you see, by then acquired so many friends that I was impervious to everything the government of a capitalist dictatorship customarily does. I could not, for instance, be impoverished, or forced to steal or rob. Everywhere I went, and I could go anywhere I chose despite everything government could do, I found people eager to repay with largesse “a hundred-fold, shaken together and trodden down” even the simplest and smallest of kindnesses I had once given them.

Goodness like small courtesies magnify in the mind of him to which they are done hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times. Offer a man in trouble a hand, he will often offer you his life, later – when you are in trouble. Offer a lady your hand, or arm, she may well offer you her heart, and there are few things in this universe as constant as the loyalty of a woman who loves.

And if you don’t believe that, you merely give yourself away to one who has learned it the only way it can be learned.

So what I mean to do for my benighted country today is offer a lesson once taught me. I have already said here that we really do not need government; and we need nothing governments have ever done for the people they imagine that they rule. That, of course, is provided that we have one another as I once had literally hundreds (perhaps thousands) of friends. We “have” one another when we do as I have done – never go anywhere without being certain that the place and the people are better for our having been there.

But it all depends, as all human society always has, upon good men. “Good” is not hard to define, when it comes to men. Good is the quality of being above price except when paid in the coin of love, honor, and respect.

Does anybody remember, “love, honor, and obey?” Does anybody remember what it meant? No, I don’t suppose; an ideology known as feminism buried it under an avalanche of militant propagandist falsehood. More, the rise of militant feminism has paralleled without deviation the nation’s decline, something absolutely undeniable. We are in the death spiral where we find ourselves because of a lack of will characteristic of female dominated democracies.

We have followed the path observed by ancient Greece philosopher Plato. “Male republics give way to female democracies, and democracies give way to dictatorships.” You tell me what you see in our latter day history.

We must restore our nation’s maleness. We must begin teaching our male children to be men. We must teach our little girls what a man is. These are not mere platitudes! They are, in fact, societal atoms that everything social and national are made of. They are absolutely critical, and failure means doom. Like most things so monumental in decisive import, it is a simple matter, but far, far from easy. It is as simple as the once-famous Boy Scout Oath so many of the nation’s men learned as boys. A scout, the oath says, has standards, rules to which by which he measures himself and is measured, and these rules are as difficult as making the nation slow its highway driving speeds in order to drive down the cost of energy, or prevailing upon the obese sixty-seven percent of us to lose weight meaningfully.

It is as difficult as taking back control of our government by total repudiation of elections, or by the rise of a political party totally independent of corporate influence and that of lobbyist. It can’t, in fact, all be done in one great effort. WE don’t have anything like the men that would require.

But it can be done. In the famed writing of a samurai of ancient Japan, the Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi speaks of a tactic he calls “Breaking the Corners.” A little at a time, the impossible opponent is weakened. Sometimes called “the death of a thousand cuts,” it can bring down a colossus – or a government. It can change a society. In fact, as Margaret Mead observed, “it is the only thing that ever has.”

We need to start now, and we need to start with our children. There is nothing they need more than role models, heroes and idols who are worthy of being emulated. We need to begin teaching our youth right – double meaning intended. We need to teach them what has traditionally and academically been called a life view. It happens that I grew up among people who had the only life view that nature and nature’s god will any longer tolerate. I dare say that because I can demonstrate by means of history and logic that we are now in the grip of evolutionary forces, such that we learn to treat nature and nature’s god with respect much in the manner that we need to learn to treat and respect one another, or we bring down upon our own heads cataclysm.

What, specifically and devoid of the politicians’ oblique and evasive rhetoric, does that mean? I set myself a daunting task there, but among the farmers of Northeast Iowa, boys were reared in an ethic almost exactly that of Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, the ideal that all other persons were seen and treated as equals. “It isn’t about the other person,” Opa said, “it’s about you!” That idea was rooted in another, that earning enough to be comfortable and provide for all the needs of family was the proper and moral goal of good men, and that anything more was excessive and depriving of others.

Compare that to the ethics of today’s capitalist. While you’re at it, try to find anything of the Boy Scout Promise in the behavior of Congress these days – the immigration issue, for instance, or the war in Iraq. Those people, those men – I demand nothing of women here, save the obvious – are what they are or are not because of what they were or were not as children. They were taught. Just as children must be taught racism, sexism, and what have you – they are not natural, you know – they must be taught greed, power-madness, and all rest of that Congress and the weakling in the White House now inflict upon us.

And a child will be taught, by someone or something. There is no escaping that, either. The questions that remain are who will teach him? And what? I suggest this: “On my honor (are you aware that school children can no longer define that word?), I will do my best to do my duty to god and my country and to obey the Scout law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”

The Scout Oath is followed by the Scout Law. It’s worth reading. “A scout,” says the law, “is”:

TRUSTWORTHY
A Scout tells the truth. He keeps his promises. Honesty is part of his code of conduct. People can depend on him.
LOYAL
A Scout is true to his family, Scout leaders, friends, school, and nation.
HELPFUL
A Scout is concerned about other people. He does things willingly for others without pay or reward.
FRIENDLY
A Scout is a friend to all. He is a brother to other Scouts. He seeks to understand others. He respects those with ideas and customs other than his own.
COURTEOUS
A Scout is polite to everyone regardless of age or position. He knows good manners make it easier for people to get along together.
KIND
A Scout understands there is strength in being gentle. He treats others as he wants to be treated. He does not hurt or kill harmless things without reason.
OBEDIENT
A Scout follows the rules of his family, school, and troop. He obeys the laws of his community and country. If he thinks these rules and laws are unfair, he tries to have them changed in an orderly manner rather than disobey them.
CHEERFUL
A Scout looks for the bright side of things. He cheerfully does tasks that come his way. He tries to make others happy.
THRIFTY
A Scout works to pay his way and to help others. He saves for unforeseen needs. He protects and conserves natural resources. He carefully uses time and property.
BRAVE
A Scout can face danger even if he is afraid. He has the courage to stand for what he thinks is right even if others laugh at or threaten him.
CLEAN
A Scout keeps his body and mind fit and clean. He goes around with those who believe in living by these same ideals. He helps keep his home and community clean.
REVERENT
A Scout is reverent toward God. He is faithful in his religious duties. He respects the beliefs of others.

The motto of a scout and the man he becomes is Be Prepared, and his slogan you may recognize from something I said here at the outset. “Do a good turn daily.”

There came a time not too many years ago, just about the same time as Helen Reddy sang her song, “I am woman, hear me roar,” that to “be a good scout” was a “put-down” - an expression of derision. It was the time of the anti-hero male, the guy who pisses me off almost daily with his bullyingly boorish behavior, the same guy who snivels like a boyish brat when confronted with real strength. The ladies of the feminist movement wanted their “sensitive man, a man who can cry without shame” (remember it all? - I do) – in order, of course, that the male should reveal no greater control of his emotions than they – and they got him.

He is everywhere these days, and he behaves exactly as a spoiled child once did, resembles nothing so much as a two hundred pound baby. Tell me, why are we surprised that our nation resembles and behaves likewise?

Fine. We either return to the time when men were proud of being a “Boy Scout,” or we go on to the time Hobbes spoke of, the time when men would live in “continual fear of violent death; and life…” Life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”

The Border with Mexico - Exactly What's Being "Compromised?"

I’ve just finished the last of a dozen letters to congressmen and senators, my latest salvo concerning the execrably craven conduct of the U.S. Congress on the hideous situation that is the Mexico border and the controversy having to do with illegal immigration. In recent days, we are hearing again and again, ad nauseam, the term “compromise.” What, pray tell, will be “compromised?” Why are we, the people of the United States compromising with anybody?

Or, more to the point, why are we being compromised?

Isn’t it enough (referring to the latter sense of the term), that in the last several decades, we’ve been little BUT compromised by our cockamamie government? What aspect of our daily lives, or our basic rights as citizens of a free nation, has NOT been compromised?

