Essential Liberty In A Post-911 World

 

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
        - Benjamin Franklin 
           Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

 

You know how you get people to stop running red lights?

You know how to make drivers slow down and obey the posted speed limit in a school zone?

It’s easy really.

You use a simple application of technology.

You take a speed sensor – it’s doesn’t really matter what kind – and you hook it to a camera along with some control circuits and some off-the-shelf software, you can make it as simple or as complicated as you like. You mount the contraption in a tamper-proof box in the area where you want to enforce traffic laws. Couple the machine to a system for identifying vehicles and drivers and a method for imposing financial consequences on law breakers.

You can put up a sign advising motorists of what you’re up to, or not.

Turn it on and it wait.

Pretty soon the tickets start piling up.

Pretty soon after that, people start obeying the law.

Automatic photo enforcement, typically referred to as a Traffic Enforcement Camera (or other unflattering names, usually involving four-letter words), it’s simple, impartial, works rain or shine 24-hours a day without time off for Union negotiated breaks, and it’s cheap compared to a manned speed trap.  It’s also extremely effective – it’s damned hard to claim innocence or police malfeasance when the judge is holding a picture of you blazing through a red light in an elementary school zone twenty miles per hour over the posted speed limit while texting and smoking a doobie. 

The technology, in various forms, has been around for more than a hundred years now.

And it works.

You install traffic enforcement cameras in a school zone, put up signs telling people you’re doing it, and start mailing out fines, and people will slow down.

You install one of these systems at an intersection and people will stop running red lights.

You install traffic enforcement cameras and impose immediate consequences for traffic violations and people will start obeying the law.

The simple truth of the matter is that traffic enforcement camera systems save lives, provably so.  This technology and similar automated surveillance and enforcement systems demonstrably make the world a safer place – at least in the certain limited aspects over which they are applied.

So how come so many people are opposed to the technology? Adamantly opposed. Vehemently opposed.

How come so many people, especially Americans, are almost offended by the very nature of such technology, the mere idea of its existence and use by government? After all, isn’t it the government’s job to enforce the law? Isn’t that exactly what so many people are demanding? Government enforcement of the law? When it comes to illegal immigration, or illegal drugs, or illegal guns, or Wall Street? So why would we be so opposed to automated enforcement of traffic laws?

In places where drivers habitually run red lights (in certain areas, running red lights is almost a cultural thing. I used to live in Maryland, trust me on this, always wait ten seconds after the light turns green before proceeding into the intersection or you’re going to get creamed), in places where motorists routinely ignore pedestrian crossings and school zone speed limits, the population will complain bitterly about the scofflaws and the resulting accidents and fatalities and they will loudly demand “that something must be done!” 

Install traffic cams, and those self-same folks will scream even louder about freedom and rights and totalitarianism.

Traffic enforcement cameras work, but in nearly every place they’ve been installed (at least in the United States), they’ve almost inevitably been removed within a short time due to public outcry.

Despite the fact that they work and they make the world a safer place.

Think about it, if we really wanted our traffic laws impartially and thoroughly enforced we’d implement this technology everywhere, not just on street corners and in crosswalks, but on highways and residential streets, in parking lots and at 4-way stops. Coupled to advanced software and backed up with real, immediate, and inevitable consequences, the rate of traffic violations would plummet – especially if you combined that automated surveillance technology with ancillary systems riding on top of the video technology, for example systems that performed facial recognition of those with suspended licenses, or looked for motorists who were texting and driving or who appeared to be intoxicated or who were in the throes of road rage or who were engaged in obviously illegal activities, or that smug self-righteous ass in the electric car doing 50MPH in the fast lane and who refuses to move over despite the clearly posted regulations requiring him to do so. 

You could fuse that technology with other systems, heat sensors for example, that when combined with video would tell you with a pretty good degree of certainty that the back of that innocent looking van was filled with illegal immigrants and not plumbing supplies.

Now, let’s add in drones …

What?

What’s the matter? Don’t you want the road to be a safer place? Weren’t you just demanding that the violators, the people who routinely risk your lives and the lives of your children, be taken off the road and prosecuted for their recklessness? Don’t you want the police to beat that hell out of that tofu eating hippy blocking the fast lane? (I know I sure as hell do, but I digress).

You do?

Oh, but not this way?

But why not?

All of this technology is available right now. Most of it is cheap – cheaper than hiring the equivalent amount of manpower anyway, and far cheaper than the billions we pay each year in insurance, ineffective human traffic enforcement, accidents and fatalities.

Used correctly, the technology is extremely effective.

Used correctly, it’s impartial. 

Make it ubiquitous, and it will save lives.

So why don’t we?

Why don’t we want automated traffic enforcement systems?

Why would we, as a society, be willing to put up with the risks of drunken and reckless drivers, road ragers, speeders, highway shooters, those who routinely ignore red lights, and those who risk our kids’ very lives in front of our schools and playgrounds every single day?

Why would we complain bitterly about these criminals and demand that the authorities do something, but then reject the only really practical solution to preventing their actions?

Why?

 

The answer to that question, why? is the same exact reason that the vast majority of Americans are outraged over recent disclosures regarding National Security Agency monitoring programs.

 

At first glance, traffic enforcement cameras seem like a good idea.

And they are, so long as you ignore one fatal flaw – human nature (which, ironically, is the same fundamental flaw in numerous systems, starting with most forms of government. But again I digress).

The simple truth of the matter is this: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

That bitter truism, attributed in the above form to the 19th Century historian and moralist, Lord Acton, is the central core concept that the entire United States Constitution was written around. Power corrupts, therefore power must be limited and controlled.

That caution, the corrupting influence of absolute power, is acknowledged in nearly every aspect of our society, from presidential term limits to antitrust regulations.

It’s why we hate the idea of traffic enforcement cameras, it’s not just because we want a sporting chance at breaking the law (and we do, don’t we?) but because the potential for abuse is too high, because the corruption of absolute power is absolutely inevitable given human nature – and most especially the nature of those humans in positions of power and authority.

Because unintended consequences are inevitable.

In almost every case, installation of traffic enforcement cameras leads almost immediately to the use of the collected information in ways far outside the scope of traffic enforcement. 

In one well known case, a picture of a red-light violator was sent along with the electronically generated ticket to the offender’s house, where his wife opened the envelope and found a picture of her husband behind the wheel of their family car – with his mistress’ head in his lap (You can sort of understand why he missed the light change). That picture ended up in the hands of the wife’s divorce lawyer and he got taken to the cleaners in a major way. Now, sure, the guy was a philandering jerk who put other drivers at risk with his actions, but it’s not the government’s job to inform on cheating spouses. And the camera was installed for the express purpose of traffic control, not vice.  And in the end it was pretty clear that the government had violated this guy’s rights, not by taking a picture of him in flagrante fellatio, but by not protecting his personal information and (inadvertently) informing his (ex)wife. He sued for violation of privacy and won.

Now it can be argued that the above case was unintentional and unlikely (and hilarious), but other violations of constitutional rights aren’t. With automated facial and/or license plate recognition it becomes a simple matter to track vehicles without a warrant or probable cause simply as part of the overall data gathering process. 

Worse, in nearly every installation, due to the technology involved, the systems are maintained by contractors – who tend to get paid by the number of violators their cameras catch.  Inevitably (there’s that word again), those contractors tended to game the system. And in too many cases, the local governments were okay with that, up to a point, because they shared in the profits.  And it doesn’t take long for the whole thing to spiral out of control and wander far from the original objective.

And the stored data can be used in all sorts of ways – imagine if the collected database was sold to a marketing firm.  Using advanced visual data mining tools, the information can be crunched any number of ways. And a contractor might have any number of commercial interests and uses for such data. A savvy marketing expert could determine, for example, that you might shortly be in need of a good discount divorce lawyer, or the number of the local florist … or a shot of penicillin.

And then there’s blackmail.

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely: this isn’t hyperbole, it’s a demonstrable truth. It’s human nature.

But it’s also human nature to disregard the lessons of history, to be influenced by groupthink, to act rashly out of panic and fear and anger – and to blind ourselves to the inevitable consequences of those ill conceived decisions.

Inevitably, governments who install traffic cameras without some very, very draconian regulations limiting their use, end up taking them back down in fairly short order – typically at a financial loss.  However, despite the repeated examples of poor implementation and endless lawsuits, local governments are eager to jump on the traffic camera bandwagon and the companies that make such systems are a going concern.

Because that too, is human nature.

And so, here we are, a decade and more from those terrible days in September, 2001.

We, as a people, as a government (because in America, we are the government), acted in panic a decade ago.

We ignored the very explicit lessons of our own history and the very explicit admonishments of our own Founders. 

In our blind fear and mindless panic and red-eyed rage, we passed laws that unleashed forces and removed certain constitutional safeguards without regard for the inevitable consequences.

The NSA monitoring and data mining programs that have recently come to light are the inevitable result of the Patriot Act and more specifically the Protect America Act of 2007 (and it’s repeated reauthorization since) and a dozen other lesser known laws that we’ve allowed our elected representatives to pass over the last decade. Those laws removed very specific constitutional protections and levied secret laws upon American citizens and fundamentally changed the very fabric of our society. 

And we let it happen.

If you, as an American, are in any way whatsoever surprised by the revelation of these NSA programs, well, you, my friend, are part of the problem and you have absolutely nobody to blame but yourself.

Save your outrage, you’re about a decade too late.

There’s no scandal here. 

The programs are perfectly legal under our new laws (whether or not they’re constitutional is another matter).

