When Patriotism Becomes a Cult

The State uber alles: Roman patriarch Horace offers his sons as a sacrifice for the State, as rendered by18th Century revolutionary French artist Jacques-Louis David. The heroic, stiff-armed pose offered by the sons was to become a salute favored by totalitarians of various hues.

"Patriotism is deeper than its symbolic expressions, than sentiments about place and kinship that move us to hold our hands over our hearts during the national anthem. It is putting the country first, before party or personal ambition, before anything."


Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, speaking the authentic language of totalitarian nationalism.


Gary Qualls of Crawford, Texas would appear to be the kind of patriot who would earn John McCain's approval. I sincerely hope Mr. Qualls is a better man than that.


In was mid-November 2004 when Qualls learned that his 20-year-old son Louis had been killed in Iraq. Gary had just finished reading a letter from Louis when his youngest son David told him that three Marines were waiting on the doorstep.


The Marines, of course, were a casualty notification team. They had come to tell Gary that his oldest son -- an honor student, star athlete, martial artist, and devout Christian -- would never have sons of his own.


He had been killed in Iraq by somebody else's son -- somebody who saw Louis not as a liberator practicing altruism at gunpoint, but as a foreign invader to be expelled from his home country.


A Marine veteran himself, Gary had come close to death in a previous exercise in lethal humanitarianism in Bosnia. Some of his closest friends had been killed there. But nothing in his eventful life had prepared him for the news that his son was gone.


"I walked up to the front door," Gary later recalled, "and all I could do was look through the glass and stand there and look at them and I knew what was going on and I said `No... Not my baby!'"
Overcome by grief, this strong, proud man was driven to his knees by the burden of unbearable sorrow that descended on him in that moment.


At some point, Gary's grief turned into something markedly different. He was infuriated by the way another parent, Cindy Sheehan, reacted to the death of her son Casey in Iraq.


When Mrs. Sheehan traveled to Crawford in August 2005 to conduct a protest in front of the vacation home of the president who had sent Casey and Louis to die needlessly in Iraq, Gary -- backed by the usual assortment of jelly-belly jingoists and computer commandos -- decided to mount a counter-protest: Where Mrs. Sheehan and her supporters had created "Camp Casey" to symbolize their desire to end the war and spare other parents the grief of losing sons and daughters, Qualls and his associates sought to create "Camp Qualls" -- a symbol of their willingness to offer their children, and those of other parents, on the altar of Bush's war.


"If I have to sacrifice my whole family for the sake of our country and world, [and for] other countries that want freedom, I'll do that," insisted Qualls.


This stands in pronounced contrast with his first, and more honest, reaction to the news of Louis's death. At that moment, Mr. Qualls didn't turn to his youngest son David and say: "OK, it's your turn; pack your things and leave with these nice fellows from the Marine Corps."


No; his reaction was to collapse beneath the unspeakable agony known only to those who have lost a child. He was thrown from his feet when reality suddenly shifted polarity and the natural order was reversed: He would bury his son, rather than being buried by him.


That was his honest response to the horrible news, before the demands of "patriotism" dictated that he "revise and extend" his reaction.


Mr. Qualls has my unqualified sympathy, and my earnest prayers that God will comfort and strengthen him. But I can't credit his claim that he would be willing to sacrifice his family on behalf of the State that rules us, and strangers he has never met and will never know.


A willingness to make "sacrifices" of that kind is not commendable; it is utterly monstrous. All variants of totalitarian "patriotism" -- including that promoted by our rulers today -- require that their subjects cultivate that monstrous disposition. Which is to say, a disposition suitable to service of what Nietszche called "the coldest of all cold monsters."


Thomas Fleming of the Rockford Institute, one of the few authentic classical scholars writing about contemporary politics, has pointed out that sound morality (as understood by Aristotle and the Christian tradition) begins with responsibilities to the most intimate association, the family, and then works outward to more distant relationships -- neighborhoods, larger communities, and then the country. To invert that order, or ignore one's primary responsibilities, is to reveal one's self to be "that `tribeless, lawless, hearthless man' denounced by Homer," Fleming observes.


The kind of "patriotism" embraced by John McCain rests on the same inversion of the moral order Fleming describes: Country (that is, national state) "before anything," or, as the Germans put it in the anthem of the Reich, "uber alles." These perverse priorities were not unknown to "heroes" of pagan antiquity, of course. Notes Fleming: "The hero's dilemma is portrayed starkly in in the case of Agamemnon, Homer's `lord of men,' who could not launch his divinely sanctioned expedition against Troy until he had first sacrificed his daughter."


The sacrifice of Iphigenia was necessary to placate an offended Artemis, who had sent an adverse wind to bottle up the Greek fleet. The cruelty of Agamemnon's ambition can be seen in the ruse he employed to lure his daughter to her death: He told her that the altar on which she was to be sacrificed was to be used in her marriage to Achilles. In other words, he used his daughter's happy anticipation of children as the bait in a trap intended to kill her, so that he could get on with the worthy project of killing the sons and daughters of others.


According to the story, Iphigenia was transported safely to a distant island, and a suitable animal was slaughtered in her place. The Trojan War -- intended to be a quick and glorious punitive expedition -- became a lengthy and pointless debacle, as wars generally do.


A similar tale of wartime child sacrifice is presented in Livy's account of the Horatti, or sons of Horace. During one of the countless conflicts in Rome's early expansion, Horace's triplet sons volunteered to meet the Curiatti triplets in a variant on single combat: The victors would win, on behalf of their city-state, possession of a small and by now long-forgotten village.


The battle claimed two of Horace's sons. The victory celebration claimed the life of one of his daughters, who was killed by the surviving brother for being romantically involved with an enemy of Rome.


French artist Jacques-Louis David, who became one of the most important propagandists for the Revolution, used his rendering of the Oath of the Horatii (see the illustration at the top of this essay) to encapsulate the "virtues" demanded by the patria: "Patriotism, fraternity, and martyrdom," as exemplified by Horace, who was willing to surrender his family for the State.


The stiff-armed pose of Horace's sons "was to become the standard manner of taking the revolutionary oath," wrote historian Simon Schama in Citizens, his magisterial account of the French Revolution. And many of those who took that oath were more than willing to kill those who didn't embrace the Revolution's priorities, such as the traditional Catholics of the Vendee.


Revolutionary oath, stiff-armed salute: David's influential rendering of the "Tennis Court Oath."