Seriously – I do not speak rhetorically - name something. Prices, compromised to a corporate military-industrial oligarchy that would sell its mothers, sons and daughters, and those of others the same way it has pandered its soul to the street pimps of capitalism? Our once-sacred freedoms, infringed and stolen at every occasion and excuse? Our standard of living, slipping for decades and now in veritable free-fall? Our safety both at home and in the wide world, sacrificed one the one hand to the nitwit negativism of those who would have domestic tranquility at any price including virtual slavery, and on the other hand to those who roam the wide world like the plundering Vikings of old, now in search of neo-colonialist economic conquest or its neo-conservative ideological and political equivalent?

When, since, 1950, have we done anything but compromise with the military industrial complex and the corporate rich our freedoms and way of life? A hundred billion dollars, for instance, of oil depletion allowances, “set-asides,” and all the rest isn’t compromise of the taxpayer? Who else gets that kind of investment from the public without having to sell stock and pay dividends?

The U.S. taxpayer is the only investor on the planet who gets absolutely nothing – except, in this instance, higher and higher prices - for his investment. You don’t recognize in that a kind of slavery? Extraordinary!

What do you call what has been going on between the White House and the U.S. Congress concerning our “more honored in the breach than the observance” Constitution? Explain to me, when a few decades ago, a president was forced to resign when he covered for what amounted to a high school prank, how a president can now lie outright, publicly, and repeatedly, in order to justify committing our troops to invasion of another nation, violate both the Constitution and his oath of office almost without restraint (you tell me when he’s shown any restraint), cause the death of thousands of people, and remain free of impeachment?

Explain to me, parenthetically, how the public of this – or any other – nation can stand by indolent and impassive while its government – government it supposedly controls – commits mass murder, all the while pretending to have no responsibility? Those who know my story or that of nearly countless U.S. citizens similarly brutalized by this government might also explain how that same government was able without a single protest from the public able to justify and otherwise escape what happened to one of their fellow citizens – me.

When you sing your mindlessly jingoist litanies – taught you by the government-controlled media and its educational system – I remind you that my awareness of the U.S. government’s true character didn’t come by way of its media or the education system it controls, but by having lived it.

The president tells you – just about daily now – that he will do just what he damned-well pleases about anything and everything (“I’m the decider”), and you really think our Constitutional Rights, your security, at home and abroad, your very way of life and dozens of things additional are safe? Not “compromised?” Jesus! – now that’s even scarier than he and his Bush League administration is!

Try me something (analogy can be very informative): were you a maiden on first date with a George W. Bush or his administration personified, and he told you concerning your chastity and honor as a woman everything he has told this sleep-walking nation concerning its sacred Constitutional rights, what would you think? You’d do what he urged? Sure you would.

I could go on, but so could anybody who has managed to remain impervious to the relentless and massive CIA-military industrial corporation propaganda now inundating the nation’s public and controlling its collective mind. Tell me, which of “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare (save, that is, of the citizens of Mexico) . . . hasn’t been “compromised?”

Now - the latest sell-out to “corporate America” and the devil that is corporate capitalism - we have still another compromise, that of compromise with Mexico and illegal immigration. And – when has it ever been otherwise? – the compromise with a foreign (or domestic, for that matter) nation results in the compromise of everything supposedly protected by government here at home. This, the latest compromise (does anybody doubt that more are in the offing?), lets the sleaze of politicos in Washington and the White House get away with still another blizzard of monstrous mendacity and deception, a colossally conniving betrayal of both their constituents and their oaths of office, while we, the long-suffering victim public, get the every-damned-time loss of our security, our freedoms, and still another bill for hundreds of billions of dollars.

Some compromise. The woman held spread-eagled and naked before a gang of slavering rapists on a dumpster in an alley isn’t that “compromised.” We seem to be adding to the vernacular of politics another of those terms with peculiarly warped meaning. “Compromise” – in the U.S., a form of rape, robbery, or other malfeasance cloaked by Operation Mockingbird media and dissimulating deception, wherein one party gets everything he wants, the other only the costs.

Why the hell should the people of the United States accept that kind – or any kind - of compromise?! Why should the nation supposedly the most powerful in history or on earth compromise with a third-world cesspool like Mexico?

I want to know some things. Exactly, what’s being compromised? What’s the deal that’s been made? Who are the principals and parties? Specifically! What’s being swapped for what? You’re telling me that I wake up one morning to find the gardeners have moved into the house, they’ve begun eating me out of house and home, tearing up and soiling the furniture, they’re leering at my wife and daughter, and the cops I call say I should compromise? Why, god damn it?!

This, by god, is too much! The congressional doctor’s advice to his national patient, now that it’s discovered that the latter is suffering of a massive infestation of disease, is to compromise – forego shots to kill the invader and immunize against its return? Incredible! If this doesn’t smack to you of misprision of crime (that, I remind the reader, is the concealment of knowledge of a crime by someone other than the culprit) or giving aid and comfort to the enemy, you’re a zombie. You’re so comatose that by way of your representatives – who in fact represent no one but the horde of lobbyists pandering to them - you’ve compromised where national defense is concerned (can you say World Trade Center). When an emergency like Hurricane Katrina occurs, you compromise with the Federal Emergency Management and its lack of response to the very thing that is its reason for being.

The National Transportation Safety Board doesn’t think before 9-11 that a knife with a four-inch blade is a weapon. A gang of raggedy clowns theatrically worshipping Allah blunders about all over the nation while noisily seeking instruction on how to fly airliners, and a government too stupid to recognize that a Boeing 757 is a three hundred thousand pound cruise missile lets them steal the same kind of airliners and do just what that same government was warned literally decades before would happen – and you don’t realize there was a compromise? Jesus!

The federal authority supposedly governing banking lets the savings and loan industry and its bunco artists (one – remember? - a brother of the president; and ain’t that a co-incidence) embezzle and steal billions from the public, right under their plenipotentiary nabob noses, and you don’t think something or somebody was compromised? And on, and on, and on.

My god, people you wouldn’t recognize a bacchanalian sex orgy if it took place in your living room on Christmas morning! Where the hell is your mind?! Tell me something the federal government of this benighted nation has done right in the last forty years. One thing - one responsibility to us all it didn’t F.U.B.A.R.

As I remarked a minute ago, the task of compiling all the compromises made on your behalf and compromising everything you have and hold dear is prohibitively daunting, impossible here. It constitutes a set of books the size of a set of encyclopedias. It should suffice to anyone rational to look around; where do you see anything in federal government but this new kind of compromise? You’re “compromised” to people like Halliburton, too. Some compromise (think again about that dumpster)! Whatever they charge, even when it’s ten or a hundred times anything near reasonable, your representatives compromise – pay them, in other words. Everywhere you look, you find more of this alley-and-dumpster “compromise.”

The difference is the woman on her back on the dumpster in the alley knows what’s happening; you’ve been fed the date-rape drug that is propaganda by the rapists’ government’s meretricious media and its own megalomaniacal messiah complex, and you’re a compliant victim.

How much more obvious – this is as thunderously obvious as that hurricane of which I just spoke – can the truth of what federal government has come to be than where the matter of Illegal Immigrants is concerned? Inasmuch as nothing is more representative – that word again – of all the compromises being thrust upon us by malfeasant and malicious government, I suggest that history will call it the Great Mexican Compromise. The sell-out this time, after all, it not only to our corporate slavers, it is to the nation of Mexico and its slavers.

When are you going to wake up? How long are you going to willingly swallow the Rohypnol being fed you by the neo-conservative corporate capitalists? How many times do you have to have been “had” before the pain and degradation of what’s happening finally reaches your anaesthetized brain? How many people have to have become impoverished, how bad does the national health care system crisis have to get? How may elderly people have to be eating pet food? How many kids have to come out of high school still functionally illiterate? How many people have to become homeless? How bad does the national highway and bridges system, the power system, and the crumbling infrastructure have to get? How bad does the energy system crisis have to become?

How many soldiers and Iraqis have to die? How many nations, cultures, and peoples have to become our enemies?