Congress was fully aware of them – oh yes indeed they are, and don’t you let them try to tell you otherwise, they provided the authorization and the funding and have done so every year since the programs were started.  NSA can’t do a damned thing without money, and the money comes from Congress. And the members of Congress who scream the loudest about personal liberty and totalitarianism are the programs’ most ardent supporters – don’t believe me? Look at who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, every single one of those people were fully aware of these programs, by definition.

The president was also fully aware, since it’s his office who oversees the agencies responsible. 

You can blame the Left, and you can blame the Right, but both are equally responsible.

The programs began under a Republican administration and continued under the current Democratic one. It was approved by a Republican-majority Congress and renewed under a majority of Democrats. 

You can blame Bush and you can blame Obama, but the simple truth of the matter is that you and I let this happen.

We, as a nation, demanded that 9-11 never happen again.

We demanded that our intelligence apparatus never, ever, again allow terrorists to slip past our safeguards unnoticed.

We demanded safety and we were willing, as a nation, to trade certain freedoms to get it.

When I was in uniform working in this same field, for this same agency*, we used to say that we had to get it right every single time – the enemy only had to get lucky once.

But, of course, we knew that we could not, in fact, get it right every time. It was impossible. 

And the enemy did, in fact, only have to get lucky once.  And sooner or later he would, because the odds guaranteed it.

And it was a risk we understood because in order to be right every time, in order to ensure that the enemy didn’t get lucky, not even once, well then we’d have to live in a radically altered world – one that would make the totalitarianism of The Hunger Games look downright democratic in comparison. And we weren’t willing to go down that road. Every single person that ever had anything to do with NSA (NSA, not The NSA, people who actually work there call it NSA) had it pounded into their heads over and over and over and over – we’d don’t spy on Americans. Period. You do, you go to jail. Of all the rules we learned, that one was sacred, inviolate.  If, and it was a rare if indeed, you were involved in anything that might lead to collection of information on fellow Americans, there were very, very strict FISA rules administered by stern faced unsmiling officers and the letter of the law was adhered to in detail. Each and every one of us received mandatory training in this area on a regular basis, it was the one rule we could never violate.

NSA had been abused once, under Nixon, and it damned for sure wasn’t going to happen again, not on our watch.

In the horrific aftermath of 9-11, we, as a nation, we Americans demanded that those who protect this country be right every single time, no matter the cost.

We demanded that the enemy, whoever he was, could not get lucky, even once. Period.

No matter what the consequences.

And so we changed the rules.

No leader, no politician, could stand before that unreasonable and impossible demand and tell the truth.

No leader, be it George W. Bush or Barack H. Obama could look the nation in eye, even today, and say, “What you demand can’t be done, not without radical changes to our way of life.”

Just as no local politician can stand in front of his constituents and say, “Look folks, unless you’re willing to put up with some unintended consequences, we just can’t completely stop people from running red lights…”

So they go out and buy the traffic cameras, just as the nation went out and bought themselves the equivalent surveillance system on vastly larger scale. We, as a nation, were willing to trade our essential liberty for the illusion of security – and so we allowed our government to write and pass and continually reauthorize the provisions of the Protect America Act.

We, as a nation, were willing to sacrifice our honor for that security, we were willing to kidnap people and torture them and put them into indefinite detention without trial or legal recourse in direct repudiation of everything this country supposedly stands for, we were willing to put up with warrantless wiretaps and warrantless searches of our homes and property and library records, we were willing to put up with being strip searched in our airports, we were willing to put up with secret laws and new limits on our rights, we were willing to proclaim a new age of McCarthyism and declare our neighbors the enemies of freedom, and we were more than willing to sacrifice our children and our treasury to a decade and more of war for that illusion of security. 

A certain segment of our population demanded, and still loudly demands, racial and political profiling (ironically, those are the self same folks who were so, so very outraged at being profiled themselves by the IRS, but again, I’m digressing).

Now, now, the nation is suddenly up in arms over NSA’s domestic intelligence gathering efforts? Now?

Honestly, where the hell have you people been?

None of this should be a surprise. These programs began a long, long time ago, and right after 9-11 they were ramped up to full throttle and the safeties were removed and they’ve been running that way ever since. 

And there were plenty of those who raised the alarm, including yours truly right here on this blog, plenty who protested – on both sides of the political aisle. They were ignored. They were dismissed as alarmists, denounced as cowards and traitors and enemies of America (and in fact if you go back and read the comments under certain posts here on Stonekettle Station, you’ll find accusations of exactly that. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been called a traitor by supposed patriots).

And it’s funny, because those protesting the loudest now, are the very ones who were most enthusiastic about those measures when they first appeared. And don’t think they don’t know it either, go on, look and see which members of Congress are screaming in outrage – and which ones are keeping their heads down and hoping nobody notices them.  Ask yourself why the usual cast of characters isn’t loudly demanding impeachment proceedings over this, their silence is profound and telling. Then go take a gander at their voting records and see which ones voted for the Patriot Act and reauthorization of the Protect America Act and its changes to the FISA provisions. Go on, I’ll wait.  This is the same batch of jackasses who angrily demand “smaller government” and gleefully embrace Sequestration and the furlough of federal employees, and then loudly wonder why the agencies like NSA have to hire contractors to carry out their massively expanded missions – missions expanded by these self-same Congressmen and Senators.

I’ve said it before and likely I’ll have to say it again, if you give the Texas-born Jesus-fearin’ Flag-wavin’ Conservative the power, you’ve automatically given it to his successor, the Kenyan-Born Muslim-lovin’ America-hatin’ Liberal.  Our government was designed with limits on power, if you don’t want the current guy to have that power, you shouldn’t have given it to his predecessor. The president didn’t create this monster, he inherited it. And the last president didn’t create it either, he was given it as a gift by a terrified nation pissing itself in fear.

Quite frankly I’m less worried about the current guy abusing this power than I was about the previous one, but I don’t want either of them to have it – not without some very, very strict controls. Ditto drones. Ditto everything else right on down to traffic cameras.

The simple truth of the matter is that in cases like this, it almost doesn’t matter which party is in the White House. It’s relatively easy to hold the President accountable, and there are multiple mechanisms for doing exactly that. 

The problem is Congress. 

If you want NSA to be accountable, along with all the rest of the three-letter agencies, then Congress must be accountable.  And if you want Congress to be accountable, then you have to hold them to account instead of just reelecting the same frightened, ignorant, small-minded, self-serving extremist jackasses over and over.

The power is enormous. The potential for abuse is fantastically high. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. That power must be limited. But in order to limit that power, we as a people must be willing to accept certain risks, we must be willing to acknowledge that the enemy will get lucky once again, the odds guarantee it.

We must be willing to give up certain securities in order to maintain our essential liberty.

And we must face the danger with our eyes wide open and our heads held high, with courage instead of fear.

This is exactly what people like me have been saying for the last twenty years.

Welcome to the party, glad you could make it.

 

The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad.
        - James Madison

 

 

 

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Disclosure:  I used to work for NSA. As a uniformed member of the US Naval Security Group and its successor organization, I spent more than twenty years in and around the agency.  Unlike Edward Snowden, I take my oath very, very seriously indeed and therefore I will not discuss my duties in any fashion whatsoever. Suffice it to say that I am intimately familiar with the National Security Agency and while I may be biased, I have very good reason to believe in the organization’s professionalism and regard for the rights and liberties of all Americans.  I don’t expect you to take my word for it, but I will say this: unless you’ve been inside, everything you think you know is wrong. 

Here’s what I know for certain, based on my personal and professional experience: The folks at NSA are dedicated professionals who hold their oath to the nation above all else.  No one is more aware of the power they wield and the potential for abuse than they are – because they, my friends, are Americans too. They were set a task and authorized to carry it out and they will do so with the utmost dedication – until they’re told to turn it off.  If you, as a nation, want it turned off, really want it turned off, then you need to hold your elected representatives to account.  I’ll offer this caution however: think very carefully before you command the Djinni, think it all the way through.

Regarding Edward Snowden: He was a contractor IT dweeb, not an operator, not an analyst, and certainly not a policy maker and you should regard anything he says from that perspective.  The programs he revealed are legal under our current laws and as I said in the article they should have been a surprise to nobody.  Snowden claims that he can’t get a fair trial in the United States, boo hoo, he’s got nobody to blame but himself. He betrayed his oath, he broke the terms of his contract, he purposely violated the provisions of his security clearance.  If he had concerns, he could have availed himself of any of a dozen avenues of address, including contacting members of Congress directly, instead he chose to make himself into a martyr and so now he can suffer the consequences.  

Changes to Email

Because my email has increased to unmanageable levels over the last year or so, I’ve started missing things that I really can’t afford to miss – e.g. one such recent event led to Stonekettle Station being offline for the better part of a week.

As such, I’ve implemented my own email domain and established a number of accounts under it to handle various personal and professional communications.

My previous general purpose email address, Stonekettlestation@gmail.com, will be phased out over the next few weeks. I will continue to respond to your missives at this address until the end of this month, or until my attention wanders, whichever comes first and, eventually, I will deactivate this account. Basically what I’m saying here is that if you’ve got something you really want me to see, don’t use this email address anymore.

From now on, if you wish to contact me regarding Stonekettle Station in order to render awe, advice, suggestions, criticism, general asshatery, or to inform me that you’re honoring my awesome self by naming your newborn child in my honor (the highest percentage of correspondence I receive, by orders of magnitude. True story), or to pledge undying minionship to me, your future Ultimate Emperor of the Universe, you may reach me at: jim@stonekettle.com.

The address on the sidebar has been updated appropriately.

Requiem For A Life Less Ordinary

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you ‘grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
    - Requiem, Robert Louis Stevenson

He was a tough wiry man.

He was on the short side of medium.

He was thin his whole life, but he was one hell of a lot stronger than he looked, people constantly underestimated him that way, usually to their detriment – and he was never in a fight that he lost.