On March 12, 1793, a Jacobin press gang visited St. Floret in the Vendee to inform them that the Revolution required their children as conscripts in a war against other European Catholics. They had arrived to claim their quota of the 300,000 men, aged 18 to 40, that Paris intended to conscript into the revolutionary army.


Unwilling to fight, kill, and die on behalf of what they regarded as a God-less political system, the Vendeans were more than willing to do battle on behalf of their children and their freedom to worship: They fell upon the draft-nappers with pitchforks, cudgels, and any other farming implements that could be employed as weapons.


"The Vendeans resented the fact that their able-bodied young men should be taken far away from the farms that needed their labor to fight men with whom they had no quarrel, on behalf of those who were implacably opposed to every belief they had," observes British historian Michael Davies.


The Vendeans fought on their home soil on behalf of their kinfolk, their neighbors, and those with whom they shared a religious communion. This is true patriotism, whether or not one approves of it. Those who assailed them on behalf of the Jacobin regime did so in the name of a murderous abstraction called the State, and they displayed unstinting zeal in shedding what their hymn of hate called "impure blood." They often displayed demonic creativity in their labors, drowning thousands of bound Vendeans in the Loire River in what they called "Republican Baptisms."


It is the Jacobin concept of State-centered "patriotism" that prevails today, rather than the family-centered, telluric patriotism displayed by the Vendeans, who fought to hold back the State's assault on the Permanent Things.

American Jacobinism, circa 1942: Schoolchildren participate in the Pledge of Allegiance by using the American variant of the same Jacobin salute favored by Italian Fascists and German National Socialists (left). Below, orphans and other poor children display the same gesture en masse during the Pledge before watching a movie in 1938.


More than 250,000 Vendeans were slaughtered by Jacobin patriots, just as hundreds of thousands of Southerners were killed -- most of them in defense of home, hearth, and immediate community, not chattel slavery -- in Lincoln's Jacobinical war of consolidation. Whatever his weaknesses, Robert E. Lee is worthy of respect for his refusal to lift his sword against his "country" -- Virginia, home to his family and everything he valued -- on behalf of the State, something that can neither be seen nor felt but can kill millions without remorse.


The more abstract the object of allegiance, the more dangerous that attachment becomes. The grander a ruler's ambitions, the deadlier they become.


Today our rulers -- like the Soviets a generation ago -- preach a gospel of universal liberation through the supposedly skilled application of deadly force. And they expect that we will be willing to offer our children on behalf of "our country and the world," as Gary Qualls professed to be.


"Patriotism," we are and will be told, requires nothing less.


This is "patriotism" of the variety displayed in Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter, and Horace's willingness to sacrifice his sons.


A more suitable example of genuinely patriotic sacrifice was displayed by the defiant Antigone. When asked by Creon, the evil ruler her brother died trying to overthrow, if she had defied a royal edict by dressing and properly burying her brother's body -- which was forbidden on pain of death -- Antigone replied:


"Yes [I violated that decree], for it was not Zeus that had published me that edict ... nor deemed I that thy decrees were of such force, that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of to-day or yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth.... [I]f I am to die before my time, I count that a gain: for when any one lives, as I do, compassed about with evils, can such an one find aught but gain in death? So for me to meet this doom is trifling grief; but if I had suffered my mother's son to lie in death an unburied corpse, that would have grieved me; for this, I am not grieved."


Antigone understood that no mortal "law" can nullify God's eternal laws of justice, which dictate that we are to place our loyalty to family above that we give to any government or ruler. She died a horrible death in testimony of her understanding that when the interests of State and family conflict, the State comes in a very poor second -- such a distant second, in fact, that it would take a telescope larger than Mt. Palomar's to see it.


This is my country, or at least the most important part of it (clockwise, from upper left): Isaiah Athanasius, William Wallace, Katrina Antigone, Jefferson Leonidas, and Sophia Faith Grigg (click to enlarge).


My first and unconditional allegiance is to God. Immediately below it comes my loyalty and responsibility to those whose faces I saw over my cradle, those who shared the home in which I grew up, and those whose faces I expect to see over my deathbed. To that number I can add a few genuine friends who have become family in a sense that is something less than blood or adoption, but more than a metaphor.


I love and cherish many things about the United States of America. But the "country" that commands my allegiance is described in the paragraph immediately above.



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Dum spiro, pugno!

It's a Thieves' World After All

As I was going over
the Cork and Kerry mountains
I saw Captain Ferrell,
and his money -- he was countin';
I first produced my pistol,
then produced my rapier,
and said, "Stand and deliver -
or the Devil, he may take ya."


Whiskey in the Jar
(trad. Irish folk tune, most memorably performed by the incomparable Thin Lizzy).




Those who steal on behalf of the execrable state that rules us -- the most powerful and vicious enemy of mankind -- don't have the boldness and character of the relatively honest thief who narrates that ancient Irish folk song.

That nameless Highwayman didn't disguise his greed and violence in sanctimonious platitudes about the public interest. He simply jacked some wealthy and powerful guy, at some personal risk, in order to buy whiskey and impress his perfidious wife, who was named either Molly or Jenny, depending on the version of the song you prefer.


No, those who steal on behalf of Washington and its affiliates don't pick on the powerful. Whether they're stealing a country and its energy resources or ripping off domestic subjects via "civil forfeiture," they prey almost exclusively on those who cannot effectively fight back.


The clothes make the "man": If this tax-devouring thug isn't an armed robber, why does he dress like one? And why do his partners in crime ... er, public service routinely steal the property of honest businessmen (see below)?



State-authorized robbers infest every community across the troubled face of our lovely but tyrannized land.

They are planted thickly at critical points along major highways, lurking in the cut to ambush motorists and rob them at gunpoint on the pretext of fighting the narcotics industry.

The Official Robbers exploit municipal ordinances that permit the seizure of automobiles for trivial or unrelated offenses. They are sent out in swarms to confiscate properties in the name of "eminent domain." They even dispatch squadrons of military personnel to steal children. And of course, they labor on behalf of the IRS and other State-run criminal syndicates whose existence wouldn't be tolerated for a picosecond were the United States of America a free society in any sense.

In his fascinating book Adventures in Legal Land, Marc Stevens -- who advocates building a society on voluntaryist principles (he insists that no "service" supplied by government should be provided -- make that inflicted -- at the point of a gun) -- takes note of a fascinating fact: The only thing that separates public sector robbers from their private sector competition is the incantatory phrase, "without legal authority."