How many people – to say nothing of pets, livestock, and animals generally - have to have grown sick as the result of infected, contaminated, and poisoned crap imported by the corporate greedy from places like China before you get rid of the Food and Drug Administration people who are interested in everything but the nation’s health? How long do you have to watch our children, derelicted by the educational system you have derelicted to government, devolve into the state of dumb beasts and orgiastic animals? How many millions of infected and infested, murderous, criminally insane, and/or sexually aberrant aliens have to have reached “compromise” safety here in the U.S. before you demand some kind of coherent action from the federal government and the Naturalizaiton and Immigration Service it holds bridled and reined in?

And I can’t, in passing, help noting what should long ago have been the harbinger of it all, a decades-long and incontrovertible demonstration of character where the conspiracy of criminals in power here in the Land of the Fee is concerned. I speak, of course, of the federal Gestapo known cynically as Internal Revenue Service. Hundreds of thousands, even millions of victims, an agency of government FUBAR as anything possibly Jeffersonian, doing long ago everything your execrable president and his cohort of cutthroats is now doing.

Long the Red Ball Express supply train for the military industrialist corporations and their Frankenstein Monster, the CIA, the IRS and its depredations were long ago the proverbial handwriting on the wall for the U.S., the federal government doing essentially everything it is now doing. That you were willing to compromise then by looking the other way as the monster tore your neighbor to pieces has come to a poetic kind of justice. Illegal Immigration is just the latest of many, many federal “operations” wherein your “establishment of justice, …domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare” – to say nothing of your pocketbook – have been compromised.

I suggest you learn to speak Spanish, and suck up to anyone who does – especially a Mexican. That’s the federal government version of “Compromise!”

Ron Paul, "Roosting Chickens," and a Bob Seger Song - "Like a Rock."

Searching for music to put on my www.judoknighterrant.com website, I came across the song I’ve now put there. “Like a Rock.” Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. That guitar’s crying voice still tears me up, as do the way the lyrics describe what I was thinking that night in the Arizona desert way back then.

You can’t imagine the emotions “Like a Rock” evokes, so I won’t bother. Here’s the gist of it, from my book, “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story.”

“I haven’t gone five miles when the proverbial “all hell breaks loose” occurs. The Cadillac comes up behind me so fast it seems to explode in my face as I check the rear view mirror. Then, as it pulls out to pass, my old Army buddy Arseneau leans out his back seat window and rakes the Skylark with what I think was an Uzi. John liked the Uzi and the Skorpion, but the bullets we found in the seat later were nine millimeter, and the Czech submachine gun is thirty-two caliber.
“I duck behind the armored vest hanging on the seatback just in time. Later, we count four nine millimeters still buried there. The air fills with flying glass, blown by the sixty mile an hour wind stream. Although it’s hit more than a dozen times, the only window still intact is the windshield
“I hit the brakes hard, standing the Skylark on its nose as the Cadillac shoots past, also braking hard and tires smoking. Swerving off the road into a shallow ditch, I breach the fence, then churn out into a pasture. I’m bouncing around in the car like a bull-rider. My head hits the unyielding roof twice, hard. Somehow, I get the seat belt fastened. I never forget to fasten it again.
“Back on the road, they’re backing up, then pulling around to come through the fence after me. They’re going to be bouncing around in here, too, and won’t be able to shoot – not well, anyway. I see right away, though, that there’s not enough room in the pasture to let me evade for long. They’ll just stop, take careful aim, and shoot me to pieces. After a couple of more fast “bootlegger turns” – thanks, mom, for teaching me that – I go back through the fence. Now I recognize there’s something radically wrong with the front end of my car. It’s become hard, really hard, to steer. I know I don’t dare drive through any more fences, that’s sure!
“But I know now what my one chance is, and I’ve got an idea. I still have old “Sweetheart,” the girl with the big knockers. Bullets, that is.
“I haven’t gone three hundred yards when they catch me. I’m thinking these evil sonofabitches must have Captain Kirk’s Star Drive in that damned Cadillac. The Skylark is making a hell of a noise, losing water and coolant, probably, and listing to one side on broken shock absorbers. But her engine is still running smoothly enough. When the Cadillac is right behind, I swerve to straddle the centerline, trying to prevent their going by on either side.
“If I can stay directly in front of them, I can keep John from shooting at me, and the farther I get to their left, the farther the guy in the front seat will have to lean out in order to get a shot. If they go by, they’ll wreck their shocks, and since John obviously doesn’t have his seat belt on, his shooting will be bad, too. Maybe I should’ve stayed in the fields.
“Now the guy in the right front seat leans far out and fires once, the slug striking somewhere on the Skylark sheet metal behind me. I note that he doesn’t have his seat belt fastened, either. Then, probably on John’s command, the guy retreats into the car. I find out why right away. Suddenly, pitiless fate makes the road three lanes. The driver of the other car swings left as Arseneau leans out their right side and fires again.
“Again, I huddle behind the armor, making myself as small as I can. The sound of it is something still with me, a staccato roar like golf ball sized hail on a corrugated steel roof. Glass seems to be everywhere again. Blowing around inside the car like a shotblast. Suddenly, I am seething mad, like that night in the Thunder Ridge Mall parking lot. This is like being raped. I have a right to be left alone, goddamnit!
“Still seething, I swerve into the shelter of the driver’s quarter of the car behind, pause a second, swerve again and slam on the brakes. Once more, the other car slides by, tires smoking and screaming. In that, I actually hear Arseneau’s thoughts. He’s anticipating me, rolling across the rear seat under him to come up in the left rear window. I’ve got “Sweetheart” on the dash, muzzle pointed through a five inch long hole blasted there by a burst from the Uzi. Come on, you sonofabitch . . .!
“There! The white face appears in the window opening. Range is about twenty-five feet. Through the spider-webbed windshield glass, I see the hit, dead center on the target, that shiny white face. I see the red spray splatter the car’s interior and the guy in the right front seat, too. The Cadillac swerves violently, turns almost sideways in the roadway, then fishtails hard in recovery, its driver fighting for control.
“While it’s happening, I wait, continually glancing at the road ahead quickly. Now. The car straightens, accelerating, its front seat passenger turning to resume the fight. Balls, I’ll give him that. Probably mad as a hornet. When he’s facing me, “Sweetheart” comments on the matter once more, spitting a two hundred thirty grain hardball forty-five kiss across the ten feet of distance between us. It hits the shooter in the front seat right under the nose, blowing his brains all over the driver behind him.
“Legs apparently straightening reflexively, the corpse rears up, then goes backward to crash into the man at the steering wheel. The Cadillac begins to fishtail again, leaves the hard surface throwing up a cloud of dust and dirt. Suddenly, its rear end leaves the ground, underside turning toward me as the big car goes by end over end, doing a kind of cartwheeling half gainer. A big sheet of something flies off, rippling in the air like a flag. In a minute, I realize that it’s the windshield. The car makes one, two, three, four flips, each slower than the last. The noise is incredible, the sound of tearing and crumpling metal.
“Finally, the Cadillac stops. Pieces are still flying, landing on the blacktop. Now there’s just the sound of the Skylark – pitiful. A belt is screaming, a bent tire rim pounding and thumping. I’m leaving a trail of water. I hope. Oil or gasoline, I’m out of business. Do I dare stop? Looking, I see another vehicle behind, a van of some kind, and it drives by the Cadillac without stopping. God damn! There were two cars!
“It’s over now, but I have no idea where the hell I am. For what seems an eternity, I grope around, keeping an eye on and finally losing the van. The engine keeps overheating, and I stop several times to find and add water. I avoid contact with people because the car looks just like what’s happened, and they’ll call police. A couple of times when I stop, I look for the device that’s letting the bad guys track me. No luck, but it doesn’t take me long to figure out that the van was the one actually doing the tracking. Finally, I arrive at my mountain campsite. I know what’s coming, and I know what I have to do . . .”

When you’re remembering a thing like that, it’s never really possible to remember it always the same way. Yeah, I know what all the courts, lawyers and moralists want to believe – it isn’t so; it isn’t so, and anyone who does remember everything and in detail about a time like that simply brands himself a liar. Just the fact that we say what we do on the subject betrays what a nation of liars we are.

