BRING ‘EM ON

 

What is taking place in this photgraph?

1. Kim Jong-Un exhorting his troops to destroy the “American bastards” as he called us after a missile launch on the Fourth of July?
2. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (who’s your daddy?) leading ISIS fighters in Muslim prayers before launching their latest Jihadist mission?
3. Osama bin Laden (you don’t think that fool Obama really killed him do you?) preparing all his remaining followers to meet virgins while making al-Qaeda Great Again?

No, you silly people, none of the above. That’s one of thousands of photographs of troops from the various services taken just prior to the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944.

Our government keeps warning the public of how these countries or groups present an existential danger to the United States and we must commit hundreds of thousands of our military personnel and hand over trillions of dollars to our Military-Industrial-Terrorist Complex in order to protect the 320 million people within our borders from a horrible end.

The thing is, none of these entities is capable of destroying us or destroying our way of life. Let’s face it. The United States of America is pretty damned impenetrable.

Oh, sure, North Korea might be able to launch a nuclear armed ICBM that reaches our West Coast but is that necessarily a bad thing? Let’s say it lands in Seattle. Whatever numbers of people it kills can it exceed the numbers posted by the multiple serial murderers spawned in that area? Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgeway the Green River Killer, John Allen Muhammed the D.C. Sniper, Robert Yates, Jr the former national Guard helicopter pilot convicted of 15 murders may just be the tip of the iceburg.

Let’s say it hits Portland.The worst fallout there would be the hair from the prolific amount of man buns which will eventually lead to clogging of the water supply. Will self-absorbed Portlandians even notice?

But if North Korea wants to invade, it faces substantial obstacles. Indeed, it might invade South Korea first hoping to provoke  U.S. retaliation. But geez, once those troops pass the 38th parallel heading to Seoul they will be distracted by a plethora of Samsung products that will make their lives easier and if they get hold of some Galaxy cell phones they will be rapt on sharing selfies with their loved ones back home and possibly trip over their own weapons that kill them as they text with their eyes down not paying attention.  If those phones are the S7 model they could die from their use, saving the efforts of ROK troops.

Too, they will have access to the first decent kimchi they have ever had. Hell, they’ll have access to real food for the first time.

If they want more direct access to North America they’ll need to come across the Siberian Peninsula, just as did the original Native Americans thousands of years ago. And we know what happened to THEM on our soil. Besides, do you think Putin will give them a right-of-way through Siberia? Hell, NO, he’s invested too much time and money into his sock puppet Drumpf to put his reign of terror at risk.

At least North Korea has an army, an air force, and a navy, the latter putting the SS Minnow to shame. ISIS? They’ve got pickup trucks. Maybe pickup trucks with machine guns, but even those are not nearly as well armed as the ones owned by the 3,400,768 active militias on our shores. However, let’s say ISIS was able to commandeer a fleet of seaworthy kayaks to voyage across the Atlantic. Chances are they’ll end up on our East Coast at a place like Myrtle Beach. With the plentiful family attractions there, those brave fighters will immediately regret having left the wives and kids at home when they could be sharing the experience and the windmills on the mini-golf courses will befuddle them. They very well could waste all their ammunition attempting to silence them.

Then, while camped, in the evenings they will wander into the bars and become dazzled by all the lovely young women competeing in wet burqa contests.

If they land much farther south at Miami Beach they will soon realize that they are overmatched in number by the Jews there. They will face the threat of being nagged to death by Jewish mothers. Or else, since Miami Beach has also been a favorite playground of the Mafia, these ISIS fools could find themselves swimming with the fishes.

Al Qaeda faces similar difficulties. Again no navy or air force and even if its operatives got their hands on some planes, there is no guarantee they could land safely to dispatch an invasion force without additional training. But let’s say they did manage to successfully breech our borders and began to move stealthily inland. Assunimg they came in on the East Coast means they will soon encounter Appalachia. Once in that territory getting to see first hand how that part of the country lives back in the hollers and in mostly abandoned coal camps, they will realize that this is no America worth destroying.

After all, these folks  have barely advanced beyond the 14th century. Al Qaeda will feel right at home.

 

Rest easy my friends.