The songs talk about an “impish grin” and “sparkling eyes,” with him the grin and the sparkle were the literal truth. Those were the very first things you noticed.

Sandy-haired and handsome in the Irish tradition, he always had a good story to tell and he could make you laugh with the way he mangled words but still managed to make you wonder if it was everybody else that had the pronunciation wrong.

Back then, in 1960,  you could always hear him coming, the unmistakable sound of jaunty heels clicking on polished tile preceded him down the hallways of General Motors.  His steps sounded like he was wearing tap shoes and not just because he was the best dancer you ever saw, but also because he wore metal heel clips on his shoes – otherwise he tended to wear them out faster than they could be replaced, the result of a slight tendency to drag his heels and the fact that he was always in constant motion.

That was his defining characteristic, constant motion.

He was always moving, even when he was asleep his legs churned restlessly as if he was climbing mountains in his dreams.

He’d always been in motion, since the very fist day he’d entered the world back in 1934. He couldn’t sit still.  He was always going going going.

As a Catholic kid growing up in Grand Rapids in the 1930’s and 40’s it was stickball and pick-up baseball and football and kick-the-can and any other improvised sport he could manage. He rode bicycles everywhere and raced pell-mell though the neighborhoods of the Polish and Irish and Dutch immigrants who made up that part of town. Word is that he was hell on wheels in his teens, there’s a story involving a bench-seat T-Bird and a police chase that ended badly … but that’s a tale probably best left for another time. He watched his older brother go off to World War II, a medic on the beaches of Normandy, but he was too young to follow.  He was old enough when Korea came though, and he ended up a  Radioman in USS Shakori, ATF-162, a US Navy Powhatan Class ocean-going fleet tug and rescue ship. The vessel was a relic of the previous conflict and she sure wasn’t pretty and she sure wasn’t fast – her top speed was only 16 knots, but she could tow a battleship at 12.  Most Navy ships are women, Shakori was a bulldog. That tough little ship was the perfect home for a tough little Irishman and she took him around the world, twice.  He went to Korea and later served in Cuba during Castro’s first failed revolution – indeed there’s a picture of him and Fidel Castro standing together on the Guantanamo Naval Base back  when the US was giving the revolutionary refuge  against the corrupt Batista government.  Oh, could he tell you stories of pre-revolution Cuba, most involving Hatuey (The One Eyed Indian), a local Cuban beer,  and he never ever forgot a single detail of any of the myriad adventures he had during those days nor the men he served with and the tales of those times have entertained many generations since.

After the war, he ended up back home in Grand Rapids, an expeditor in the Materials Control Division of GM’s Fisher-Body Plant #2.

That’s where he met her. 

She was a clerk-typist in Materials Control.  She’d started out there back in 1954, then moved up to receptionist for the company’s doctor, and then back to Materials when the plant reorganized and went from making airplanes to car parts.  She’d seen him around of course, all the girls had, he was a regular cock-of-the-walk and impossible to miss. Her boss, a tough old coot named Chet Barger, who had once been a Texas Ranger and had rode with Teddy Roosevelt’s Roughriders, used to say that “the only thing that boy needs is a good spanking.”

Likely Ol’ Chet knew what he was talking about.

She ran into him one day, literally.

Or he ran into her, depending who’s telling the story.

Maybe she didn’t hear his heels clicking on the tile … or maybe she did.  What’s for certain is that despite the advanced warning they slammed into each other coming ‘round a corner.  After that, he started finding reasons to stop by her desk.  It’s possible that she was flirting with him. It’s also possible that he noticed.

She wanted to learn how to play golf.

She asked around, it seemed the best golfer anybody had ever heard of was already dropping by her desk on a regular basis.

So she asked him to teach her the game.

He agreed – but only if she’d have dinner with him.

You can see where this is going, of course, and it wasn’t long before they were married. 

They said it wouldn’t last.  He was an Irish Catholic, she was a Dutch Protestant – worse, a Presbyterian – and his family disapproved, to put it mildly, back when such things mattered. He was wild and impulsive, she was deliberate.  He couldn’t balance a checkbook on a good day, she always knew where every single penny went.  They struck sparks off each other and would for the rest of their lives but it turned out they had more in common than they didn’t and they proved everybody wrong. 

And they spent a lot of time golfing.

Their first child, a son, followed the marriage after the requisite amount of time, and another son two years after that.   They were living in a trailer in Grandville, but with two boys, they wanted something bigger, so they moved to Jension and bought a small house with a couple acres of land – large enough for a big garden (In all the years that followed and all the places they lived, and all the things they went through, they always had that garden).   Alongside the corn and cucumbers, they raised Irish Setters. And there were many cats and chickens and a duck or two, rabbits and a goose named Slippery, and various other critters now lost in the mists of aging and unreliable memory.  I could tell you stories from that time, about how he moved an entire garage a hundred yards with just the help of a few friends, or how he tilled that huge garden with an antique walk-behind tractor, a bucking beast of a machine that would have knocked a lesser man senseless (and did, but again, that’s a story for another time). He hunted and fished and gigged for frogs in a tiny fold-up boat made by his father-in-law.  He owned not one, but two Corvairs, and parked them next to the station wagon. 

He still worked for General Motors and one day while conducting an inventory, a job he wasn’t supposed to be doing but there was a strike and management had him doing tasks that normally would have gone to a union man, a defective lift cable snapped and he plunged sixty feet in an elevator cage to the warehouse floor below.  The fall shattered a vertebrate in his neck, he could have been paralyzed and for a while it looked like he might be, but a year of surgery and neck braces later and he was mostly back to his old self.  Mostly.

But that’s where it started, the collection of injuries that would haunt him for the rest of his life. 

The doctors fixed the shattered bones in his neck, but he would always have problems with the injury. He had numbness in his hands and trouble turning his head and if she hugged him too hard with her hands behind his neck, the pressure on his spinal cord would drop him to the floor like a puppet with cut strings –  a side effect the doctors forgot to mention and something that he learned about the hard way.  These were the 60’s, nowadays he would have gotten a decent settlement and maybe long term care, back then what he got was let go.

Rather than complain, he went on to other things and other jobs.  There wasn’t much he couldn’t do, they might have invented the term “Jack-of-all-trades” just for him, and he was master of quite a few.  He could do plumbing and electrical work. He could do any kind of carpentry. He could build fences and dig ditches. He had the best wood shop in the neighborhood.  He could wear a suit and tie as easily as a Caterpillar Cap and a pair of Levis – though he always called them “dungarees,” a legacy of his time in the Navy. They bought a new house, had one built, in one of the new suburbs of Jension. The house was bigger, the lot was smaller, but still they had that garden.  They camped and fished and drove cross-country on family vacations. By now it was the 70’s and instead of a crew-cut he had a beard and long hair and there was a lot of plaid – the pictures from that time are hysterically funny to his grand children.

It wasn’t all roses (though he grew those too, and they were gorgeous).  He drank. Like many a Navy Man of that time, he’d always been a hard drinker, Pabst Blue Ribbon usually, chased with Pall-Malls.  And after a while it started getting the better of him.  There were some rough times.  They’d started their own business by then and after a couple years of backbreaking labor, it went under – but not before he was nearly electrocuted (the details of which are again, a story for another time).  The short version is that an electrical shock burned a dime sized hole in his wrist, the high amperage cauterized the wound and you could look into the bloodless hole and see the bone. The electricity  traveled straight through his heart, it would have killed another man but not him, he walked out of the hospital.  His drinking got worse after they lost the business.  Eventually she gave him an ultimatum.  And so he joined Alcoholic’s Anonymous and found sobriety.  Like I said, those were rough times, they nearly lost the house and a number of other unpleasant things, the OPEC Oil Embargo was in full swing along with the energy crises and the floundering economy. But through it all they had each other and they persevered. He worked a variety of jobs, from janitor to hospital security guard – and, man, the stories he could tell about those places would have you in stitches no matter how many times you’ve heard them – nothing was beneath him, he’d do whatever it took.  He even went back to school and got his GED and some college.

He calmed down after he stopped drinking.  He’d always been there for everyone else and now he went at it with a will.  He helped others stop drinking, he didn’t preach or lecture, but when they were ready, he’d help them find their way to sobriety.  He became a deacon in the Presbyterian church (his family had long ago made peace with his departure from Catholicism).  He’d always been a scout leader, even before his own boys were old enough to be Cubs, back when being a Boy Scout actually meant you were something other than a bigot.  In 1976, he took a troop of Scouts to the BSA high adventure ranch in New Mexico, Philmont, and they hiked nearly 200 miles in two weeks. He had some trouble keeping up – even then a pack of Pall Malls a day was starting to have an effect, especially in the high altitude mountains of New Mexico, a harbinger of things to come. On the morning of the United States’ Bicentennial, he quietly woke his Scouts up before dawn and with practiced ease and huge shit-eating grins they broke camp in complete silence so as not to wake the other troops, then they climbed The Tooth of Time in the dark using only the light of the moon to arrive at the summit just as the sun rose over the Rocky Mountains.  Every Scout in Philmont that year had wanted to be first up the mountain on that particular morning, after all there could only be one troop, ever, first to summit on the morning of America’s 200th Birthday, and there had been some less than good natured boasting in base camp the night before among the Trek Leaders.  He didn’t boast, he just did what he always did – he outfoxed them.   His Scouts ended up on the cover of the Bicentennial Edition of Boy’s Life (if you happen across that issue, I’m the blond-headed 14 year old Scout in the front of the hiking line).  He got in some trouble for that, and more when he commandeered the troop bus (an aging repurposed school bus painted like a giant Bumble Bee) and took his Scouts on an unauthorized trip to a local Mexican restaurant as a reward for all their hard work and where those Michigan boys learned about real genuine New Mexican ‘green’ chili for the first time (Jesus H. Christ!).  On the four day trip back to Michigan, whenever the other Scout Leaders from the other Michigan Troops would attempt to chastise him, he’d lead the bus in a rousing rendition of 10,000 Bottles of Beer on the Wall and drown them out. 