What, exactly, is "legal authority"? Simply put, it is the permission one group of thieves gives itself to steal from people, or commit other acts of criminal violence, with impunity.


The nature of the act remains the same, of course. It is always a violation of the Law -- call it Nature's Law, if you will, or God's Law -- to take an individual's property through force. But when (to paraphrase Augustine) a dominant band of robbers institutionalizes itself as a "government," it anoints itself with "legal authority" and re-baptizes its crimes as acts of public policy.


Thus, as Mr. Stevens points out, Arizona's state criminal code (section 13-1802) states:


"A person commits theft if, without lawful authority, such person knowingly ... Controls property of another with the intent to deprive him of such property...." (Emphasis added.)


Thus it stands to reason that under this statute -- and those just like it that exist in all fifty of Leviathan's sub-divisions -- one can control the property of others, through force and fraud, with the intent to deprive them of it, if said person is endowed with this numinous quality called "lawful authority."


(Interestingly, when Mr. Stevens published his book in 2002, he was able to find identical language in Arizona's statutes regarding murder and child molestation, both of were forbidden only to those who acted "without lawful authority," but obviously permitted to those thus consecrated. Since that time, perhaps because of Mr. Stevens' research, the statutes have been changed.)


"Lawful authority" is therefore a license to do exactly the same things lawless people do to the same innocent victims. This is why the vocabulary of "law enforcement" often has the same flavor of implicit or threatened violence one hears from common criminals, and the behavior of those who supposedly "protect and serve" us is increasingly indistinguishable from that of those from whom we're supposedly being protected.


This is splendidly -- and infuriatingly -- illustrated in two recent case studies, one of them the roadside robbery of an individual, the other the government theft of a huge amount of money from honest people across the nation.


The first case is that of Chris Hunt, a 28-year-old entrepreneur from Atlanta. Hunt, who owns an auto detailing business, was headed south on I-75 to visit his mother in their hometown of Dublin when he was waylaid by a team of robbers in the form of two Lamar County Sheriff's deputies.


Hunt had been speeding, for which he was mulcted via traffic ticket. He had a licensed handgun, something without which no sane person would travel (the gun, not the spurious license). The deputies said that Hunt looked "nervous," which is understandable: He had just fallen into the hands of armed strangers who have official permission to do lethal violence.


One of the deputies noticed curious bulges in Hunt's clothing. He demanded to know if it was money. When Hunt answered that it was, the deputy -- as can be seen in the video of the incident -- used a combination of conscious lies and threats to steal it from the young man.


"OK, man, here's the deal," drawled the barely literate thug with an air of practiced insincerity. "I'm gonna count it out and hand it back to you, OK?"


That was a lie. From the moment the deputy identified the money, he planned to steal (or, as people of his ilk prefer, "forfeit") it.


"Let's see how much you got, OK? Like, eight, nine thousand, maybe?" the deputy prodded an increasingly rattled Hunt, who replied that it wasn't that much. Unnerved by what was obviously shaping up to be a shakedown, Hunt muttered that he didn't want to take the money out of his pockets.


"Do it anyway," demanded the uniformed thug. "I'm tellin' ya to pull it out."


When Hunt hesitates just a second longer, the deputy dismisses the pretense that this is anything other than an armed robbery.


"Put your hands behind your back," he demands. "OK. This is what we're going to do. You can either cooperate, and not get the handcuffs...."


The instrument has yet to be invented that can identify a material difference between that threat, and those made by robbers in the private sector.


That "difference," of course, is the intangible quantity called "lawful authority," which in our system is reportedly contingent on the consent of the governed. Mr. Hunt seems to have remembered that principle, for all the good it did him.

Victim of Highway Robbery: Atlanta business owner Chris Hunt.



The deputy/robber told Hunt, "Look man, here's the deal: we're gon' take this money into our possession, OK?"


"Oh, no," Hunt replied, his anger in the face of armed intimidation doing him credit, "I'm not giving you authority for you to take that money into your possession."


"I'm taking the money," the deputy announced, consummating the crime.


Mr. Hunt was never charged with a crime. The practice of "civil forfeiture" doesn't require criminal charges: All that is necessary is for the thieves to allege some narcotics nexus with the money or other assets they steal. In this case, the thieves alleged that they smelled "burned marijuana" during the traffic stop, and observed "an untestable" amount of something that "appeared" to be marijuana in the car's interior.


Which means that the deputies, who had every reason to lie -- and at least one of them was captured lying on video ("I'm gonna count it and hand it back to you") offered no corroborating evidence beyond entirely subjective impressions. Sure, once the stolen money was taken back to the station a drug dog "alerted" to it, suggesting that it -- like nearly all Federal Reserve Notes in circulation -- has drug residue.


On this pretext, the thieves in blue handed the loot off to the robbers in pinstripes. The office of Maxwell Wood, US Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia, filed the proper paperwork to "forfeit" the stolen money by prosecuting it -- the money -- in civil court. The case is captioned "United States of America v. $5,581.00 in United States Funds."


Like countless others before him, and as with many, many more who will succeed him, Mr. Hunt has hired a lawyer to challenge the theft of his money, something no drug dealer would do for such a trifling amount. If he is blessed, Hunt will get some of his money back. More likely, he will find it too expensive to fight taxpayer-funded thieves in a court they control.


The crime committed against Mr. Hunt, though outrageous, is a fairly common one. The second case study of the Robber State in action is exceptional, both in terms of the vulgar display of corrupt power it entails and the compound dishonesty it embodies.


About eight months ago, the appendage of the Regime that calls itself the Justice Department stole more than two tons of authentic money -- in the form of platinum, gold, silver, and copper coins -- from the Evansville, Indiana headquarters of the Liberty Dollar organization, and from its affiliates nation-wide. Also taken was a substantial amount denominated in the spurious currency the Regime insists on calling "dollars."


The seizure warrant (.pdf) seeking official permission to carry out that crime depicts the Liberty Dollar as the key to a subversive scheme supposedly being carried out by the National Organization For the Repeal of the Federal Reserve and Internal Revenue Codes (NORFED) "with the intent to undermine the United States government's financial systems by the issuance of a non-governmental competing currency for the purpose of repealing the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Code."


