America Will Not Impose?
"No husband has ever been shot while doing the dishes." -- unattributed
# From the March/April 2005 issue of American Handgunner:
"... The winner and 2004 overall champ is Gunny Zins with 2,635-123X, now the fourth man in history to win six National Pistol Championships of the United States. Zins, a 35-year-old father of two, didn't discover his aptitude for marksmanship until he joined the Corps.
"Always smiling, he seems bemused by his fame in the gun world. A defining moment comes on the line Monday, when he patiently and encouragingly coaches a lady new to the pistol at the Small Arms Firing School. The next day she approaches him and sayd, 'Somone told me you're the national champion. Is that true?' He flashes the boyish smile and says, 'Yes, Ma'am.' 'Well, why didn't you tell me?' Zins shrugs and replies evenly, 'It's not about me shooting, Ma'am. It's about you shooting.'
"In the end, that says it all. About the kind of folks who come to Camp Perry, and about the man who is for now their king. About the welcoming atmosphere of the place, and why the NRA's national matches there are a touchstone for people who love the handgun, and the uniquely American friendly competition that surrounds it. To get started on the path, contact the NRA and ask for an information package. You'll be glad you did."
-- Massad Ayoob
# John de Rosier at The Albany (NY) Times Union - 2005 Inauguration (Guantanamo Broadcast) - tyranny suppression begins at home. Hehe.
# Lalo Alcaraz at Marc Brands Liberty - Inauguration - a reminder of the literal skeletons in Bushnev's closet. Not funny. [smith2004]
# Roderick T. Long at Liberty & Power: Group Blog - Free At Last - Mr. Long takes Bushnev at his word. Hehe. Copied in its entirety below. [smith2004]
All hail George W. Bush, the Liberator!
During hisdeificationinaugural address today, our Prince President announced: "America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling."
Well, golly. As an anarchist, I'm one of the unwilling. And finally, an American President has promised that the American government will stop imposing itself on me, as well as on all similarly unwilling persons!
In short, the American state has peacefully withered away, and a purely voluntary association now stands in its place. This has got to be the best second term ever.
# David Codrea in Guns Magazine - "Safe Schools" - from the February, 2005 issue, which I received yesterday but have not yet read. My take: American schools are not safe. All our children are helpless sheep, waiting to be slaughtered. If we cared about them, we'd hang by the neck until dead every legislator who voted to ban guns in schools, or at least ignore their disgusting "gun free school zones" laws. [publicola]
# Edgar J. Steele - White Rape - I'm not going to comment on this except to warn you that it expresses in no uncertain terms Mr. Steele's love of his race and hatred of Jews and interracial sex. If you don't like that, don't click.
# Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker via Infoshop News - The Coming Wars - The war for world-wide terrorism, in the name of freed'm, marches on. The wars of the next four years will be fought mostly in secret, directed by Rumsfeld. [rowjimmy]
"This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah--we've got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism."
Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things went wrong--whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s' vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld's dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt.
Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld's responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon's control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.
The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books--free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon doesn't feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the former high-level intelligence official said. "They don't even call it 'covert ops'--it's too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it's 'black reconnaissance.' They're not even going to tell the cincs"--the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)
...
The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls "action teams" in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. "Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?" the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. "We founded them and we financed them," he said. "The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon's commando capabilities, said, "We're going to be riding with the bad boys."
# Aljazeera.net - Arabs Wary of Bush's 'Freedom' Speech - and well they should be. Every time Mr. Bush says "freed'm", somebody's kid dies. [dirk]
An Arab professor of political science drew parallels between the words of Bush and Usama bin Ladin, saying the president had made the word freedom banal in the same way as the al-Qaida leader had the word jihad.
"The two men have both invoked their favourite concepts without ever putting them into practice," Assad Abu Khalil, who works in the United States, told Aljazeera.
He said Bush's notion of freedom as the solution is just as simplistic as the belief of Islamists that Islam is the solution in a region largely ruled by totalitarian regimes that reject religious extremism.
"By wanting to explain all through freedom, Bush ends up explaining nothing. We need to see how the idea of liberty can be translated into effective policies," he said.
"The export of democracy is in no way a military operation."
# William S. Lind at LewRockwell.com - Coming Unglued - more on how fourth generation tactics are winning against state-run armies, in Iraq and around the world. [clairefiles]
For the most part, all these evidences of a world coming unglued fall in the tragic category; we can only chronicle them, and weep. But one massive fiasco promises high comedy: that of the so-called "Revolution in Military Affairs," the vast Pentagon money tit through which an army of Congressmen, contractors and colonels is sucking the country dry. Based on hucksters' promises of video game war, where General Swami "sees all, knows all" through a vast array of hyper-priced "systems," the RMA is coming unglued in Iraq's gritty streets. To the grunt on the ground, it has proven as useless as a regiment of lancers.