He got a job as the resident manager of a YMCA summer camp out in Middleville. The place was a wreck, but he cleaned it up and turned it around and thousands of kids owe some very happy memories to him.  He was in his element, wrangling horses and giving hay rides behind the tractor,  zoo keeper to an ever changing menagerie of animals from goats to raccoons to cows (I’d tell you about the time one of his boys, and I’m not saying which one, locked a very angry goat in the chicken coop as a Father’s Day surprise, but that’s really a story that needs to be told in person and out loud with lots of enthusiastic hand waving. The short version is that he was indeed surprised that Father’s Dad. Very. Ditto the story about the dead cow, and how Old Man Mesick grabbed its tail and cranked it back to life after … well, again, that’s a story for another time). He had a garden there too, a big one and more and more he thought that’s what he wanted to do full time – garden, farm, grow things.  The job lasted a decade or so, long enough for his kids to leave home and go off into the world on their own, one to the Navy, one to the Air Force. 

Eventually he left the YMCA and they moved to a small farm outside of Middleville.  He went back to school, this time to the Michigan State Cooperative Extension and became a certified Advanced Master Gardener.  They owned a couple of acres and they bought more, and they converted almost all of it into a specialty garden and artisan farm.  They opened a farm stand and started selling fresh produce in their front yard.  It wasn’t long before they were known across half the state and people came from all over for a chance at their stock in trade.  He helped others become Master Gardeners themselves.  He worked at the local Co-Op and Grain Elevator, testing soils and doling out advice to local farmers.  One day the town fathers approached him, they were thinking of starting up a farm-market, something they hoped would revitalize their slowly fading village.  And so it did.  And so they became founding members of the Middleville Farmer’s Market, and there you could find them, rain or shine, every Friday, the center of life in a small Midwestern farming town.  Everybody knew him, he had a thousand friends and when he walked into the local diner a dozen people smiled and waved and called out his name. 

He got older though, and his health went to hell.  He finally quit smoking, but by then it was too late.  The old neck injury calcified and his hands got gradually weaker and more numb and one day he could no longer change fittings on the tractor with a normal wrench, he just didn’t have the strength anymore. So, being him, he got out the biggest damned pipe wrench you’ve ever seen and fitted it onto the tractor’s PTO, figuring all he needed was a little more leverage.  Unfortunately the tractor was in gear, and when it shifted the PTO rotated a turn … and that huge damned wrench swung through a full arc that just happened to intersect with his leg.  They had to insert a steel rod and fit the shattered bone back together with screws and if you think it slowed him down or taught him a lesson you haven’t been paying attention.  Eventually he went back under the knife and the doctors were able to clean up his neck and he got both feeling and strength back in his hands, sort of closing the barn door after the tractor has done rolled away down the hill so to speak.  But even as he got his strength back he was developing COPD, that’s the new innocuous word for emphysema. He ended up on oxygen. He had to give up golf.  He kept looking for things that he could do, he became an avid birder, a member of Cornel University’s legion of bird watchers.  He knew everything there was to know about birds and his backyard was filled with feeders of a dozen different kinds.  

But the world just kept closing in on him, every year he could do a little less and for a man that had been ever in motion it got harder and harder. 

The end came suddenly, an infection he just couldn’t shake, which led to congestive heart failure, kidney failure, and a dozen other things.  His heart stopped in the emergency room, but they got it going again. He had beaten the odds so many times in so many different ways and those who knew him figured the feisty little Irishman would somehow find a way to outfox fate this time too.

And for a while, it looked like he just might pull it off.

But it just wasn’t to be. 

On June 8th, 2013, at precisely 11:06AM, a beautiful Saturday morning, two days before his fifty-second wedding Anniversary, he finally stopped moving. 

His wife was at his side along with his sons, the Navy Chief Warrant Officer and the Air Force Master Sergeant. 

He was laid to rest at the Fort Custer National Cemetery with full military honors, next to his comrades in arms beneath the cold white granite, still at last.

His name was James Gordon Wright.

And he was my dad.

Holy Crap! What Happened?

Late last week this blog vanished from the web.

Some people cheered.

Some people wept.

The earth shifted slightly in its orbit.

And a great wailing and gnashing of teeth swept the globe.  The seas rose, the sky rained fire and death and poisoned toads, and the Four Horsemen rode the land upon their undead steeds.

True story.

 

What?

 

Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating a wee bit, but for the last week folks attempting to reach www.stonekettle.com got a variety of weirdness, from links to various stones and kettles to a generic busty blonde Hot Chick™ who sadly explained how Stonekettle Station didn’t exist on the web but how about these other, nifty, sites?

Given the volume of email and instant messages I received, apparently more than a few of you noticed the huge gaping hole in the Internet where Stonekettle Station used to be. Which, to be admittedly smug, was a more than a bit self-validating for me – i.e. the fact that so many of you would write expressing massive dismay at the sudden and unexpected disappearance of Stonekettle Station made me feel all warm and happy inside.

Which was nice, considering the volume of unpleasant surprises I’ve gotten lately – the least of which was the implosion of my blog.

Thanks for missing me, I sincerely appreciate it.

At first, I tried to respond personally to the messages, but eventually I just had to give up. So, if you wrote and I didn’t respond, consider this an acknowledgement of my sincere appreciation. Thanks for caring. Really.

So, what happened?

The short answer is that I didn’t pay the bill and Google turned off the lights.

It really was just that simple.

In my defense, it wasn’t my fault.

OK, actually, it was entirely my fault. But, I’ve got an excuse.

The longer answer is that I own the internet domain www.stonekettle.com along with a number of other domains (a domain is a specific site somewhere on the internet).

This isn’t anything unusual, for the price of a couple of large lattes anybody can own a domain.

And there’s a whole industry, in fact, of unsavory jerks who go around buying up likely names and then attempting to charge people for the use of their own name or business and so on. It’s called Domain Squatting and it’s an asshole thing to do. 

But anyway, as I said, anybody can own an internet domain.

Here’s how it works: basically you brainstorm up a super-cool keeno incantation, then you contact a wizard service and the sorcerers check to see if anybody else is using that same name-of-power, if not then there’s usually an exchange of money and/or sexual favors and then geeky computer types in strange robes and pointy hats sacrifice small animals in certain highly dangerous blood rituals and engage in other various powerful arcane magics to insert your domain name into the bowels of the internet. Then you can lay a website over the top of it and add subdomains and perform various witchy juju of your own. There’s a bunch of technobabble mumbo-jumbo that describes the process in sleep-inducing detail and the only people who care about the actual specifics are those who already know how it works.  So, I’ll spare you the grisly details and we’ll just say you hire a wizard and magic happens. 

The long and short of it is that periodically you have to renew your registration.  In other words nobody really owns a domain, you just sort of rent it.  If you don’t pay the rent, the registration service turns off your domain and for all practical purposes, your website simply ceases to exist. 

That’s what happened to Stonekettle Station.

When you went looking for www.stonekettle.com last week, it didn’t exist. Depending on the service you used to look for me, Google or Yahoo or directly via a DNS address (like a bookmark) or by typing in the actual numeric IP address or by performing some form of animal sacrifice and beseeching the gods, you got a variety of errors – some of which looked a lot like somebody had hijacked my domain. They hadn’t, it just looked that way, which is an artifact of whatever software logic you employed to find me.  In other words, you typed in “stonekettle” and the internet said, “I can’t find stonekettle, so here’s a hot chick with some nice kettles.”

So how come I didn’t pay the rent? What am I? Some kind of internet deadbeat?

Yes. Sort of.

I’ve owned stonekettle.com for a number of years now, and right from the first day I set up an automatic payment process and basically forgot about it.  Every year Goggle bills me for my various domains, my computer talks to their computer, various arcane magics occur in various banking computers, and I get an email receipt and everybody is happy.  If there’s any problem, say an expired credit card, I get an email notification and I wave my arms and curse a lot and that generally fixes things, and again, everybody is happy. 

Except that this year I missed the email warning.

In my defense, one of my family members is gravely ill and I was somewhat distracted.

Also, I get a lot of email.  Now, knowing that, I should have moved this particular process to a dedicated email notification account instead of my general purpose one (and given that domains generally allow for their own email process, creating dedicated email addresses specifically for certain transactions is pretty simple), but again, I was distracted and somehow never got around to it (that’s since been corrected).

So, I missed the deadline.

There’s a grace period, but I missed that too – but again, as I mentioned, I’ve been distracted.

Google therefor assumed I didn’t want the domain anymore, so they reset my admin controls and notified their contracted registration service to shut down the domain.

Which is all perfectly normal and aboveboard and automatic.

First I knew about it was when I got up Sunday morning and my email and Facebook Messages were overflowing with “Holy Crap! What Happened?” and “Dude! You’ve been hijacked! Call Homeland Security!”

It didn’t take me long to figure out what had happened, and it should have been a simple matter of logging into my administrator account to update the billing information and then requesting an automatic reinstatement of the domain.

Except I couldn’t log into the administrator account.

Because there’s some kind of weird bug, which I won’t go into because you don’t really care about such arcane magics and technobabble mumbo-jumbo. Suffice it to say that it took many phone calls and emails between myself and a nice lady somewhere in Kowloon or Bangladesh or wherever Google’s tech support is located, plus help from a number of folks on Google’s tech support forum, to sort it out and give me the various required incantations to mollify the various moat monsters of Google’s patchwork kingdom. 