What the warrant doesn't explain is how this is a crime. Is it a crime to conduct transactions by barter, or is this impermissible only to those who understand, and seek to abolish, the criminal syndicate called the Federal Reserve System? Is it a crime to pursue that policy change by other means, or merely by finding some non-Federal Reserve Note (FRN) means of buying goods and services?

Who is the "victim" in the supposed Liberty Dollar scheme, wherein willing buyers and willing sellers exchange FRNs for real money at an agreed price? Who is the victim where providers of goods and services agree to barter with people who wish to offer Liberty Dollars as their part of the transaction?


And how could anyone not in the employ of the Regime be plausibly accused of "undermining" a fiat "money"-based financial system that is in full and terminal collapse beneath the weight of its own incurable absurdities?


But none of these questions matter at all, since the robbers have the heavy artillery to carry out their crimes, and the "lawful authority" to "justify" them, at least to their own satisfaction. And now the architects of this massive crime -- the theft of real money, in the form of precious metals, from people nation-wide -- are preparing to "forfeit" $3 million in plundered Liberty Dollars and related assets. This is something of a pre-emptive strike, since the victims of this crime have already announced their intention to sue the criminals responsible.


As attorney James Ostrowski reports, the civil case will "proceed on the fiction that the money is the defendant," and, of course, no particular effort was made to inform the owners that their property is now "on trial." As is always the case, the thieves want to finish the job before the victims have a chance to defend their property.
















The Perks of Serving the Robber State: Lt. Angelo Adriani, commander of the Hoboken, N.J. SWAT team, uses his team's military gear to pick up chicks at an Alabama Hooter's following a "relief" mission to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. After photos of the SWAT team's romp were published, the team was disbanded, and Adriani was retired, with his full pension.

Once North America was home to a flawed but promising republic. It is now occupied by a corrupt, authoritarian kleptocracy -- a government of the robbers, by the robbers, and for the robbers -- that maintains an overseas empire, at least until its displacement by the next globally ascendant robber band.


And perhaps there is one potential blessing to be extracted from the unfolding imperial collapse: Freed from the distraction of foreign entanglements, there would be a chance -- slender as an insecure supermodel, delicate as the wings of a frozen butterfly -- that Americans might finally be able to start uprooting the deeply entrenched Robber State here at home.



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Dum spiro, pugno!

Banditti in Blue

(Thanks to the Strike The Root blog.)


A robber poses with his loot: The lucrative racket called "asset forfeiture," in which police steal money, cars, homes, and other valuables without convicting their owners of crimes, is a major reason why the fraudulent "War on Drugs" continues.


David Seward's problem wasn't his greed. It was his inability to transmute that greed into public policy.


Until August 2006, Seward was Chief of Police for the town of Troy, Texas (pop. circa 1,400). As I noted in this space shortly after the event, Seward was fired -- along with the three other officers who composed the police force -- amid accusations that he had misappropriated funds "seized during criminal investigations." Specifically, the money was confiscated after drugs were found in a car during a traffic stop.


He allegedly blew a relatively trivial sum -- described in the misdemeanor criminal complaint as "more than $500 and less than $1,500" -- on clothes, meals, gasoline, a rental car, vacations, and an embroidery machine (presumably for his wife).


For a brief period, Troy was deprived of the dubious protection of a police force, relying instead on the Bell County Sheriff's Department. Regrettably, the City Council reversed itself and reconstituted the police force.


Although Seward was arrested and booked on the theft charge earlier this year, he failed to appear for a June 11 court appearance and his current whereabouts are unknown.


Although he is the subject of an arrest warrant, the prosecutor very generously declined to tack on a "failure to appear" charge, as he doubtless would were the accused a mundane, rather than a former police chief. Furthermore, Bell County assistant prosecutor Ken Kalafut "did not know if law enforcement officers were actively seeking Seward," reported the Waco Tribune.


It's obvious that capturing Seward is not a pressing priority for his successors. After all, asset forfeiture -- the seizure of cash, cars, homes, and other valuables from people who are often neither convicted of, nor charged with, a criminal offense -- is a huge business in Texas, netting some $125 million for police agencies last year.


With such sums slopping police troughs across the state, it's impossible to believe that Seward's piffling misuse of a few hundred dollars here and there was the most serious instance of official corruption involving "forfeited" money. If he had somehow been able to swaddle his avarice in a serviceable bureaucratic rationale, Seward would still have his job.


Indeed, Seward's lack of discipline cost him what could have been a very lucrative gig. As Texas towns go, Troy (represented by the red dot on the map) is an insignificant insect, but it's a mosquito that's drilled into a major artery -- in this case, Interstate-35, which serves as a major conduit for drug traffickers and other traffic to and from Mexico.


This provides a ready-made rationale for seizing cash and other pelf from "suspicious" motorists, and anybody else who blunders into a traffic stop in or near Troy. In fact, according to a recent federal court ruling, the mere possession of a large amount of cash by a motorist provides sufficient justification for its seizure by law enforcement.


If he'd been blessed with a gift for "creative writing," or had the minimal self-control to avoid stealing small amounts of money, Seward could have turned his four-man police force into a lucrative shake-down outfit: A small town sitting astride a major interstate in the middle of nowhere would have been an ideal speed trap, and every traffic stop would be a chance for a big haul.


Support Your Local Highway Robber: Brian Gilbert, former Dallas County (Iowa) Sheriff, convicted of stealing $120,000 in "forfeited" money. Is it just me, or does he look a bit like Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy), the "King Sh*t" Washington cop from First Blood (below, right)?


That's how things worked for the Sheriff's Department of Dallas County, Iowa, located along Interstate 85, which is perhaps the country's most heavily traveled East-West freeway. Under the direction of former Sheriff Brian Gilbert, the Dallas County Sheriff's Department hauled in millions over the course of several years -- and then Gilbert got a little too greedy, making off with paper sacks containing $120,000 seized in a traffic stop.


Gilbert's punishment was a suspended ten year prison sentence, five years' probation, and a term of make-work "community service."


It's quite reasonable to believe that Gilbert's punishment would have been considerably more severe had he stolen $120,000 without the benefit of a wearing an official law enforcement costume.


Heck, given the leniency extended to Brian Gilbert for committing a major felony theft, David Seward really ought to turn himself in. Either that, or migrate to Iowa in search of a job in Dallas County.


East of Seward's old hometown can be found Kingsville, Texas, a rustic and picturesque town that serves as the Kleberg County Seat. More importantly, Kingsville is located on U.S. Highway 77, which in some sections runs parallel to I-35 and serves as an alternative route for drug couriers bringing their product into the U.S., and taking cash back out.