Anyway, I always remember that black Cadillac and the way it could accelerate. Awesome – and I do not use the word loosely. Other things about remembering a fight like that are probably different for other people, but although I do remember thinking with certainty that I was going to die, I was far, far from afraid. I was, in fact, enraged, in a killing fury.

You may understand if I tell you that I think I know how a woman being raped may feel. The shear outrage of being violated. Of being dealt with as though you are nothing, something to be used by someone simply because he is powerful enough to do that, then to be thrown away. The only thing we really have of value, you know, is our lives. We have worked so hard for it, defended it from so much, from so many people and things; it is what all those men – and women – in history have suffered, been maimed, and died to preserve for us. That someone stronger intends to take it from you as if it were his to take is unconscionable and unforgivable. No, I won’t ever forget the rage.

For years, in fact, I fought the rage. Walking that night down one of those dug-out roads in the desert north of Phoenix, I fought the killing urge to kill. Anyone. Anybody. YOU! All of you! Everything was gone. Business, wife, family, money – everything. Even my identity, and record of having soldiered, of having fought for this execrable society and nation, all gone. The federal government of the United States, you know, controls and owns everything. Money, property – even your name! You have turned all of it over to them, and you have done that because you are crawling cowards, believing that you assure by submissive subservience your miserable security.

That night, in the desert, you were my enemy.

I had just learned with certainty, you see, that your government – the one you have give that kind of power because you are too craven and cowardly to face life on your own – was resolutely calling anyone who thought to give me a job, to threaten them with audit and retribution should I receive a paycheck. And I wanted to hurt you the way you were hurting me.

The song made it worse. “Like a rock, “Seger sang.


“My hands were steady,
“My eyes were clear and bright,
“My walk had purpose,
“My steps were quick and light,
“And I held firmly to what I felt was right.
“Like a rock.”


As I said a while ago about another song like this one, I can count the number of times I’ve cried during my adult life on the fingers of one hand. When that guitar started its wail, I fell to my knees in the road, and I wept.

Like I said, it’s strange the things you remember, and how you remember them. Another thing singularly vivid, like that damned Cadillac, was a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche, the great philosopher. Translated from the German, it says, “He who fights with monsters ought take care lest he become a monster.” Some time later, I would glue it to the ceiling over the bunk in my RV. This night, though, I went into Scottsdale, found a music store in a mall, and bought the Seger tape. I listened to it through the night as I drove to Denver. The fight in the night near Fort Collins would take place a couple of years later.

Yes, I did fight back and I won; not the way you think, but I won. The first major piece of legislation attacking IRS, Omnibus Taxpayers Bill of Rights, had a great deal to do with my own efforts.

But that’s not what this is about, either. Night before last, I heard Congressman Ron Paul – I can’t help wondering at the co-incidence that he is my representative in the U.S. Congress; Chuck Grassley, the author of that first, landmark legislation, having then been my representative in the Senate – said that the world has begun attacking us because we have made a practice of attacking the world. We should have expected 9-11, he said, inasmuch as we had been bombing Iraq – and therefore all Arabs – for years.

The truth, in other words (sorry, but the world is not obliged to see everything the way you see it). Before you attacked an entire religion, you would have done well to learn a modicum about it. But you don’t do things like that, DO you?!

No, hell no – everything you do is right. Everyone on the planet should have our system of government, our way of life, and our moral code. Listen to your miscreant president and his neo-conservative, New World Order (thanks for the reminder “Treebear” lady), military industrial complex cohort. Nothing may stand in our way, especially our greedy way, and when it does, we – you, I’m your enemy, remember? - destroy it.

Save the bullshit. Wave the flag you won’t so much as stop to pick up from the gutter in my face, and I’ll cram it down your sycophant throat. I was there at the beginning of it all, don’t forget. That’s what caused my ordeal that night in the desert all these years ago. I was supposed to go to a foreign nation and kill its leader, that just because he had begun to stand up to you, to reprove what you had been doing to the people of Cuba for more than a century. There would be many more murder operations like Mongoose (they named it for me, you know), all over Latin America and elsewhere - Iran, for one. Chile? And Panama?

Oh, but when Congressman Ron Paul had the courage both intellectual and moral to tell it like it is, you know what happened. People in the Land of Free Speech don’t tell the truth unless it favors the neo-conservative, military industrial complex corporation line, and the Newspeak prole (you remember the proles, don’t you – Orwell’s “1984?”) public’s opinion. What Paul said was that some of the chickens came to roost on 9-11. There was a Colorado professor who said that years before, remember. Remember what happened to him? Free speech, your ass!

I’ll tell you something else I know, something I know because I’ve been where you don’t want to believe we go. One of these days, you will do to someone what you did to me, and there won’t be a mollifying or accusing song to ring in a his mind as he struggles with the desperate need to destroy you. You will destroy everything that someone loves, and he will retaliate in kind.

There’s one more thing you need to know: It was I who nearly thirty years ago in June, 1978 first wrote to our minimalist-minded government to warn what would happen if someone high-jacked a Boeing 747 or Douglas DC-10 and flew it into a skyscraper. The strike of what amounts to a 300,000 pound flying bomb somewhere near the middle of a building like the World Trade Center (the building I used for example was the Empire State Building), would cause its collapse. No one listened then, either. You always have your own version of the truth, no matter how mindless and divorced from reality it may be – haven’t you?!

And that, ultimately, is what saved you from me (if you think the airliner idea was my worst, you only demonstrate how decadent-stupidly vulnerable you really are). I realized that night in the desert and the next day that you are your own worst enemy.

You are your destroyer.

Flags, Logic, and "There Is No Such Thing As Illegal!"

Last night, I watched yet another demonstration and example of something I’ve been afraid of since boyhood, bias. Of the several subjects I have maintained study of all my life (and by “study,” I include continual and regular returns to college classes) one is the psychology and sociology of bias in human opinion and opinion formation.

Bias amounts to nothing short of a form of insanity. It is very like a reflexive or Pavlovian reaction, in that the individual either responds without thought, or – perhaps even more indicative of his condition – even after thought. In almost all of its forms, the bias so masks its presence that the afflicted individual actually believes he IS thinking, the bias having appeared as thought.

Bias, moreover, is seldom self-induced, being a product almost entirely of the human need and tendency to control his fellow and his behavior. The result is that few of the behavioral sciences – or sciences in general, for that matter – receive more attention and study from government than that of bias creation. That’s what’s become known as propaganda. In my own poor way, I seek to combat bias induced by propaganda with methods like my logic page here, “The Thinker.” The idea primarily is to point out on a continuing basis examples of illogical argument and propaganda – with government, as with all human beings, the determination is always that of evil intent or simple error – being foisted upon the public by the nation’s information and news media.

Last night, on the Lou Dobbs Show, I watched in utter astonishment one of the most egregious examples of human bias I’ve ever witnessed anywhere. As I have again and again wondered here on these pages, I wondered at the mental and psychological state of the principals. Where bias of this kind is derived from the erroneous, but ubiquitous fallacy of moral justification of method by end result, the individual must, I suppose, be excused of any evil being done. The issue here was that of illegal immigration (and, in order to deliberate effectively here, one must begin with recognition of the kind of bias capable of stating categorically that illegal immigration is not illegal – or its inverse, that all immigration is legal), and all that means for the U.S. and its legal citizenry.

It appears that some time ago (I haven’t looked it up), Lou Dobbs made reference to the number of illegal aliens from Mexico who had Hanson’s Disease, or leprosy. That I do not have the precisely correct numbers is due the fact in the first place that illegal immigration prevents knowing the numbers – which is precisely one of the reasons any nation attempts to control immigration.

That fact was conspicuous by its absence from the argument of the Dobbs’ Show’s guests.

Otherwise, the guests’ astonishingly biased argument committed primarily the fallacy of irrelevant conclusion, proceeding to use the irrelevant conclusion in the further fallacy of appeal to ignorance.