Also, in the middle of this, I suddenly had to drop everything and jump on an airplane and fly to Michigan. 

No, really.

I literally got a phone call from my brother telling me to come, NOW. It was 10PM Alaska time. My wife called the airline, my son packed my electronics (and did a damned fine job of it), I stuffed whatever was handy into a travel bag, in less than ten minutes from the call we were in the jeep and my wife drove me sixty miles to Anchorage while I explained to my son that this was an emergency so it was okay if mom was speeding like a maniac but I’d better never catch him driving that fast or else, I waded shamelessly through a hundred Chinese tourists in front of the Alaskan Airlines desk shoving left and right and using my elbows mercilessly, claimed my ticket, sprinted through security with the grateful help some really awesome TSA agents, and ran the length of Ted Stevens International Airport to make my plane just as the door was closing.  Total elapsed time from notification to strapping in, 90 minutes – and that included a 60 mile drive, I’m pretty sure that’s some kind of record.

Once in the air, I was able to connect to my wife via Skype.  She got me a rental car in Grand Rapids and texted me the confirmation number. 

Then I had nothing to do but worry for the next six hours as we flew south over Canada, headed for O’Hare. 

So naturally, I thought of you, Gentle Readers, and used my time and the magic of WiFi in the Sky to finish sorting out the domain problem – because I damned sure wasn’t going to get any sleep and worrying about what was waiting for me on the other end wasn’t going to do anybody any good. 

Frankly, if the the sheer ridiculousness of attempting to fix the internet by squinting at a small phone screen while reading tech data off my slightly larger tablet transmitted by a nice lady in Kowloon or Bangladesh or wherever speaking arcane technobabble in fractured English while onboard an airplane hurtling though turbulence at 500 miles an hour somewhere over remote Canada had actually hit me, I might have quit right there and availed myself heartily of the drink cart. 

But it worked. 

By the time I landed in Grand Rapids, Google’s accounting department had been mollified and the various arcane magics of the internet worked their spells and the computers did the proper handshaking, sexual favors were exchanged, and somewhere between the time I roared out of the rental lot at the Jerry Ford International Airport and arrived at the Spectrum Health Butterworth Hospital (a massive modern complex of interlocking advanced medical facilities built around the old brownstone Butterworth hospital that I was born in 50 odd years ago) Stonekettle Station was back online.

And that wasn’t the only good news.

It’s been a rough couple of days, but it appears that my dad is going to make it. 

You’ll forgive me if I don’t go into the details, and I’d really appreciate it if you don’t pry, but things are looking up and that wasn’t even in the cards two days ago.  We’ve still got a long haul ahead of us, but if Stonekettle Station can come back from oblivion, anything is possible.

Those of you who follow me on Facebook had some idea of what was going on, and I truly appreciate all the offers of support and goodwill. Thank you. All of you, who wrote or left messages on my Facebook page. I am truly grateful.

I’m currently camped out at my folks’ house in rural Michigan. 

I have no cell connectivity here, let alone high speed 4G.  I’m tethered to a very low speed DSL connection, and between the hospital and fixing things around the farm, I doubt there’ll be much time for blog posts, but you never know.

We’ll just have to take it as it comes.

Thanks for hanging in there.

Memorial Day - 2013

Portions of this text first appeared here on Stonekettle Station, Memorial Day, 2011. The wars change, the years pass, the message remains the same   //  Jim

---

 

 

Once again, it’s a gorgeous day here in the Alaskan Matsu.

It promises to be a beautiful Memorial Day. 

This is the day we Americans are supposed to pause for a moment and remember those who have fallen in the service of our country.

Memorial Day isn’t about honoring veterans per se, not exactly. Veterans, the living ones anyway, have their own day.

Memorial day is supposed to be about the dead, those who have fallen in military service.  Once it was called Decoration Day in honor of those who died during the American Civil War. Later the holiday became a day of remembrance for those killed in all conflicts, and today it marks the passing of all those  who died in uniform in both peace and war.

This is the day that some dutiful Americans visit the graveyards and the military cemeteries to place flowers and flags and to remember husbands and brothers and wives and mothers and sisters and sons and daughters who wore the uniform and came when called and gave the last full measure. 

For some, today is a day when we will lay the wreaths and sound the lonely trumpet and shed a tear and a salute for those comrades long gone.

It’s also a perfect day, here near my home in Alaska, for grilling out or for taking a drive in the convertible with my lovely wife or for puttering around in the woodshop with the large bay doors open – and I may do all three. 

Because you see, even though Memorial Day is nominally about honoring the dead, it’s also about celebrating life.

And on this, of all days, it’s important to remember that.

Because celebrating life is something we do far, far to little of in recent decades.

It’s been more than a decade now since those terrible days in September of 2001.

It’s been more than a decade of war and death and sacrifice. 

For our children, this most recent generation, the ones just now reaching the age of reason and awareness, they have never known an America not at war. 

They have never lived in a nation at peace.

Never.

Think about that. 

For them, this new generation, war has become so commonplace, so ubiquitous, that it’s simply business as usual. For them, war simply is, it’s just another aspect of life, like plumbing and electricity and the flow of money, invisible and all around. The dead come home from conflict invisibly, hidden, silently, returned to their grieving families in quiet ceremonies away from the public eye, unlamented and unnoticed by a nation grown jaded and bored with war.

For them, this generation, war is normal.

And their parents, those of us born in the 1960’s, we can’t tell them that they’re wrong, that war is not the normal state, that normality is peace without conflict.  See, because we grew up in a nation at war too.  By the time I was ten, America had been fighting in Southeast Asia for my entire life.  The news media was daily filled with images of blood and death, mangled and maimed soldiers, of burning helicopters and a terrifyingly incomprehensible enemy.  At home, the streets were filled with violence and unrest and it seemed that America was about to tear itself to pieces in a clash of violently opposed ideologies – because no matter how much the enemy might hate us, we hated ourselves, our neighbors, our fellow Americans, even more.

For us, war is the normal state of affairs too.

And before that it was Korea, and before that World War Two, and before that … well, the list goes back a long, long way.

There are a lot of dead to remember on this Memorial Day.

Today there are those who instead of picnicking  with their familiars, instead of working in their yards or enjoying the day, will be patrolling the dark and dangerous corners of this world.  They’re out there, right now, walking the bitter broken mountains of central Asia, standing the long watch on and below and above the seas, they’re out there in the fetid festering jungles of South America, in the dry dusty deserts of Africa, in the blistering heat of the Middle East, in lands so remote you’ve never even heard of them (and wouldn’t believe the descriptions of such places if you did), they are as far away as a cold airless orbit high above the Earth and as close as local bases in their own states.  

Some of these men and women will not live out today.

Some will most certainly come home to Dover Air Force Base in a cold steel box beneath the draped colors of the Stars and Stripes, their war over, their dreams fled.

And there are those who wear the uniform, but can no longer serve – their duty stations are the crowded and forgotten wards of military hospitals around the world. They won’t be working in the yard or grilling out today either. Some will spend the day with family, even if they are unaware of it.  Soon too their last battle will be over.

And there are those who no longer serve, no longer wear the uniform, but they still fight. They fight the nightmares of Vietnam and Beirut and Mosul and Firebase Alpha and a thousand other battlefields you’ve never heard of.   They are the walking dead, killed in action only they no longer have the wit to know it and so they haunt the streets of America, the forgotten unseen discarded ghosts of war and conflict, slowly fading away.

And, of course, there are those who no longer fight, no longer struggle, no longer remember.  They lay entombed in the soil of foreign nations, at Normandy, at Tunis, at the Ardennes, at Brookwood and Cambridge, at Flanders and Lorraine, at Manila, Mexico City, in the Netherlands, the Somme, and many other places whose names most Americans no longer remember or never knew. One hundred and twenty four thousand, nine hundred and nine American servicemen lay interred forever in twenty-four cemeteries on foreign shores and there they will stay, never to return to America.  They were the lucky ones, if you can call it luck, found and honored and laid to rest by their fellows.  Others, well, their bones are myriad and they litter the sea floor beneath all the oceans of the world or are lost in the jungles and deserts on all the world’s continents, their resting places unknown and unremembered. And here, within the boundaries of the United States, there are one hundred and forty-six national military cemeteries, and more than a million Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen, and Guardsmen lie beneath the cold white granite.  Their battles are long, long over, even if the war still rages on.

They, all of them, came when called, some of their own free will and some not, and did their duty and no one, no one, can ask any more of them.

For them, for all of them, for those who have fallen or will fall in this lousy war, and for all those who have fallen in all the conflicts we’ve fought lo these many years, today raise a glass and give a nod towards the flag.

Remember them, if only for a moment.

 

Then enjoy your day, celebrate your precious and fragile life, because that’s why they do what they do.

The IRS Scandal: Tempest In A Teapot

 

After the previous essay on Benghazi, I got a bunch of email.

The gist of which is best summed up as:

Okay, Benghazi, fine, whatever. Fine. But what about the IRS thing? Huh, what about that? How are you going to defend your boy Obozo on that, huh? Huh? It’s Obumer’s Watergate, Man, he’s going down! Impeachment! Impeachment!

Right.

The IRS scandal.

You mean the IRS scandal where not one, not a single one, of the targeted conservative groups requesting 501(c)3 or (c)4 designations were denied tax exempt status despite being engaged in blatantly political activities in direct violation of the intent of the tax code? You mean the IRS scandal where not one of the targeted organizations were denied their rights as citizens of the United States or, in point of fact, were not harmed in any way? You mean the IRS scandal where no actual laws were broken? Where there was no actual cover up? And where the IRS itself found the problem and corrected it and then reported it to the American people?