(Highway 77 also runs right through the City of La Grange, settled by Germans in the early 19th century and noted primarily for being near the little shack of ill-repute made famous in ZZ Top's imperishable blues-rock jam tune.)


NPR reported recently that "For impoverished cities and counties situated along 77 [the narcotics and drug money traffic] is like a river of gold. On one 15-mile section that runs through ... Kleberg County, the southbound lanes have become a `piggy bank,' according to the local sheriff. In the past four years, combined seizures [of cash] have surpassed $7 million."


That's why Kleberg County Sheriff Ed Mata "drives a gleaming new police-package Ford Expedition bought with drug funds," and this year was able to hit up the County Commission for a new fleet of vehicles for his department.


It's likewise the reason why the Kingsville PD, which patrols a somnolent city of 25,000 in which violent crime is as scarce as Ytterbium, "drive high-performance Dodge Chargers and use $40,000 digital ticket writers," as NPR reports. That same police force will "soon carry military-style assault rifles, and the SWAT team" -- yes, a town that size with an all-but-nonexistent violent crime problem has a SWAT team -- "recently acquired sniper rifles."


Ah, but the sniper rifles and other toys purchased with forfeited boodle are vital "homeland security" assets, insists Police Chief Ricardo Torres. "We have to be prepared," he insists, as he -- like other police administrators mainlining on drug money -- fatten up their budgets.


Oh, how David Seward must be kicking himself for blowing such a potentially profitable opportunity!

Photo courtesy of James Bovard.

But the forfeiture scam is much more than merely an inexhaustible source of police corruption and a mammoth kick-back scheme between narcotics lords and the law enforcement agencies who enforce drug prohibition -- thereby keeping narcotics prices artificially high.


Kingsville offers a very telling illustration of how federally abetted highway robbery by police, a major facet of the "war on drugs," has been a very effective means of militarizing "local" law enforcement by stealth.


Not quite a decade ago, Kingsville residents were quite understandably alarmed when the Army Special Operations Command at Ft. Bragg chose their torpid little town as the staging area for "Operation Last Dance," a live-fire exercise involving an uber-elite group from Delta Force called the Night Stalkers. The exercise included minor roles for the local police department, including its SWAT team.


According to Tomas Sanchez, at the time Kingsville's head of emergency management, "Operation Last Dance" involved (as summarized by WorldNetDaily) "a scenario that required military action because local police could not deal with civilians effectively."


"Martial law has been declared through presidential powers and [the] war powers act, and some citizens have refused to give up their weapons," Sanchez reportedly explained. "The police cannot handle it. So you call these guys in" -- that is, the Night Stalkers or similarly constituted special forces personnel. "They show up and they zap everybody, take all the weapons, and let the local P.D. clean it up."


Sanchez pointed out that "Operation Last Dance" left much of the town panicked and nearly all of it angry. Blackhawk attack helicopters used in the training exercise rattled windows and left many of the city's inhabitants terrified. One of the helicopters collided with a telephone pole and started a fire. Elsewhere trainees used live ammunition and set off explosive charges. The result was a general uproar, with angry citizens flocking to city council and county commission meetings and municipal authorities filing official complaints.


Now, however, with the help of both direct federal subsidies and the federally authorized take from highway shake-downs, Kingsville's "local" police department is quickly becoming a militarized affiliate of the homeland security state. And nary a syllable of protest can be heard.


Indeed, this ingenious back-door narco-subsidy of police militarization is taking place not only across Texas -- where Mexican drug profits are presumably plentiful, as are innocent victims who are fleeced in the name of forfeiture -- but nation-wide:

Lethal plaything: The Gwinnett County (Georgia) Sheriff's Department's armored SWAT vehicle.


*Brownsville, Texas recently used forfeiture funds to buy a Lenco BearCat armored vehicle, made famous in the police assault on harmless eccentric Robert Bayliss in rural Wisconsin;


*Georgia's Gwinnett County Sheriff's Department recently spent a wad of forfeiture funds to upgrade an armored SWAT vehicle that proved useless in a standoff that ended with the death of a 31-year-old woman;


*Canton, Ohio's Police Department dipped into the city till and found $100,000 in forfeited funds to buy its own armored SWAT vehicle, which was cheerfully described as a future mobile command post "for potential school shootings and terrorist attacks" -- neither of which, unlike police gang-molestation of attractive women taken into custody, has afflicted that part of Ohio, but, hey, keep a good thought;


*Police in Westland, Michigan presented the $114,113 purchase of an armored SWAT vehicle as a uniquely sweet deal. "There was no general fund money used—it was all drug forfeiture money,” exulted Westland Police Chief James Ridener. “The bad guys got to pay for it.” And once it's broken in and fully tricked out, Ridener continued, "We'll probably use it every week for narcotics [raids]."

"You see, kids, someday neat trucks like this will swarm our neighborhoods to flush out and carry away all the bad people whose names are on The Official List": Fresno, California's armored SWAT vehicle.



For those who pay attention, Ridener's last comment boldly underscores the evil symbiosis behind the murderous fraud called the war on drugs.


Why should police agencies want to "end" drug trafficking, when it is the source of inexhaustible largesse?


And why should police personnel consider themselves accountable those who live in the communities they occupy when they have Washington's permission simply to steal whatever amount they can and spend it on lethal toys?


(Yes, this decal is real, and is displayed on the bumpers of at least some LEOs. Thanks to J.D. Tuccille for bringing this to our attention.)



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Dum spiro, pugno!

Happy Insurrection Day!

Our Glorious Insurrectionary Heritage:
Minutemen gun down soldiers of the Empire, April 19, 1775.
Sic semper tyrannis!

It has often been said that if voting actually changed things, it would be illegal. In much the same sense it could be said that if the genuine meaning of the event commemorated on the Fourth of July were to become widely known, our rulers would respond by criminalizing the celebration and the document that should be at its center.


This isn't a hypothetical proposition. Around the turn of the 20th Century it was common for "Wobblies" -- radical activists belonging to the Industrial Workers of the World, a schismatic socialist sect -- to be arrested for reading the Declaration of Independence in public.


The inflammatory, seditious content of that document was largely unknown to the public even then, and when tranquil middle-class Americans were confronted with unsettling assertions like
the claim that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed" and that "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it," many of them assumed their ears were being assaulted by the rhetoric of foreign subversives.