That last there is not intended as double entendre, incidentally, but it you don’t recognize appeal to ignorance, you don’t watch much television these days. You may recall from earlier posts here Nazi German Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels’ dictum that propaganda must be directed at stupidity and repeated often. Now that I think of it, your failure to recognize that may prove that you watch too much TV. It would also prove, then, that Goebbels was right.

Dobbs had reported in some fashion – and the fashion constitutes all aspects of the guests objection and argument – that a precipitous rise in cases of leprosy (to say nothing of the danger of epidemics resulted from there being no way to know who or what is crossing the border with Mexico) could reasonably be connected with illegal immigration. The following URLs will relieve me of any necessary recitation of statistics on that specific subject. From them, the reader can proceed to his own research of the issue and problem. If that doesn’t piss you off with Dobbs’ detractors – including, incidentally, Media Matters – nothing will.

ftp://ftp.hrsa.gov/bphc/pdf/nhdp/2003Regreport.pdf

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43275

That second URL, incidentally, is the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons report, and it includes what might be considered a prescription for protecting the health of Americans:

“Closing America's borders with fences, high-tech security devices and troops.
“Rescinding the U.S. citizenship of "anchor babies."
“Punishing the aiding and abetting of illegal aliens as a crime.
“An end to amnesty programs.”

In the report located at the first URL, you will note that thirty-seven percent of all leprosy among immigrants to the U.S. occurs in Caucasian Mexicans. A further eight percent occurs in black Mexicans. The percentage nearest those has to do with “Pacific or Asian Islanders” – twenty-two percent.

Now, to regress momentarily and for cause, the fallacy of argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad Ignoratium (that, actually, means “appeal to ignorance”) or argument by lack of imagination, is the logical fallacy in which one avers that a premise is false only because it has not been proved true. Its corollary is the equally fallacious averment that says a premise is true because it has not been proved false or that a premise contained in the averment is false.

The Dobbs Show guests went even further (as do many – most, and almost invariably – of illegal immigration apologists), to the similar fallacy known as argument from personal belief or conviction. That one says that because the apologist’s bias won’t let him believe something – a premise, technically – the premise or argument can be assumed to be false. The inverse of that one is that a premise preferred is true even though not proved.

Both these dingbat arguments regard lack of evidence for one conclusion as constituting evidence or proof that another conclusion is instead true. In the anti-derivative of that one the dingbat arguer regards his personal bias against the opinion opposing his as probative. “I don’t like it, so it isn’t so.”

If you haven’t recognized that one in all the flak flying up from the illegal immigrant forces – try Geraldo Rivera, for instance – you’re again demonstrating either that you don’t watch television or that you watch so much television that the Goebbels Method has you in thrall

Finally, and summing up, the two Lou Dobbs Show guests asseverated indignantly that because Dobbs’ supposed statement wasn’t provable – I remind the reader that on account of the nature of illegal immigration – there is no way to know – it was false (Dobbs pointed out that, still further along the string of fallacious assumption, he had never said what the guests’ insisted was inferable from his actual statement).

To sum up the guests’ (and that of literally dozens of proponents of illegal immigration and amnesty for those already here) argument, we don’t know how many people with leprosy (conspicuous again by its absence was mention of all other diseases possible) are coming across the border, so none of the people coming across the border illegally are lepers. Remarkable.

Here, by the way again, we may fairly remind ourselves that all the same logical nonsense is being asserted where criminals and other examples of flotsam and jetsam from Mexican and other South American social paradises are concerned. Want to go a little further along that same line of d-u-u-u-h reasoning (still another reason we so desperately need these people – their surpassing intelligence)?

Pay attention, now – let’s see if you can identify the fallacious thinking necessary to explain the immigrant who flees his Mexican homeland in order to make his new country like his old one . . . If Aztlan belongs to Mexico, and by out-breeding us, they take it back and turn it into Mexico, how will the citizens of the new Mexican state have gained anything? What, the land – the air, maybe - makes U.S. citizens prosperous and successful as a community and nation?

“Splain dat to me, Luci!” Isn’t Mexico the way Mexico is on account of Mexicans?

Still, we’re not done yet. Next, we have the “only a little or a few” fallacy of composition argument. Only a few of the people coming over the border are sick, criminal pedophiles, rapists, or murders. “The new TV is cheap, because it only cost a dollar, fifty a day” (and it you haven’t heard that one, you’re either deaf or haven’t listened to radio, watched TV, or read a newspaper). Illegal immigration can’t cost us that much (some of the fiscal argument being put forward by illegal immigration supporters are deliberate exploitation of public stupidity where innumeracy is concerned, obviously fallacious on their face to anyone who can add, subtract, multiply, or divided numbers in six digits).

It’s only when the TV salesman tells you that his buck, fifty a day adds up to five hundred, forty-seven, fifty that the “cheap” comes out of the innumeracy fog into the light of day.

Again, however, the real trouble comes from having no idea how much the payments are going to be. WE DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IS GOING TO COST, BECAUSE WE DON’T KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE THERE ARE! The same is true of how much disease, how many pedophiles, how many drug-pushers, and how many murderers. More, while it is reasonable to assume that some of the people willing to break both our immigration laws and those of their own country (another thing conspicuous – at least to me – by it’s absence from the discussion) are something less than candidates for sainthood, it is equally likely that at least some are criminals of the lowest possible nature - scum of the earth, in other words.

Or, maybe, a Mexican national can’t be a criminal?

What? – Citizens of the U.S. are to play the equivalent of Russian Roulette, just because Mexico wants relief from its own societally prostrate condition? Maybe when we’ve become the victim of an illegal immigrant and illegal immigration the government will give us – like it does the family of a soldier maimed or killed in Iraq “the honor and respect of a grateful nation?” Mexico, maybe?! Maybe we can have cast a new medal, a Purple Heart for wounds suffered while being sacrificed to Mexico’s invasion of the U.S.

Thanks, I’ll take vanilla – enforce the law, I mean.

Want to do some fun numbers? Assume that twenty million illegal aliens are given amnesty – meaning, in a few years, social security benefits. Do the numbers; say, an average of what I get (for fifty years of payments, mind you) $10,320 a year. Multiply by twenty millions (never mind – I’ll do it for you), you get $206,400,000,000. That’s two hundred six billion, four hundred million. And if you think that will do it, you don’t realize how I’m getting screwed; worse, you think illegal aliens will stand for being treated like I was. There’s nobody who doesn’t realize that just social security income – I haven’t mentioned all the rest – benefits for the amnestied illegal aliens will cost people like me – and you - a couple of trillion dollars.

But my topic was bias (again, I digress – if only to demonstrate the degree of dishonesty resulted from bias, my subject). How do two educated persons like Dobbs’ guests dare sit before a national audience and commit the kind of stultifying, stupefying dissimulation and prevarication these birds did? How does a Reverend Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson dare rail one day against the same faux pas he commits the next? A Glen Beck ballyhooing on Monday the end of the world and on Thursday excoriate as fear-mongers exponents of human-originated global warming? How does a Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly, a Rosie O’Donnell or Al Franken take a politically right-wing or left-wing view on every issue?

How is it that a television viewing researcher can watch for days on end without seeing a single logical argument propounded by any pundit on any issue of political and national importance? Not one!

Why is it that that same researcher - and just about anyone who watches television or reads the papers – can know in advance on any given subject or issue what any of these purported experts will argue?

How does a Sean Hannity dare – like every, single one of his to the political right of Attila the Hun ilk – dare say something as illogically stupid as the argument that U.S. departure from Iraq would result in increased violence? Go back to the fallacies of Ignoratium and division, then think about that one.

Three guys in a roomful of people are fighting one another, tearing the place all to hell, and knocking hell out of all the bystanders – innocent or otherwise. All the principals are shooting at all the others. How the hell does one guy being removed increase the level of violence? They’re not going to use the ammo they were shooting at us to go on shooting at one another? The guy who left was preventing them from shooting one another? What - by drawing fire? Our shooting wasn’t hurting anybody? We didn’t have and use far more firepower than either of the other two?