You mean that “scandal?”

Right.

Folks, there’s a scandal here alright, starting with the one where hysterical conspiracy mongering conservatives in Congress will now use this non-issue as yet another excuse for obstructionism, yet another excuse to beat their fleshy chests in a pity party of make-believe persecution while managing to avoid doing any of the actual work they supposedly get paid for.

They’ll form committees and demand investigations and assign an independent counsel.  They’ll bloviate and pontificate in furious fulminous outrage. They’ll give self-important red-eyed interviews to the feverish rumor mill of Fox News.  They’ll stroke the corpulent fecund ego of Rush Limbaugh and his legions of misshapen trollish minions who are even now rubbing their flinty hands together and leaking noxious fluids and squealing in orgasmic glee.  They’ll stand by with eyes slyly averted while Glenn Beck spins his bizarrely ludicrous gold-tinged conspiracy theories replete with Nazis and Hitler and Mao and Sharia Law and the coming of the Mormon End Times of Doom. And they’ll send forth their scrawny pet Tea Party chimp and she’ll caper about dancing her little clockwork monkey dance to the sound of music only she can hear with the whites of her crazed eyes rolling madly in their sockets while she screeches her little set-piece monkey screech of Impeachment! Impeachment!  Then they’ll trundle out John McCain with his war medals a’clankin’ and a’janglin’ and he’ll briefly rouse from the excrement smeared bamboo prison of his cloudy yellowed existence and angrily shout Pickles! yet again.  And when the circus has done run its course, when all of the greasepaint saturated clowns have exited their gaudily painted little car and tooted their little horns and squirted their little seltzer bottles into the cheering crowd, when in the end it turns out that there’s really no scandal at all, and there’s nothing that they can pin on Obama or use to deflect Hilary Clinton from 2016, well, then congressional conservatives will sullenly slink back to their dark little spider holes and dust off their forgotten Benghazi script.

What congress will not do, is their actual jobs.

And most Americans won’t even notice.  America heard “IRS” and “Obama,” their blood began to fizz and pop, and they were off and running down to the store for a fresh supply of torches and pitchforks without once stopping to ask even a single question.

Because they didn’t need to ask questions, they didn’t need to think. 

IRS.

Obama. 

Ding!

When the bells ring, the dogs drool.  It’s really just as simple and as reflexive as that.

Kill ‘em all and let God sort it out, that’s how we do business in America these days. Kill ‘em all, let God sort it out.

But here’s the thing, Americans should have asked the questions.

That way they wouldn’t look so damned stupid all of the time.

At this point, most Americans couldn’t even tell you what this whole thing is actually about. 

Fine, so we’ll ask: Say, what’s this whole thing actually about?

It seems that the Internal Revenue Service singled out conservative groups for detailed investigation.  Republicans are calling it “The New Watergate” and “The New Iran Contra Affair.” 

Um, isn’t there a  non-republican scandal we can compare it to?

No.

What was the IRS looking for exactly?

In a word, fraud.  The groups in question were applying for tax-exempt status, specifically they asked the IRS for either 501(c)3 (charitable agencies) or 501(c)4 exemptions (social welfare organizations).

What the heck is a “social welfare organization?” Sound like a bunch of flaming liberals!

Not exactly, Social Welfare Organizations, called 501(c)4 Groups in the tax code, or usually just C4s, are nonprofit agencies that by law must be devoted primarily to programs broadly serving their communities and not private groups. These can be religious, cultural, educational, veterans organizations, homeowners associations, volunteer fire departments, and so on.

Sounds like socialism! And I  knew welfare would be involved somehow!

Right. In recent years the vast majority of those applying for 501(c)4 exemptions have been conservative patriot groups.

Like the TEA party?

Correct.

OK, that’s cool then. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that 501(c)4 group cannot engage directly in politics.  They can make campaign contributions, but neither that nor lobbying can be their principle function. Otherwise, they get to pay taxes just like everybody else. And there’s another more important thing, political groups, besides having to pay taxes also have to disclosure how much money they gave and to who.  C4 organizations don’t.

I don’t get it.

501(c)4 organizations can give money to politicians and political parties anonymously, as much as they want.

So, like if you’re one of these C4 outfits you can just give whatever you want to whoever you want and you can keep it a secret?

Bingo.

Wait, you’re saying you could be like The Muslim Brotherhood or Homos for Sodomizing Jesus or something and you can give gobs of money to a stinking filthy scheming liberal politician and they don’t have to disclose that?

Not directly to the politician.

How then? Like to a SuperPAC?

Exactly. Then that PAC can support a politician or lobby for or against a particular piece of legislation and you, as an American citizen, don’t have any idea who’s paying the bills or helping any particular candidate. 

That’s Bullshit! How did this happen?

Two words: Citizen’s United.  Prior to 1998, just about 100% of all political donors to federal campaigns were publically identified.  Today, four years after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, it’s less than 40%. That’s how profound of impact Citizen’s United had on federal elections.  It’s huge.  Today 60% of all federal campaign money is given anonymously, in other words, you as a citizen of the United States have no idea who’s funding which politicians.  And since money is the key to political office in the US, you don’t know who’s buying what. With the Citizens United decision, big donors can de facto give as much money to political parties and politicians as they want. In many cases, for what should obvious reasons, both the big money donors themselves and especially the candidates would prefer that you, Average American Citizen, don’t find out who’s giving what or how much to whom.  

So, you’re saying that…

Since Citizens United, C4 organizations and Political Action Committees naturally became a way to launder campaign money.

So, like, maybe the government tax people should watch out for that! You know enforce the law!

Yeah, maybe they should. That would be the IRS’s job, wouldn’t it?

Hey! I thought we were asking the questions here!

Sorry.

So why was the IRS spending all of its time harassing conservatives? That’s some Nazi shit right there.

Since Obama’s election in 2008 and the Citizen’s United decision in 2010, the vast majority of organizations applying for 501(c)4 status are, wait for it …. wait for it … conservative Tea Party groups. Naturally they get the lion’s share of the attention.  The IRS wondered if the organizations applying for tax-exempt status as “social welfare” organization really were social welfare organizations or if they were, maybe, engaged primarily in, oh, I dunno, politics. And they wondered that because it’s their job to ask the question.

OK fine. But how come the IRS spent 100% of its time targeting the Tea Party, huh. What about that?

Actually, only about 30% of the organizations singled out for further review were conservative political groups.  

Yeah, but, it still sounds like harassment!

Well, it’s the IRS.   However, of the approximately three hundred applications that were tagged for extra screening (out of several thousand), only about a hundred of which were conservative organizations, independent review showed that those applicants clearly demonstrated indications of significant political campaign activity and they should have been investigated in detail.  In other words, in nearly every case of the 501(c)4 application process, the IRS did exactly what it was supposed to do. In fact, the IRS should have been doing more to investigate these groups, along with the right-wing groups they should have investigated left-wing groups, and middle of the road groups, and any group applying for tax-exempt status as a social welfare organization who appeared to be engaged primarily in political activities. 

Yeah, but, it still sounds like harassment!

Again, it’s the IRS. they’re supposed to harass tax-cheats. And they’re supposed to regard everybody as a potential tax-cheat until proven otherwise. Everybody feels persecuted. But, see, here’s the thing. No conservative group that applied for tax-exempt status was denied.  All were eventually approved. All of them. None of them would have even noticed this thing if it hadn’t made the news. 

But, wait, I thought they were targeting the Tea Party?

Well, yes, in essence they were.  Given the overwhelming number of applications and the limited manpower, and the fact that Congress refuses to either confirm a permanent head of the organization or fund the IRS to the levels required to do a thorough job, the IRS needs a way to help filter things out, so they use something called a BOLO list, or Be On The Look Out.  Then they used certain keywords to flag applications for the BOLO list, words like “Tea Party,” “Patriots,” and “9/12 Projects.”   However, it didn’t work very well, so after about a year they changed the filter criteria to something more generic like “constitutional groups” and “groups dedicated to changing government.”

Ah HA! So it was Obama all along! Just like Nixon!

No. It was the Cincinnati IRS office. There is absolutely no evidence that the White House had anything to do with it.  And the difference between this affair and Nixon’s abuse of power is that Richard Nixon set out to break the law, he did it on purpose and with malice aforethought, and he damned well knew what he was doing.  In the current case, the direction regarding which organizations got extra screening didn’t come from the White House, there was no cover up, and no laws were broken, though the IRS did bend their own rules regarding impartiality – which is what this is really all about. In the Watergate case, the IRS under Nixon’s direction deliberately broke the law, in the current case the IRS acting on its own was attempting to enforce the law.  Big, big difference.

Why Cincinnati?

Because Ohio is a hotbed of liberalism?  Cincinnati is the office that processes all of the tax-exempt applications. Again, the White House had nothing to do with it. Clearly so. Provably so and even congressional conservatives agree with that assessment – well, most of them anyway, the ones that aren’t gibbering white-eyed extremists like the aforementioned capering monkey woman.  Instead of trying to pin it on Obama, the more rational conservatives are now using this event to push for a tax code overhaul, something the President has been calling for since his first term, and a revamp of the IRS itself.

Okay, sure, you’ve convinced us, it wasn’t Obama. Sure. Insert eye-roll. Some low level flunkies put in the filter criteria on their own. 

Yes, because that’s what their office is paid to do. These guys are supposed to be on the lookout for tax fraud. That’s why they call it Be On The Lookout for tax fraud. Should they have used the word “Tea Party?” Maybe. Maybe not. It’s exactly like a police sergeant telling his patrol officers to be on the lookout for red corvettes, because it’s his opinion and his experience that people who drive red corvettes tend to speed more than other drivers. It’s an asshole thing to do, but, honestly, just how egregious is that really? 