A few years later, after the regime of the unutterably evil Woodrow Wilson had maneuvered the United States into a European war on the side of Great Britain -- still regarded with understandable suspicion by the Middle Americans expected to provide the coffin-stuffers for the conflict -- public recital of the Declaration was ruled a violation of the Espionage Act. At least one man was sent to prison for the supposed crime of reading aloud from Jefferson's document.


In his war message to Congress on April 2, 1917, the detestable Wilson demanded of Americans nothing less than complete and perfect uniformity of opinion and behavior. He also deputized Americans to assist the state in "rebuking and restraining the few who may be of a different mind and purpose" than that ordained by his government.


"If there should be disloyalty," Wilson promised, "it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression; but, if it lifts its head at all, it will lift it only here and there and without countenance except from a lawless and malignant few."


Less than a century and a half had elapsed since a "lawless and malignant few" had gathered in Philadelphia to certify their disloyalty to the King of England -- or, more properly put, a small group of principled men who understood government's subordinate role in human affairs assembled to withdraw their consent to be governed by that man and his minions.


The Declaration articulated some indispensable truths. The first is the understanding that individual liberty is a gift of God, and the powers of government are contingent and revocable. A man can live without government, but he cannot live, as a man, without liberty. Second, the single greatest enemy to individual liberty is the government claiming the right to rule that individual.


The third, and most troublesome, of those truths is this: There is an inherent right to rebel against the supposed authority of any government that becomes "destructive" of the rights invested in the individual by God. That right, like all others, inheres in the individual. But it can be exercised collectively in the form of principled, violent insurrection when such action is justified. Most of the rest of the Declaration consists of a legal brief justifying the insurrection already underway in the British Colonies, and the decision to sever the political connection between those polities and the British Empire.


Self-enraptured mass murderer: The unfathomably vile Woodrow Wilson pauses at his desk to pose for a photograph. And then ... it's back to the merry business of plotting war, conscription, confiscation of wealth, and repression of individual liberties!



It's hardly surprising that the Wilson regime effectively criminalized the Declaration: Like collectivists of all ages, Wilson assumed that man, who was created for the state, should be pitifully grateful for whatever transient "liberties" he was given by the state, and should be prepared to sacrifice everything on behalf of the state.


"It is not an army we must shape and train for war, it is a nation," Wilson declared, as he centralized the economy, orchestrated a frenzy of war hatred against Germany, and moved to impose conscription. His Vice President, Thomas Marshall, urged that citizenship be formally revoked for anyone found to be "not heartily in support of the Government in this crisis."


Bernard Baruch, chairman of the War Industries Board and de facto commissar of the economy, explained the logic of Wilson's war regime in admirably frank terms: "Every man's life is at the call of the nation and so must be every man's property.... The state is all; the individual is of importance only as he contributes to the welfare of the state. His property is his only as the state does not need it. He must hold his life and possessions at the call of the state."


Just as every man's life was considered property of the state, so were every man's offspring. This was made clear by the demented Theodore Roosevelt: "Any man who says, `I didn't raise my son to be a soldier' isn't fit for citizenship. That statement is on the same moral level with saying, `I didn't raise my girl to be a mother.'"














Raised to die on behalf of the State? Just a few of the many young men from Clovis, California who have died in the Idiot King's worthless war.

Killing and dying on behalf of the state -- the congealed essence of lethal violence -- was thus defined as a moral exercise as exalted as bringing life into the world. Or, as Bill Kauffman observes in his invaluable new book Ain't My America, to WWI-era collectivists like Wilson and Roosevelt, "Mothers were brood sows. Sons were herded into the abattoir."


Vaulting over the blood-stained decades that followed Wilson's administration, we find that today's adherents of the cult of the nation-state aren't content to send just their sons to the slaughterhouse; many of them are dispatching their daughters as well.


This was memorably dramatized during a recent "Military Appreciation Sunday" service at the Bell Shoals Baptist Church in Brandon, Florida (a video of which was very generously provided to me by a friend).


The service featured Lt. Col. Steve Russell, who commanded the troops who extracted quondam subcontractor for Washington Saddam Hussein from his "spider hole." The proceedings began with brief remarks -- laden with pious poses and orotund vowels -- by the late Pastor Forrest Pollock, in which he gave a detailed recital of the evils perpetrated by Saddam while he was on Washington's payroll -- a remarkable exercise in mote-obsession and beam-ignoring. He then urged attendees to pay heed to a nauseating video presentation offered by Russell's GOP-jingo PAC, Veterans for Victory.


The video first depicts a father in his 30s rising early in the morning to kiss his wife and son, then depart, clothed in the habiliments of the Empire's contract killers, to murder people in a distant land who have done our country no harm. Wretched as that spectacle is -- almost unbearably so, given that it is set to the "tune" of a soul-less corporate simulacrum of country pop -- it is the second vignette that is genuinely abhorrent.


Families ripped asunder by war: A mother consoles her children as their father departs to kill on behalf of the State (left); a man torn between his God-ordained role as father and State-appointed role as soldier embraces his children before leaving them behind (below).


The scene begins with a middle-aged couple walking out of their home, each of them flanking a daughter dressed in a BDU. Their little girl, obviously, wasn't raised to be a "brood sow"; she's a fully realized member of the killer caste.


"Somewhere a man and woman ... are waving their girl goodbye; for gone are the days of pigtails and curls and candle-light lullabies," keens the "singer" in the video's soundtrack as the couple and daughter hold hands in prayer. "If they had their way, she'd stay young forever and never be far from home. But freedom has drawn her heart to danger's shore -- and for freedom they'll let her go."


Ah, yes: "Freedom" -- defined here as a gift conferred by the Almighty State on some, through the expropriation and death of others.


The video ends with the wife and son being visited by a Marine chaplain who confers on them a folded piece of cloth in exchange for their living, breathing, irreplaceable husband and father. His life was extinguished carrying out what George W. Bush, in a voice-over, describes as "the highest calling of history" -- that is, enforcing the divine will of the State through lethal violence.


Mr. Bush, no stranger to blasphemy, insists that their mission resonates with "the words of the prophet Isaiah," as recorded in chapter 61:1 ("The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me ... to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound").


Christians who genuinely understand that passage recognize that it foretold how Jesus Christ would liberate from the captivity of sin those who accept Him as Savior. As the High Priest of Washington's murderous Civil Religion, Bush follows in the jackboot-steps of Lincoln, Wilson, and their damnable ilk in depicting the State as savior.