And, pal, if you tell me about the two thousand pound bombs that can hit a doorknob, failing to mention what the explosion does to everything in a one thousand yard radius of that doorknob, if you tell me about a hundred and fifty thousand of our troops shooting in every direction every kind of personal weapon, mortar, rocket, and cannon, all hitting nothing but what they’re aiming at, we’ll be right back to the buck, fifty a day television set.

The violence in Iraq can be worsened when we stop shooting, bombing and blasting, and leave? HOW, do tell!

How Is It That a Harvard Law School Grad Doesn't Know the Law of Citizens Arrest?

Last night, the nation saw yet another (there’s never a night that passes, actually) glimpse of the military industrial complex corporations’ Operation Mockingbird campaign to protect the totalitarian oligarchy being set up in the United States. This one took the form of another “expert analyst’s” commentary on the culpability of five persons who stood and watched as a burly and youthful car thief punched twenty-one times a ninety-one year old man.

The “expert,” one Jeffrey Toobin, stated categorically that no law requires action from a citizen in such circumstances. That, inasmuch as Toobin is purported by CNN and the television networks who hire him to be an attorney at law (Toobin earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard College and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review [!!!]), is a bald-faced lie, one made even more egregious by his credentials otherwise. The following is the legal definition – taken from Black’s Law Dictionary – of the crime codified as “Misprision of a Felony”:

“1. Maladministration of public office.
“2. Neglect in preventing or reporting a felony or treason by one not an accessory.
“3. An act of sedition against a government or the courts.”

Your attention is directed to definition two. Realizing that everything having to do with the rules by which we live nowadays requires assignment of some special and esoteric meaning to words and language, I submit that it would take more, even, than what has become the customary Supreme Court prestidigitation, terpsichory, and solecistic contortion to reach an interpretation different than the plain one where the term “misprision” is concerned.

Anyone who stands and watches a felony committed is a felon criminal.

More, all fifty states provide for and impose upon citizens the duty of citizen’s arrest. That I happen to know a bit more than most people on the subject is due that fact that I once wrote a book on Citizen’s Arrest, and it was, at least in part, the reason for my having acquired the sobriquet “Guerrilla Lawyer.”

A citizen's arrest is an arrest performed by a person acting as a civilian, as opposed to a sworn law enforcement officer. In common jurisdictions (the U.S. and everywhere law based on the English system of law is practiced), the practice dates back to medieval England and the English common law, when sheriffs encouraged ordinary citizens to help apprehend law breakers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen's_arrest

“Expert Analyst” Toobin also made reference to “vigilantes” in his cynical effort to further destruction of Jeffersonian government. From another on-line legal dictionary, this is the definition of that term:

“vigilante n. someone who takes the law into his/her own hands by trying and/or punishing another person without any legal authority (emphasis mine). In the 1800s groups of vigilantes dispensed "frontier justice" by holding trials of accused horse-thieves, rustlers and shooters, and then promptly hanging the accused if "convicted." A mother who shoots the alleged molester of her child is a vigilante (Hal’s note: provided, that is, she does not catch him in the act; then, she has the right and the duty to – at least - arrest him).

That Mr. Toobin is a liar is my opinion, of course; but inasmuch as one who purports and is purported to be a lawyer might be reasonably expected to know the law well enough to know something as basic and simple as the two definitions I have cited, I choose to believe he has deliberately given false legal advice to the public and nation. The question, as I have already noted, is why.

The further question is why he would do that. More, the answer bears directly and heavily on any number of similar televised pronouncements and dissimulations being heard on the media. Illegal immigration and related matters, for instance.

I might also remind everyone of a president who publicly and contemptuously flaunts the law, much in the manner of all his patrician kind everywhere (of course, as I have pointed out here again and again, law that punishes a person living on social security with the same fine as a billionaire is a plainly absurd as is Toobin’s disingenuous “analysis”).

But, as I am often wont to say, and do, I digress. Why would Toobin lie? That the CNN “analyst” is a liar has not only to do with something I wrote about years ago, it is something I bet my life on then, too. On the capitol steps in Denver, Colorado in 1987, I announced my reasons for having come to the state then being called in the nation’s prevaricating and dissimulating media “The Make My Day State.” I said plainly and in a manner unmistakable as is today’s media dishonesty that I would arrest any federal official caught in crime, and shoot or beat him to death in the process if necessary.

I threw down the gauntlet, in other words. Were I wrong, I had just handed federal felons who had already shown themselves so anxious for my demise as to shoot at and wound me from ambush the opportunity to accomplish their mission legally. More, my contentious announcement was widely debated, including that of night-time talk shows wherein lawyers calling were obliged to admit grudgingly my right to do just what I said. Even more, in the years to come the government betrayed the truth of what I had said that fateful night by first running for cover – including the total destruction of all records that might remotely have to do with me (that fact later confirmed by former IRS Historian Shelley Davis in her book “Unbridled Power”), and a U.S. District Court for Colorado ruling which sealed all records having to do with me.

“To do otherwise,” the court said, “would irreparably damage the tax collection system of the United States.”

The court, in so doing, protected federal officials as high as the White House from exposure, in the process having elevated tax collection to a matter of national security in order to avail the government of Freedom of Information Act exclusions having to do with the same. Even today (see my website page on the subject), the courts deny me the access to a legal system afforded even illegal aliens – to say nothing of the Constitution of the United States. There can be no rational doubt why.

Neither is the reason for the government’s panic – if repeated attempts at the murder of a citizen by his government represents anything more than panic, you tell me what it is – irrelevant here. The federal government was by this time aware that I had infiltrated it at all levels, and that I could prove felony crime by individuals throughout a system about whom my most extreme contentions have since been vindicated. The U.S. Government is, in fact, nothing more than a conspiracy of criminals. I was at the time of my radio discussions being instrumental in the creation of the Colorado Militia. In fact, I was also instrumental when members of the militia arrested as citizens two agents of the United States engaged in efforts to incite militiamen to commit actionable crimes having to do with weapons possession.

The arrested federal felons – while the court in question admitted the arrests were legal – were released by the court to which the militiamen had dutifully delivered them, still another example and proof of my point here; namely, that we have lost our democracy and nation of laws. The felons were federal and, therefore – like our criminal president - above the law.

The simple fact, and upshot of my activities, was that I would have the right and authority to do legally what amounted under the circumstances to overthrow of the nation’s federal government.

Let’s go back to the outset, and to the basics where our question is concerned. First, a citizen of the United States who sees a crime – in some states, the crime must be a felony – in commission, has the authority and duty to stop it by means of arrest (that’s what the word means, incidentally). The person arrested may be anyone. Let me say that again: anyone!

The law of arrest in all fifty states – and the powers known as police powers are reserved, I remind you, to the states and to the people by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments – entitles the arresting party to enlist the aid of fellow citizens, as many as is necessary to accomplish his arrest.

NOW do you see how one guy, me, could terrorize the entire federal government? Having said that, think further again – why would that be? Obviously, a government not engaged in widespread crime – like, for instance and among all the more obvious and publicized ones, selling our kids into sexual slavery to foreign potentates – would have no reason to fear citizens arrest.

Let’s back up again, back to the original reasons our nation was constituted as it was, and to the Bill of Rights Amendment none other than Thomas Jefferson considered the keystone of all civil rights. Let’s read it:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

Reminded that I am not licensed by any state to practice law, but that I am an ardent – so ardent as to be just about unimpeachable there – historian, let me point out that last: “or to the people.” It’s probably the most overlooked words in U.S. Law, buried as it is under all the smoke and mirrors and Toobin analyses the federal government can pay for. It means that the power to arrest – to stop in the act of crime – belongs to the citizen. In fact, the states derive their power to arrest from the individual, assisting him, in effect, in his prevention or arrest of crime.

The fact that this is misunderstood by almost everyone in our country is also singular in its implication. Cui bono? – to use another legal term – who would profit by that? Now, unless federal, Operation Mockingbird brain-washing has obliterated your mind, you’re starting to catch on.

And that is the reason for Mr. Toobin’s cynical – and sinister - prevarication last night.