Still sound fishy to me. I feel all persecuted and shit.  So, anyway, which patriotic Conservative discovered it?

Actually it was brought to light by an internal review, by the Inspector General for Tax Administration – I don’t know if the inspector was a liberal or a conservative. I don’t think it matter.  What matters is that the system worked exactly as intended.  The IRS itself corrected the situation and informed its superiors in the Treasury Department, who informed the President, who informed the American people.  No cover up. No secrets.

Wait, I though like John Boehner discovered this?

The Inspector General submitted its report to the Treasury Department and the Obama Administration made the announcement on Monday.  It was considered minor, something easily fixed, already fixed. By Monday afternoon, somewhat predictably in retrospect, congressional conservatives had turned it into “the scandal of the century” complete with fireworks and a parade, which replaced last week’s “Scandal of the Century” in the headlines.  Now, again predictably in retrospect, every senator and representative, every holy man and con man, every circus clown and malingering hanger-on has jumped on the bandwagon and declared themselves persecuted by the IRS.  Boehner didn’t discover anything, and couldn’t have even if it was printed on his ass in orange self-tanning lotion, he’s just being an opportunistic asshole who now has to eat his own words. 

How come Obama fired Steven Miller then?

It’s Washington. Somebody had to be fired. Don’t feel sorry for Steve, he’s an IRS agent, you can dunk them in boiling water like lobsters, they don’t feel pain.  

But, but, but this sort of sounds like, um, kind of, not really a big deal.

Yeah. Funny that.

Well, crud. What kind of scandal is this? There’s no guns, no CIA break-ins, no Weapons of Mass Delusion, no LSD in the water supply. Hell, there isn’t even a blowjob involved. How can it be a scandal without blowjobs? Why for all the screaming and gnashing of teeth?

Well, now that’s the real question, isn’t it

See, because there are genuine scandals here. 

Political organizations, blatantly political organizations, are being allowed to commit tax fraud. And the IRS is letting them get away with it in direct violation of their charter and the law. The Supreme Court is letting them get away with it. The President is letting them get away with it. And Congress is most assuredly letting them get away with it.  

And we, us voters, are letting them all get away with it.

These organizations are pretending to be charities and social clubs and we’re pretending to believe them. 

All those organization were approved for tax-exempt status? All of them? None were denied?

That’s the problem right there. 

That’s the real scandal.

That’s the question you should have asked, right there, not, “How many organizations were singled out for review?” or “How can we pin this on Obama?” but “How many of these applications from blatantly political organizations were rejected?”

And so now they get to avoid paying taxes while secretly laundering funds for every giant money machine from the Koch Brothers to Rupert Murdock to Karl Rove to the mob to the UAW to the Mormon Church.  

We sold democracy to these conniving assclowns without even getting a receipt.

With its Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court has turned democracy into a fucking joke for sale to the highest bidder.

So, why isn’t John Boehner up in arms over that? Why aren’t these great patriots, these great constitutionalists, investigating that?

And that’s the real scandal, right there, isn’t it?

 

Ask yourself something: Who benefits from this situation?

Who benefits from being able to wash money through the system and buy politicians and political office anonymously?

Who indeed.

And that, my shiny electronic friends, is the answer to the real question.

Benghazi: Reductio Ad Absurdum

 

Update:  Apparently a number of folks that should be commenting on The Blaze have chosen to instead to grace me with their charming wit and razor sharp intellects.  Oh lucky, lucky me.   Because, really, reason, punctuation, and spelling are so overrated.

As such, comment moderation will be periodically turned on when I’m not able to watch the post in real-time.

This way I can get on with my life, rather than play Whack-A-Mole with a bunch of trolls.  Feel free to comment, stuff worth posting will appear eventually.  The other crap will be bundled up, put into a brown paper bag, placed on Glenn Beck’s front porch and … well, you know how this gag works. Just be prepared to run when I push the doorbell.

//Jim

---

 

Benghazi.

Let’s lay out the playing field.

Just to make sure we all understand the rules.

If the President is in the White House situation room surrounded by his staff and military advisors, and he, personally, on his authority as the Commander In Chief, authorizes the US Navy to take whatever action necessary, if he authorizes weapons-free and gets out of the way, and then US Navy SEAL snipers acting on the resulting orders from their on-scene commander execute an astounding feat of marksmanship which then instantly kills three Somali pirates via three perfectly executed head shots which then subsequently allows Navy boarding crews to successfully rescue American merchant Captain Richard Phillips off the Horn of Africa in the tradition of Preble and Decatur – the President gets no credit for that at all, he was only a bystander.

Likewise, if the President is in the White House situation room, surrounded by his staff and military advisors, and he, personally, gives the go/no-go order on his authority as the Commander in Chief, and US Navy SEALs then jump from a C-130 high above Adow, Somalia, and make a daring raid in the middle of the night on an armed pirate camp to successfully rescue Jessica Buchanan and Poul Hagen Thisted, and kill nine pirates in the process – well, Obama gets no credit for that either. He’s just some uninvolved asshole who watched it all on TV.

And of course, if the President is in the White House situation room surrounded by his staff and military advisors, and he, in real-time, personally, gives the go/no-go order on his authority as the Commander In Chief, and US Navy SEALs then swoop into an allied country and double-tap Osama Bin Laden right in the brainpan – Obama gets no credit for that at all.  In fact, if he even mentions it in any way whatsoever, he’s grandstanding, taking credit,  dishonoring the men who actually put themselves in harm’s way to neutralize one of America’s greatest enemies.

However.

However, should four Americans die in the middle of a riot in a warzone, by intent or by accident – well, then that, by the Angry Bearded Christian God, that, Sir, is all Barack Obama’s fault, one hundred percent.

And he should be impeached for it.

And maybe shipped back to Kenya.

He gets no credit for any success and all the blame for every failure.

Do I have that about right?

I’m not complaining, I just like to know what the rules are.

 

Maybe Obama should have maybe made his various announcements of success while standing on the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln in a flightsuit, maybe conservatives would cut him some slack then.

But probably not.

 

So, Benghazi.  

What, exactly, is the point of this circus again?

I’m not asking rhetorically, I mean it precisely as stated.

What is the point?

Last week, the chief clown in this posse, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), said that he “did not know what took place, and who was where doing what and why."

King doesn’t know who, what, or why, and yet he next declared confidently, "I believe that it's a lot bigger than Watergate, and if you link Watergate and Iran-Contra together and multiply it times maybe ten or so, you're going to get in the zone where Benghazi is."

Bigger than Watergate?

Bigger than Iran Contra?

Conservative math, folks: ((Iran Contra + Watergate) x 10) = Joe Biden for President!

Yay!

… ur, what? No, that’s not what we, wait, now just hold on a minute, what do you mean it’s in the Constitution? Well, crap! Though, you know, at least Biden’s white….

So, if it’s not to make Joe Biden president, then what exactly is the point of the current conservative “investigation” into Benghazi?

I mean let’s be honest here, these people hate the government, they hate it more and more with every day that passes.

And they hate liberals, hate them with the fiery righteous fury of a born-again Evangelical minister denying that’s his face on YouTube snorting cocaine out of Rentboy’s tanned asscrack.

Now, the four Americans killed in Benghazi were government employee. 

And the Ambassador was a liberal appointed by President Obama. 

I’m frankly surprised that the folks screaming loudest about Benghazi aren’t out in the streets next to Westboro Baptist Church, cheering the fortuitous reduction of  government and thinking up ways to make it happen again.

Oh what? Now I’m being offensive? Now I’m being insulting?

Okay, fair enough, but come on, conservatives have spent the last five years threatening to take their guns to Washington. According to a Rasmussen poll taken two weeks ago, more than fifty percent of conservatives said that they believe armed revolution is now the only way to get what they think they want – now that they’ve lost two presidential elections to a black guy it’s time to burn down democracy.  Hell, they’d celebrate if somebody gunned down the president, would they not? A number of them have said so, in exactly those terms, in public. They talk openly about it. And, really, armed revolution, right? If you’re not talking about shooting down government employees, then what’s the point of the gun in the first place?

So what exactly are conservatives pissed about with Benghazi?

That the Libyans denied them four more targets?

That Ambassador Stevens died in a Libyan civil war instead of an American one?

Seriously, what’s the problem?

Hey, don’t get all soggy and hard to light with me, this is your revolution. I know which side I’m on. I know how long I’ll live once the shooting starts. The knock on my front door will surprise me not at all, nor what comes after (though it might surprise you. Just saying).

Like I said up above, I just like to know what the rules are, that’s all.

Given all the dead and sick and maimed Americans that Congress turns a blind eye to day in and day out, all the blood they personally have on their own hands, and given the responsibility they themselves bear for all our war dead up to and including Benghazi itself, what is the purpose of this particular Republican witch burning?

What is the point in specific and concise terms? Bullet point by bullet point, so to speak.

What is the purpose of the investigation, spelled out, in detail? What is the objective? What are the expected outcomes? How do we measure them, i.e. how do we know when the investigation is complete?

Most importantly: What will we do with the information once we have it?

I’d really like to know.

Why are we spending so much time on Benghazi?

I mean, we already know the answer, don’t we?

We know who is to blame. We know who is at fault, do we not? Conservatives certainly do. They’ve already reached a conclusion and made the announcement. It’s all over but the shouting and now they’re just looking for the smoking gun, and they’re going to keep at it until they find it – and in today’s world if you can’t find a smoking gun, well you can always just print one out of thin air, can’t you? (Of course, it’s liable to blow up in your hand, but that’s not really the point, is it?).

Is Benghazi that important? In the grand scheme of things, among all the dead, among all the carnage, among all the blood we’ve shed in the Middle East, is it really that important?