If that gesture seems similar, there's a reason: American schoolchildren reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1940s (left); dutiful German citizens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics offer the same gesture of allegiance to their version of the welfare/warfare state (below, right).


Throughout the United States today, Americans will celebrate the sanguinary majesty of that State and its pitiless apparatus of mass murder and repression. We should instead be celebrating the divine gift of individual liberty that was the focus of the "lawless and malignant" insurrectionists who gathered in Philadelphia -- disreputable men like Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Hancock -- to shout their defiance at a previous globe-straddling empire.



How different would our society be today if, instead of the Pledge of Allegiance, schoolchildren (in private or home schools, of course) were required, each day, to read or recite this paragraph from the Declaration of Independence:


"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."


What if, instead of starting every day being marinated in the language of submission (to pledge "allegiance," after all, is to proclaim one's status as a vassal bound in service to a feudal lord, or "liege"), youngsters were taught, on a daily basis, the principles of self-responsibility, individual liberty, and principled rebellion? As I stated earlier, if this kind of thing were to become common, our rulers would simply criminalize the Declaration. They've done it before, and they would be more than happy to do so permanently.


The sobering truth is that, due to the cultivated docility of the American populace, Jefferson's document, much like the Constitution created eleven years later, poses no threat to the designs of our rulers.


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Dum spiro, pugno!

Fiat Justicia Ruat Caelum

"Ha! I kill me!" Unfortunately, the death of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq is not metaphorical.











"...the rulers of the states are the most criminal group in a respective population. With a limitation of their power their criminality tends to decrease; but it still remains exceptionally high in all nations."

Pitirim Sorokin



What was the offense for which Saddam Hussein was executed?


Most people in a position to answer that question -- those with an attention span superior to that of the typical goldfish -- would probably say that Saddam suffered the long drop to the end of the rope as punishment for his multifarious crimes against humanity.


That list would include waging aggressive war against Iran, the use of chemical weapons in that conflict and against his own subject population, or for other mass murders and acts of domestic terror.


The correct answer, as former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi recalls, is that the formal charge for which Saddam was hanged was not the murder of millions or even thousands, but rather the execution -- following a proper trial, conducted under established law and settled standards of due process -- of 102 Shi'ite men from the village of Dujail.


Those men were convicted of plotting and carrying out an attempt on Saddam's life when he visited the Shi'ite village 35 miles north of Baghdad in July 1982. At the time of that assassination attempt, Saddam was a subcontractor for the world's most malevolent regimes -- the one infesting Washington, and the one afflicting Russia -- and so he was obviously capable of bestial behavior. Yet in dealing with the attempt on his life, Saddam behaved as if he were a legitimate head of state*.


Saddam let his security forces round up about 800 people and winnow from them the relative handful of people who had some direct connection to the attack. After a two-year inquiry, a 361-page indictment was compiled naming some 148 suspects. By that time, 46 of the suspects had died under torture at Abu Ghraib prison, a fate not unfamiliar to those imprisoned there under American rule following Iraq's "liberation." The remaining 102 were tried, convicted, and executed for the attempt on Saddam's life.


Interestingly, the attempt by Shi'ite radicals to murder Saddam came just months after the Syrian regime of fellow Ba'athist Hafez al-Assad dealt with an uprising organized by the Muslim Brotherhood (a beneficiary of U.S. aid since the early 1950s, as Robert Dreyfuss documents in his book Devil's Game) in a small town called Hama. Assad dealt with that rebellion by unleashing his military and pounding Hama into blood pudding massacring an estimated 10,000-25,000 people.



Saddam dealt with a much more personal threat in Dujail. Had he behaved as the prevailing caricature would suggest, that village would have been destroyed root and branch: The town itself would have been subject to Carthaginian destruction, and the extended families of its residents would have been liquidated. Instead, Saddam's government undertook to distinguish the guilty from the innocent and punished only those determined to have been complicit in the attempt on his life.

As Bugliosi notes, Saddam "was killed [by execution] for killing those who first tried to kill him." More than five years ago, George W. Bush ordered American military personnel to invade and occupy Iraq, thereby authorizing the killing of Iraqis who had never harmed or threatened Americans in any way. Thousands of Americans and -- most likely -- hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died as a result of Bush's orders. Sundry justifications have been offered for this unnecessary bloodshed. Among them was the charge that Bush flung at a September 2002 fund-raiser in Houston: "After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my Dad." Even if that were true -- something we have ample reason to doubt -- it must be pointed out that Bush's Daddy tried to kill Saddam first during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.



The revenge motive, whether or not it reflects genuine filial passion on Bush's part, makes as much sense as any of the other rationales for the ongoing conflict in Iraq, aka The War In Search Of A Reason. And this fact underscores the fact that the legal case for convicting Bush is much stronger than the one used to convict Saddam.


Consider: Saddam was the direct target of a documentable assassination attempt, and his response was to find those specifically responsible and punish them. Bush the Younger, claiming an irrepressible desire to punish those responsible for a dubious alleged attack on his father, instigated a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, devoured hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth, helped bring about an accelerating economic crisis, and threatens to metastasize into a regional or even global conflict. Saddam was made to stretch a rope for much less than this. In fact, the "crime" for which Saddam was executed was nothing of the sort.


In his new book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, Vincent Bugliosi takes note of this contrast, but he curiously doesn't elaborate on it. That's probably the only notable shortcoming in the case made by Mr. Bugliosi in his timely and necessary book.


Bugliosi made his reputation by prosecuting the Charles Manson, so he's well-equipped to deal with the blank-eyed sociopath defiling the White House. He insists that Bush can and must be put on trial -- within the United States, not at The Hague -- for the deliberate, premeditated murder of Americans sent to die in Iraq. Those deaths were entirely unnecessary and occurred because of the depraved indifference to human life displayed by the Grand and Glorious Decider in bringing about the Iraq War.


According to Bugliosi's analysis, Bush can find no legal refuge in the fact that Congress "authorized" and funded the war, since "consent is not a defense to the crime of murder. Further, even if it were, it is [well-established] law that fraud vitiates consent. So the consent that Congress gave Bush is nullified by the deliberate misrepresentations he made to Congress in inducing it to give him its consent."