So often have I been over this ground, arguing it in every forum imaginable over the last two decades, that I make still another discursive retrogression – to the term “vigilante.” We’ve heard that word a great deal lately, haven’t we? A “vigilante,” our definition said, is “someone who takes the law into his/her own hands by trying and/or punishing another person without any legal authority.” Check those last four words. If any citizen who sees a crime in progress – beating a helpless old man in order to steal his car is a crime, you know – is empowered to arrest, then how does doing so make him a “vigilante?”

Now we know what this is about. It’s about a military industrial complex corporation coup d’etat, an attempt – successful, so far – to seize control of our government and nation, repudiate all of both its way of life and Constitution, and set up a corporate oligarchy. It’s about seizing the nation’s information and news media in order to put the public in a behavioral straight-jacket, a virtual prison whose shackles are restraints placed on the mind rather than the body. Availing itself of ideologies like liberal and feminist humanism, and controlling the information and news media with the iron fist of Internal Revenue Service, by way of programs like Operation Mockingbird, the criminal conspiracy in Washington on the Potomac intends totalitarian dictatorship by the privileged few, government from the rich and powerful to the peasant servant, rather than from the constitutionally powerful individual to a public servant government.

“Deception,” observed CIA Counter-Intelligence Director James J. Angleton, “is a state of mind, and deception is the mind of the state.”

Don’t be deceived. This isn’t rocket science, and it is not difficult to know that no criminal wants to be arrested, stopped, while in the furtherance of his crime. Compare the other criminal conspiracy in progress at this time with that of the military industrial complex corporation. Indeed, this conspiracy happens – mirabile dictu – to be still another operation of the same coup d’etat conspirators. I speak, of course, of illegal immigration from Mexico. Listen to the language, observe the practices and behavior of the conspirators. Recall the term modus operandi, and recall, too, that it is a tried and trusted means using the criminal’s method to identify him.

Anyone, also, who seeks where the criminal is a Mexican to interfere with the crime in progress is a “vigilante.” You don’t, really, see a similarity – a linking one – between the way the federal government flaunts and ignores the law and the way criminal Mexicans, their supporters, and apologists do all but exactly the same thing? You don’t notice the way the federal government – including their godfather, who happens to be none other than the presidential head of the conspiracy that is the parent to the Mexican one – enjoys immunity to laws the citizen must obey, that in much the same way the illegal alien from Mexico enjoys, somehow, immunity everywhere to laws under which a citizen would pay heavy penalty?

Remarkable! Remarkable; and probably indicative of the fact that, as I said yesterday, you’re far too far gone to save. But then, if people like Mr. Toobin still find it profitable to maintain the Operation Mockingbird tactics and orchestrations, I suppose there must be some hope. Obviously, the coup d’etat conspirators of the corporate oligarchy who now rule believe the specious, only virtually real, democracy requires constant maintenance.

There are still some of us, after all, who remember the United States of American when it was still the “Land of the Free.”

Historically, "the Jig Is Up" for the U.S. - History Will Never Believe We Didn't Know.

Having engaged in debate on many and various websites here on the Internet, I have gathered volumes of data for a prospective doctoral thesis having to do with the state of the nation’s public discourse. In a certain manner, the data has also to do with the state of the public’s intellect, and I have also written often and a great deal about the staggering realization any such researcher must come to, that the people of the United States have simply grown too stupid to remain free. What is more, few of our citizens have any idea of the effect of their stupidity on our progeny and their lives.

I never see one of the little people without reflecting upon the evil being worked upon them by their elders and this insouciant society. What a rotten thing we are doing to our children and their children.

Examples and proof of my contention abound, but evidence of the nation’s mental incompetence has become so overwhelming, so insurmountable, as to be prohibitive where any proof or proving is concerned. There’s no point in demonstrating to a jackass that he’s stupid. He’s too stupid to have any way to learn that.

All, therefore, that remains for those intelligent enough to realize what is happening is to prepare for the worst. A number of my friends are doing that, and one, a veteran of Iraq, came to town last night to pay a visit and discuss our nation’s dismal straits. He brought with him a friend retired now from SEAL Team One, and the conversation among old warriors was brisk, and interesting. We are agreed, suffice it to say, that strength born of the certain ability to survive in the wilderness, and to teach others the same, will be critical when the fabric of our society begins to tear. This isn’t going to be pretty.

With all of the people at the table possessed of postgraduate degrees or the equivalent, the conversation was scientific, and went deeply into causes. What explains best our precipitous decline, especially regarding the effectiveness of the electorate vis a vis federal government? Many possibilities were put forward, but among the most likely, especially from an historical perspective was the historically unequalled selfishness of the American people. There’s never been anything like it, and the spectacle of a myriad of pressure groups demanding largely imagined rights fills the television screen nightly.

There seems little that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t “protect.” Again, examples of this ignorant nonsense abound, but a sign carried by an illegal alien Mexican at a recent protest demonstration speaks louder than the words there. “There is no such thing as illegal,” the sign blazoned. Another sign said, “Everyone, Hispanics, too, have a right to an education.”

Really? Show me where in the Constitution it says that. Show me in the Mexican Constitution where it says that.

But now I’ve spoken about illegal immigration from Mexico, a subject too tiresome, so totally imbued with irrational nonsense, that . . . Well, anyone who deigns to argue with a jackass labels himself a jackass. The illegal alien standing in our street waving a Mexican flag over an inverted U.S. flag shouts a message so thunderous concerning our shameful fecklessness as a nation as to put the proverbial handwriting on the wall for anyone smarter than a monkey.

I choose, then, to speak of something else as exemplary of our situation, the public’s total loss of control over their corrupt Congress. As I type here, the conspiracy of criminals on the Potomac continues their hand-wringing charade concerning the war in Iraq. And, as the owner and manage of our local Firestone store observed in bringing me home when I had dropped off Rita’s car for service, the young men and women who honor us all by serving in the armed forces of our country as did my friends of last night and this mornings discussions are made up mostly – overwhelmingly, again – of the poor. When I remarked that in a recent “blog” I had said the same, and added that it was unreasonable – stupid, even – to believe or expect patricians like those risen to power in our nation to have any real concern for the war or the soldiers fighting it, my companion nodded agreement vigorously.

Where the Congress is concerned, our national malaise isn’t about stupidity. It’s about disdain. Having preyed upon the poor to reach ascendancy over them, the patrician feels no compunction whatever when he persists in that practice. My benefactor this morning, it happens, is Hispanic – as was the buddy veteran of Iraq I mentioned – and most of my friends here in South Texas are of the same culture. I speak Spanish, moreover, so – at least in that way – I am Hispanic. When he pointed out that he had declined a U.S. Navy request to put a recruiting poster in his business window, my friend showed more courage and integrity than the Congress of which I speak here.

That Congress dithers on the matter of illegal immigration for the same reason it dithers on Iraq. It’s all about recruiting, enlisting the poor to do the patricians’ dirty work. Whether they work in the fields doing stoop labor, or brave IEDs in Baghdad, that’s what it’s about. Not long ago, in fact, a nationally-syndicated columnist “stumped” in his column for a program whereby illegal aliens would be permitted to enlist in the military in order to so earn citizenship – provided, of course, they survived to apply.

But I promised to forego talk of illegal aliens. The issues and questions that prompt the congressional criminal collective to behave in such a disgustingly egregious manner have more to do with a reflexive tendency to avoid any controversy that might disrupt the status quo ante regarding representative-constituent relations (read “re-election”) than with any intellectual debate about doing the right thing. This, moreover, is bipartisan in nature, even if the Democrat Party, people who obtained their majority from an electorate thereby expressing dissatisfaction with the progress of the war in Iraq through their votes, are behaving particularly shamelessly. What a pack they are!

Once more, we have the stinking with decay of age, smoke-and-mirrors chicanery we see where nearly every issue or trouble is concerned. Flailing about, bloviating like Bullmoose (Al Capp? - What’s good for Bullmoose is good for America!”), the putrescence of politicians on the Potomac creates the appearance of much ado while doing for all practical purposes nothing.