It is?

Really?

But why?

 

No, stop for a minute and think about it carefully.

 

Why? Why is what happened in Benghazi important? Why does it matter?

Why does it matter to you? You personally. You as an American.

Will the answers, whatever they may be, will they make a difference? To you? Will they, whatever they may be, will they change what you think? Will they?

Will those answers, whatever they may be, make a difference in your life, personally?

Will the final analysis make a difference in the lives of people that you love or admire or are responsible for?

Will the answers make Congress fully fund embassy security and the foreign service? Will they approve funding and full military support to the eventual Damascus mission, you know, the one we’ll have to stand up once we oust Bashar al-Assad from Syria as certain members of congress are insisting the president do right now – the very same members of congress who are conducting the Benghazi investigation, as a matter of fact, and who cried Treason! when Obama sent us to Libya.

Will the answers reanimate the men who died in Benghazi?

Will the investigation return those dead men to their families, alive?

Now I, personally, don’t believe in reincarnation, reanimation, resurrection (divine or otherwise, now or previously), nor zombies, But some folks certainly do, including the ones conducting the investigation. So is that what this is about? Never mind the thorny moral or ethical questions posed by resurrection. Never mind the profound theological implications or the mind-bending metaphysics. Never mind even the practical, legal aspects of reanimating the dead or the chilling political implications of putting that god-like power into the hands of Congress. Simply answer the question, will the current investigations into Benghazi bring those men back from the grave? Yes or no?

Better yet, do you, as Americans, really expect that the investigation will return those men to life? 

No?

No, I suppose not.

Well then, if the investigation won’t make the dead live again, will it at least give their families closure?

Will the answers, whatever they may be, give those left behind comfort and surcease. Will it ease their pain and put their hearts at peace?

Is that noble idea what this is about?

Are we doing it for the families?

Are we doing it because we owe those who fell in the service of their country at least that much?

If that’s so, are the families of these four men that much more important to us, as Americans, than the families of all the thousands of men and women who have fallen, unlamented, uninvestigated, in the service of their country over the last decade? Are the memories of these four men so much more important than all of thousands who have died on patrol in hostile territory, who died because they lacked proper body armor or reinforced vehicles or dependable equipment or reliable intelligence or air cover or even a decent map, who died carrying out impossible orders in untenable positions, who died because they were sent into battle under false pretext, who died due to any of the hundred million idiotic things that can take your life in a war zone, leaving behind bereft wives and husbands and daughters and sons and mothers and fathers? 

Is that why we’re doing it? Because we owe the families of the fallen?

If so, shouldn’t we give each death, each life lost before its due time, each and every one of those fallen thousands, equal attention, equal outrage, equal measure?

And should we not hold to account with equal diligence the men who sent them?

No?

No, I suppose not.

Is the purpose of the investigation about the words?

Is it about Act of Terror versus Terrorism?

Is that what it has finally come down to?

Is it really about the missing “ism?”

Have all the big questions been answered to such a degree that we have nothing left to debate on the national stage but the phrasing? Has Congress really solved all the big problems, addressed all the big issues, faced all of the challenges, settled all of the big debates, that the only thing left to do is argue over grammar?

Is the Republican party so desperate, are conservatives so exhausted of substance, that the only thing they have left to argue about is the suffix?

Have they truly been reduced to that level by the mighty negro mojo of Barack Obama?

Does it really matter if the president called Benghazi terrorism or if he called it a ham sandwich? 

Do conservatives really, and I mean really, believe that “Act of Terror” and “Terrorism” actually determined the outcome of the last presidential election? 

That it really, honest and truly, came down to that?

Really?

If it’s that important, that the tense can determine elections, that it can change the very fate of nations, if it can alter the very fabric of the time/space continuum, I mean if it’s really that important, what we call it, then shouldn’t Congress draft a bill defining the exact criteria? If it really matters to the American people, then should we not, each and every one of us, demand from our elected officials a clear and unambiguous definition of the words and specific guidance on when each expression may be used – under penalty of law.

If it’s really that important, I mean.

On the subject of words, is the number of revisions important? 

CNN’s Candy Crowley suggested that the Benghazi talking points were edited to “help the president get elected.”

Leaving aside the question of why anybody would watch either Candy Crowley or the pitiful joke that CNN has become, what exactly did the rough draft say?  “The Ghost of Osama Bin Laden came to the president in a dream and said, ‘Baaaaaarack, America wiiiiiill beeeee bathed in the blood of infidels.’ But Obama ignored the warning, thinking it no more than a fitful bit of REM sleep brought on by the spicy halibut tacos he had consumed during a Press Club Dinner earlier in the night. ” er, no, let’s make that “The CIA had no credible indications of Al Qaida activity near the Libyan consulate…”

And should we, as Americans, even allow revisions to the pending release of government documents at all? If it’s that important, so important that Congress must hold hearings into the differences between a rough draft and the final copy of each White House memo, can we as citizens do no less than demand that only first drafts be used? That when penning a report to the American people, all government agencies must agree in the rough draft and that no changes shall ever be made?

Or shall we allow a certain number of revisions? One? Two? Exactly how many revisions shall constitute high crimes and treason? Come now, don’t be shy, Conservatives, step up and make your case. If an overabundance of revisions is an impeachable offense, well then shouldn’t that number be codified into the very Constitution of the United States itself via amendment (Wait, the Constitution is the ultimate government document, does the act of revising the Constitution via constitutional amendment fall into this same impeachable offense? Wouldn’t that make the Founding Fathers traitors? After all, they revised the Constitution several times. Also, will conservatives now throw out their bibles, starting with the King James Version? After all, look how many times that silly tome has been revised, it’s damned near gibberish. But I digress).   

Should we set a limit on the number of drafts?

If it’s that important, I mean.

Ridiculous?

Congress doesn’t think so. Conservatives don’t think so. They’re both deadly serious.

Is the exact location of the president that important?

Fox News’ Bill Kristol says the president was “absent the whole night the crisis.”

Absent? Like what absent exactly? Like they couldn’t find him absent? Like he was hiding behind the couch absent? Like Obama went out for a smoke without telling anybody? Like he just opened a window and shimmied down a tree, over the wall and disappeared out into the night?

Like where’s Obama? I dunno, I thought he was with you absent?

Like Great Scott, he’s absconded absent? Like that?

If that’s the case, maybe we should be having a completely different investigation.

What? I’m just asking, how’d he get past the Secret Service? 

Was it Obama’s smooth negro mojo again?

And what? He didn’t take a cell phone?

Former Secretary of Defense, Leon Penetta and General Martin Dempsey testified before Congress that the president was fully engaged with the National Military Command Center during the attack.  And really, don’t we spend a metric shitload of money to make damned sure the president is fully connected, all the time, no matter where he is – even if he sneaks out for pizza?

But here we are, with Conservatives declaring that the president, the president, wasn’t in the right place at the right time.  That the very future of the nation is at stake, isn’t that what conservatives are telling us?  The nation teeters on oblivion, the seas shall rise, the dead will walk, the Anti-Christ is come.  Because, hey, even though these are the same people who predicted with absolutely confidence that their guy would be sitting in the White House right now, we should just take them at their word on this subject. Right?  Because they’ve been so, so very correct in the past (like that time these same clairvoyant assholes told us to invest in real estate, but I digress). We can’t determine the exact nature of the treason until we pin down exactly where Barack Obama was during every second of every minute of every hour of the unfolding crisis. 

We don’t know where he was, man, but we know where he wasn’t – he wasn’t in the right place.

And where is that exactly?

Should Obama have remained in the Situation Room? The Pentagon? Deep below Cheyenne Mountain? Or perhaps he could have called Dick Cheney and asked for the undisclosed location of a convenient Cold War redoubt. 

If it’s that important, shouldn’t Congress pen a bill requiring the real-time tracking of the President via GPS collar? If it that’s important? Or maybe every member of the government, including Congress, should be belled, just in case we need to know where they are.  Hello? Is this thing on? Hello?

Are we doing this for the people? For us? For America?

Are we doing it because the people have a right to know?

Are we doing it for the truth?  Because the truth, the truth no less, actually matters to a nation steeped in conspiracy theories and make-believe creationist hoodoo and chock-a-block with science-denial and awash in unchecked rumor mongers and which routinely lends credence to hysterical talk radio and reality TV and embraces deliberate ignorance, because that nation clearly gives a good goddamn about the truth?

Really?

The Truth. That’s funniest thing I’ve heard all day. The Truth.

 

Of course, in reality (if that word has any meaning here), we should be investigating Benghazi in order to determine how we might better protect our people in the future.

That’s what responsible, mature, intelligent people would do.

That’s what those charged with the security of nation are enjoined to do. That’s the oath they swore and their solemn duty.

But obviously we’re not investigating what went wrong in Benghazi in order to reduce the likelihood of such an event again.

Look at the “investigators.” Look at the questions they’re asking. Look at the witnesses and those called before Congress. Look to the talking heads on the News. Look at the testimony. Nowhere is there any effort whatsoever to quantify lessons learned, to develop a better process, to update security procedures or embassy staffing or define security protocols.

Because, obviously, the investigation isn’t about that.

It’s not even about Barak Obama, except by default.

It’s about blame.

It’s about sour grapes.

It’s about bitter partisan driven revenge.

It’s about the last presidential election.

And more than anything, it’s about preemptive strikes. it’s really about the next presidential election and if these silly sons of bitches want the truth, the Truth, then they should start right there and admit it. 

But they won’t, and they won’t admit what they’re really up to because conservatives go into an election the same way they screw, scared to death and afraid somebody is going to catch them cheating.

 

Nothing, and I mean nothing tells you who conservatives fear in 2016 more than this idiotic charade.