So once again we treat as normal the pride with which pundits, journalists, and politicians scream loudly about how terrified they are; about how given the monsters we face, the gigantic super-villains against whom our 300 million people and world's most powerful military are nought, we are on the verge of destruction if we even allow one act of self-respect and appreciation of Constitutional principles to leak through.

'But we're scared of them!' 'They wanna kill us!'

And if I thought it was genuine fear being so continually announced, I might extend a tiny bit of understanding for the fear mongers.

But I don't.

I think this is an ongoing battle between those whose greatest contempt is not for 'the terrorists', but for the notion that civilized people ought to hold themselves to higher standards of behavior for their own sakes and their own consciences.

There was a time where men whose country (even as a fledgling) truly faced destruction, rather than unpredictable attack, wanted to hold themselves to the standards of fair trials, due process, warrants and all the other sane judicial norms ought of their own respect for themselves and for the society they wished to create.

But the fear mongers try to reverse that.

Fair trials, due process, warrants, etc., in their minds, are something that weak-willed people do out of a misplaced sympathy for the accused, and that the norm should be that your opinion of the accused should determine the level of decency to which you hold yourself and your society, such that when you believe the accused to be beasts, then your own beastly behavior is permitted.

To this outlook would appear utterly alien the notion that a prime reason you don't want your society to engage in torture is that you don't want to be a society of torturers, and that this position is in fact one representing courage and strength. No, no, that's not possible, clearly only the weak-willed who are insufficiently afraid of villains would dare hold themselves above such behavior.

Again, I don't think it's sheer cowardice which drives such hatred for the notion of a society which respects itself and holds itself to be the sorts of people it wishes to be.

Trust me, it's okay. I've been here for a while, back when liberal hawks were telling me how necessary it was for Reagan to hire terrorists to blow up Nicaragua's government, death squad tyrants in El Salvador and Honduras (Hi John Negroponte!) and genocidalists in Guatemala, and most people thought it all sounded pretty silly and cruel, and most people were right.

Regardless, it just seemed that there was a whole lot of bigoted bashing today. Letting out a little steam?

-- heru-ur

Just mocking faux tough guy 'farragut' who, unless a spoof, appeared to think that he'd issue cowboy-like warnings of militia or lynching uprisings against anyone who dare'd prosecute Maximum Leader Bush Jr., so it seemed pretty much appropriate to mock him in the cowboy / redneck style he thought to either joke or inspire fear with.

If I bash Southerners, it's the ones what deserve it. As a native and still Southerner, it has caused me no end of grief in my lifetime that the most pernicious of destructive political forces we have faced in the lifetime of our country have been my conservative white neighbors, and not so much them, as the manipulative elites posing to lead conservative white Southerners.

There's almost no effort to harm our nation and undermine the unity of the country and the strengths embodied in the liberal Enlightenment achievement that was and is the Constitution (imperfect, yet so valued) which doesn't count conservative white Southern elites among its leaders.

On the other hand, those same vicious elites are the first to step up to beg Uncle Sam for those sweet, sweet federal dollars flowing to the South from other, more developed, more prosperous states.

And who the hell were those elites to declare which nation our enslaved citizens were to be a part of? If the slavers wanted to leave and have their own nation instead of war, maybe we should have granted that small and hopeless group a section of the Florida keys, so that they could die off quietly. They had no right to attempt to steal millions of lives, and they were immoral in the highest to convince so many of the ordinary whites into their false and bloody cause, which thank God was "Lost".

So as someone who has had to deal with the arrogant boasting of right wing Southern political shysters and worthless movements my entire life, from the small minded oafs still bickering about evolution to the fake 'militia' movements of the 1990's trying to give white supremacists an alternative way of opposing Clinton to the GOP Senators who gladly kill off the U.S. auto industry so that their states alone can subsidize foreign companies, I will be among the first to mock their fake and hollow boasts of war and rebellion.