Meanwhile, and with the situation and circumstances in Iraq worsening daily - twelve this weekend, with three captured and almost certainly being tortured to death - the media has unleashed a barrage of diversionary political info-tainment rivaling any before it. Feigning what surely must be as close to unprecedented partisan infighting as possible, left and right wing are laying about them in every direction, creating a hurricane of noise designed to distract the fatuous public from the hideous truth. Apparently locked in the worse kind of partisan selfishness and self service, Democrats and Republicans are in fact cooperating as never before. Worse, the public falls for the meretricious masquerade, in effect standing idly by to indulge the politicos their unconscionable fraud.

Meanwhile, industrial military complex profits exceed by multiples anything before in history. Halliburton may, indeed, purchase Kuwait, rather than just move operations there.

But as I’ve intimated, I’ve grown suspicious of the public’s motives, too. Three dollar plastic yellow ribbons stuck on a car, and ranting “blogs” like this one are cheap enough. Waving the flag in the front yard is much easier than wearing the nation’s uniform in combat. I’ve already pointed out – with, I can assure you, rueful, agonized (I really thought god was on our side) pain - the feckless stupidity of most Americans. It’s true, and there’s no doubt about it. There must be, then, a tremendous number of our citizens either too ignorant or too incurious (or a combination of the two) to judge for themselves the efficacy of congressional behavior toward Iraq. Incredibly for my group of friends last night or myself, Congress pretends to be searching for a solution to Iraq, and Americans ignore the obvious in order accept that this is this case.

Too easy – nobody’s that stupid. The truth, I fear, is that it’s pass the buck time all around. It’s become “un-American” to accept responsibility for anything. Insurance contracts in the U.S. deny liability coverage for policyholders who admit fault. “Don’t get involved,” the motto of the sixties, has pejorated to “It’s not my affair,” and that has become, in turn, the national mantra. This is not only the stupidest public every having inflicted itself on the nation, is it the most selfish. It’s somebody else’s husband, daughter, or son – now, even mother - being killed – so what do I really care?!

And, then, there are other reasons I doubt our sincerity. Listen, look, where we are, what’s we’re doing! My god, people, we seem to listen like sheep to the most incredible nonsense. We are trying in Iraq, just for instance, to do the logically impossible – solve a problem that hasn’t been defined. Tell me how you play and win a game without knowing how it is that you score. I simply don’t believe anyone can be that stupid. Not even indoctrinated by relentless propaganda as we are.

We – the media, congress, the president - speak of “surges,” “stability” and “funding” as if those rhetorical terms actually – real world, now - address real problems like – among many others - Iraq. I don’t buy it. I think we’re corrupt. I think we’re satisfied by the status quo because we don’t really believe it affects us. That’s worse than stupidity. It’s scrofulous morals.

I pause parenthetically here to point out that I am trying to reason with you, and to myself recognize that I am doing what I scorned as I began – to reason with someone (with all due respect), no longer capable of reason. This is like trying to explain sex to a ten year old.

Let me try to simplify enough to prove useful. Even people as enslaved to their own greed and lust as members of the U.S. Congress are capable of recognizing that Iraq was at best – the alternative was monstrous evil - a staggeringly stupid thing to do. It was nothing short of an attempt to persuade – or force – an entire religion, Islam, to change its fundamental doctrine.

But Americans don’t seem to know that. They almost desperately don’t seem to know that. And how convenient it all is. We all sound like Hillary Clinton: “Sure, I wanted the war, but I was deceived by the president.”

Sure. BULL! Oh, I know we’re stupid, all right. Tons and tons of data show that. Jay Leno and his “Jaywalking” segment show that. “Americans” – in that peculiarly unique stupidity of ours – know everything – and are willing to argue vehemently – about subjects they almost invariably flunk when tested concerning actual, real, knowledge. There isn’t anything remotely like it in behavioral history, and – I think – it is at the heart of what amounts to a national psychosis.

As he does with fifty other “issues,” an American will nod his head knowingly when one utters the words Sunni, Shiite, or Kurd. Ask a few questions, you invariably realize – and you prove – that he doesn’t have the faintest idea what he’s talking about. Why? Could it be a matter of convenience? Is he hiding the fact that he knows there is no way for anyone stupid to solve any problem he knows nothing of? I think so.

A couple of weeks ago, a congressman, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, the newly appointed chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, failed a quiz when journalist Jeff Stein asked him to differentiate between Sunni and Shiite. Reyes may have become the poster boy for congressional stupidity, but at least he IS representative of his constituency in that regard. Reyes isn’t alone – damned few of our sleaze of representatives could pass a similar test.

They’re representative, all right. No? Okay, try the test borrowed from the news story: Explain the relationship between the Iraqi cities of Karbala and Baghdad as they impact the coexistence of Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni populations. The question is crucial, the sine qua non, of tactics and “winning” in Iraq. Explain to yourself how you can offer any intelligent commentary on the question, knowing what you do.

I’ll put the history of the two factions here later, but answer me this: if you really give a damn about Iraq, how is it that you haven’t taken the time to learn even that much about the tactics and strategy that should surround any such undertaking? As I write this, I am finishing former CIA Director George Tenet’s book “At the Center of the Storm, My Years at the CIA.” The book is a classic example of what was once known as “CIA Writing,” the obfuscatory publication of deceptive material in turn known as “limited hangout.”

Parenthetically, for those not familiar with what I have written before here (and for more information, go to my website coup d’etat page), the CIA hires writers to publish novels, biographies, news articles, editorials, and the like designed to mislead or distract the public. Tom Clancy is a notable example. “Limited Hangout,” additionally, is the practice of admitting publicly a smaller and less damaging error or fault, in order to cover a bigger one. In his book, Tenet admits mistakes which made 9-11 possible for al Qa’ida. He also tells us that cuts in spending for the CIA lay the agency and the nation open for the destruction of the World Trade Center (that always amazes me; six hundred billions a year, and every time there’s a repetition of government typically FUBAR, there’s somebody federal or military talking as it they were “underfunded” poor boys!).

That’s the limited hangout, the little admission. The “bigger” one - the one being covered by all the distracting uproar from the media – my god, they’ve resurrected (pardon the expression), the Natalee Holloway Affair again! - is the historically devastating – to G.W. Bush and his presidency, among other things – admission of having known what was going to happen and done nothing, then having followed “the dog that didn’t bark” scenario with the lie its result “necessitated,” that of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq and an Iraq connection with the terrorist attack.

That’ll take some Hollywood “special effects” and state of the art propaganda in Brobdingnagian proportions, and, if you watch television, you’re seeing it. In order to order to raise the public’s awareness of Tenet’s book to a level as high as possible, famed “analysts” like Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck and their frothing-at-the-mouth ilk have lampooned it furiously, that on the ground – surprise! - that it impugns their demigod, our pusillanimous president. Several of television’s version of Dickens’ Uriah Heap have called for Tenet to return the medial of Freedom curiously awarded him by their hero.

Meanwhile, the former CIA Director tours the television circuit, stumping in order to market his defector work. Anyone who can’t see through all this high-school-level dramatization . . . well, as I said – nobody’s that stupid.

“Storm” is an interesting book, indeed – more interesting in what it doesn’t tell than what it does. like the major – and minor, for that matter – national news media, not once in his book does the former Director of the CIA mention KH-13 and KH-14, “Keyhole” – why do you imagine they have that sobriquet? - satellite surveillance of Iraq, relentless spy and other aircraft over-flights, or literally hundreds of special forces insertions into the country prior to invasion. Not once.

Come on, folks – this is like trying to tell the cops you didn’t notice that your kid was hiding a stolen elephant in his room. I don’t buy it, and neither will history, your kids and their kids. When the government gets away with this – and, thanks to all of us, they will - and your progeny pay the hideous price, they’ll know who it was who was really responsible. Like you don’t fool anyone when you complain about the oil companies and gas prices, yet continue sycophantly to drive everywhere and at ninety miles an hour, you won’t fool anybody about Congress and the Bush Administration, either.

History and your children will, indeed, to quote again Benjamin Franklin here, “piss on your graves.”