EVERETT DIRKSEN WAS RIGHT

Senator Everett Dirksen (R. Ill.) served as Senate Minority Leader in the 1960’s. Distinguished for other reasons as well, his greatest legacy…or the one most cited…was his statement about government spending “A billion here, a billion there and soon you’re talking real money”. Or perhaps not. According to the nonpartisan center developed in his name designed to promote better understanding of Congress, he probably never uttered those words or anything remotely close to them.   http://www.dirksencenter.org/print_emd_billionhere.htm

The lack of a credible basis for that quote has failed to impede billions of pundits from using the quote to focus attention on any other presumed societal excess that is cumulative but has an effect equal to it occurring all at once even, .I suppose, in reference to tooth decay.

Did you hear about 9/11? You recall, the despicable act of al Qaeda terrorists flying four airliners into buildings or the ground, killing nearly three thousand people in the doing.

There is no argument that that was horrific on so many levels but yet it is a singular event in American history because of the depth and breadth of its immediate, sudden, and unfathomable occurrence that affected so many real victims in one fell swoop and millions more watching in despair and/or being frightened of a similar doom for themselves. And our government has exploited and perpetuated that fear through ill-conceived laws and two destructive utterly unnecessary wars.

I bet you also vividly recall the bombs set off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon last year perpetrated by two young Russian immigrants who had developed an obsession with Islamic terrorism. There have been other killings attributable to Muslims in the U.S. since that fateful day in 2001 that have drawn enormous media attention while at the same time only served to increase the ill treatment of American Muslims often to the point of violence and very often to craven politicians advocating the violation of the very Constitutional privileges they have vowed to uphold with their oaths of office and which they purport to adhere to in their emotional irrational rhetoric.

But, just as the two wars we instigated killed more Americans in total than the 9/11 crimes as well as many times the number of innocent civilians eradicated on that day, so have home-grown terrorists been more destructive in this country than any alleged Jihadists.

So goes the point of this Op-Ed piece arising from the weekend shootings at a Jewish Center and retirement community in Kansas by a KKKer that brought three needless deaths.

In fact, since 9/11 extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right wing ideologies, including white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists and anti-government militants, have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology. According to a count by the New America Foundation, right wing extremists have killed 34 people in the United States for political reasons since 9/11. (The total includes the latest shootings in Kansas, which are being classified as a hate crime).

http://us.cnn.com/2014/04/14/opinion/bergen-sterman-kansas-shooting/index.html?sr=sharebar_twitter

And while we verbally and editorially assail Syria for its use of chemical weapons in its Civil War and fear Iran developing nuclear weapons to be unleashed on Middle America, with some in Congress willing to vote for war, we ignore the folks who have seemed to possess a tendency to employ chemical and biological weapons to kill their fellow American citizens.

From the same op-ed:

Moreover, since 9/11 none of the more than 200 individuals indicted or convicted in the United States of some act of jihadist terrorism have acquired or used chemical or biological weapons or their precursor materials, while 13 individuals motivated by right wing extremist ideology, one individual motivated by left-wing extremist ideology, and two with idiosyncratic beliefs, used or acquired such weapons or their precursors.

In other words, Ladies and Gentlemen, our right wing extremists give us more reason to fear than do Jihadists or left-wing fanatics. And the toll the right wing nuts have taken could have increased several fold if the idiots supporting Cliven Bundy’s illegal grazing had had their way this past weekend, having sent a veritable written and embossed invitation to federal law enforcement officials to attempt to enforce the law and remove Bundy’s cattle so they could respond in a deadly manner.

Not only was that defiance a matter of potential terrorism it would also have been an act of treason.

Not that all far right wingers are so depraved but these folks had a huge rooting section cheering them on across the country. Imagine if a few Muslims had committed a violent act and the fallout against their millions of members here would have been  unjustifiable accusations of complicity if not outright revenge attacks for their “conspiracy”.

While the op-ed particularly addresses the media failure to cover most of these right wing acts with the same emphasis they do Islamic terrorism the American public eats it up largely due to their own preconceived notions, reinforced in various ways, that they need to fear the Muslims, leading to illogical profiling.

Yes these right wing acts of violence add up. A body here, a body there and soon you’re talking real terrorism.

It turns out that the right wingers especially who want to condemn all Muslims and find nothing wrong with profiling them would have better results from profiling potential terrorists if only they would look in the mirror.