Additionally, after he leaves office Bush is fully liable for any criminal actions he committed while he was president, unless his successor issues a plenary pardon. Under existing law, it is not necessary to prove a specific intent to kill in order to demonstrate "premeditation"; the act of "lying in wait" to attack a victim who subsequently dies is sufficient.















No lack of jurisdiction: Bush's murder victims come from every state and most U.S. territories. Any state Attorney General, or county prosecutor, could pursue an indictment against Bush.


As applied to Bush's crimes, this principle would mean that it's not necessary to prove that Bush intended for any specific American or Iraqi to die in order for him to face the charge of first degree murder. At an absolute minimum, however, "Bush's taking the nation to war would constitute implied malice, that is, an intent to do a highly dangerous act with reckless disregard and indifference to human life, and hence, at least second degree murder in every state, as well as under federal law," writes Bugliosi.


Thus "any state attorney general in the fifty states (or any district attorney -- called the state's attorney in cities like Chicago and Miami -- in any county of any state) could bring a murder charge against Bush for any soldiers from that state or county who lost their lives fighting Bush's war," the author continues.


In fact, such an attempt has already been made by Ed Felien, a former City Councilman from Minneapolis. Last May, Felien petitioned the Minneapolis District Court for a writ of mandamus "alleging that President Bush committed third degree murder by sending Minneapolis National Guard troops to Iraq on false pretenses," reported Jason Leopold of The Public Record. Felien has appeared before a District Court judge to argue "that a county attorney should be ordered to arrest the president on murder charges when he arrives in the city for the 2008 Republican National Convention."



Unfortunately, Felien's complaint is attenuated -- and thus made ineffective -- by various less important allegations of oil price-fixing and drug distribution.


But this doesn't foreclose the possibility of other, more tightly written complaints being filed by other officials in Minnesota or elsewhere.


George W. Bush habitually displays the sociopath's frigid indifference to the suffering of others, but he is exquisitely sensitive to impositions on his own leisure time.


Yeah, war's a real laugh riot -- isn't it, Idiot Boy?


Witness, as just one example, Bush's recent lie (widely reported while Bugliosi's book was on the presses) that he had given up golfing as an act of sacrificial solidarity with U.S. troops and their families. Bugliosi points out that of the approximately 2,535 days of Bush's presidency through last January 1, "Bush spent all or part of 908 days, an incredible 36 percent of his time, on vacation or at retreat places.... Two and a half years of the less than seven years of his presidency in which his main goal was to kick back and have fun."


And boy, has the Bushling had fun.


While Iraqis are dying by the tens of thousands, American troops are on their fourth and fifth rotations into hell, and more than four thousand American families have lost children, husbands, fathers, and mothers, Bush's life has been one protracted lark punctuated by the unpleasant occasional necessity of pretending to work. Neither the rigors of education nor the burden of painfully acquired wisdom has ever left is impress on Bush's face -- something genuinely remarkable for someone in the seventh decade of life.


During the past five years of war, the expression most often seen radiating from the face of that in-bred, pampered Man-Child has been the kind of delight one would expect of an idiot child who can indulge every transient whim. No matter the suffering inflicted on others by his war, no matter how many Americans die or suffer life-altering injuries, Bush "is always seen with a big smile on his face ... and is in good spirits," notes Bugliosi. "How would that be possible if he was suffering?" Just weeks after 9/11, while Americans were still shattered by the event, the New York Times noted that "Mr. Bush's nonchalant, jocular demeanor remains the same."



In an August 2002 interview with Runner's World, while Americans were killing and dying in Afghanistan and his administration was getting ready to roll out the case to expand the killing to Iraq, Bush complained that his daily jogging regimen was suffering: "It's sad that I can't run longer. It's one of the saddest things about my presidency."


"All in all, it's been a fabulous year for Laura and me," effused Bush in December 2001, a year incurably disfigured in the memory of the rest of us by 9/11 and its aftermath. "We're having the time of our life," he gushed during his second inaugural in January 2005, nearly two years into the war of choice he inflicted on the world.


Given that his reign has taken place in a permanent state of quasi-vacation, Bush probably won't notice a dramatic change of lifestyle when he retires. Perhaps the only significant difference will be that he'll no longer be able to kill people at whim. He really should spend the remaining decades of his life being either pursued or punished for the murders he has committed. One wonders how the Secret Service would react to process-servers or bounty hunters charged to carry out court orders resulting from the legal process Bugliosi outlines; I think such incidents would be both entertaining and edifying.


While Bugliosi's criminal case against Bush is compelling, there are weaknesses in the rest of the book.


He insists, for instance, that Bill Clinton and Al Gore were somehow less inclined toward the promiscuous murder of foreigners than Bush has been, which is demonstrably untrue. Clinton shed blood needlessly in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, as well as in the politically convenient anti-impeachment military campaigns of 1998: The "Monica Missiles" missile attacks on Afghanistan and Somalia in August, and the "Desert Fox" bombing of Iraq in December. And Clinton's 1999 78-day terror bombing of Serbia, supposedly to prevent "genocide" in Kosovo, was an act of mass murder easily as prosecutable as Bush's assault on Iraq.

Don't forget Clinton's war crimes: Belgrade, the capital of a pro-U.S. European country, burns under assault by NATO bombers during the 78-day terror bombing ordered by Clinton in 1999 (left); a young girl who lost her legs in a bombing attack is just one of hundreds of civilian victims of the assault (below, right).


Where Bush -- as Bugliosi capably documents -- did everything he could to precipitate war with Iraq (to the point of discussing with Tony Blair various ways of provoking a first strike from Saddam), Clinton used a January 1999 diplomatic meeting in Rambouillet, France to present the Serbs with an ultimatum he knew they would have to refuse: The price of avoiding a bombing was Serb acquiescence to the military occupation of their country. "They [the Serbs] need some bombing," one State Department Clintinoid commented at the time, "and that's what they are going to get."


If it was just for Saddam to be forced to dance between heaven and earth because he executed would-be assassins, Bush deserves no less for his acts of mass murder, and Clinton really should join his successor in the dock as well. That's one reason why both wings of the Ruling Party will work in tandem to shelter Bush and his minions: Both sides are mired in the same morass of murderous criminality.


This is why Barack "The Holy One" Obama has disavowed any intention to pursue criminal investigations of the previous administration should he be elected, or even to support impeachment this year. "I think you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breaches, and intentional breaches of the president's authority," he commented more than a year ago.


Apparently, waging aggressive war, institutionalizing torture, and eviscerating due process protections are merely "policy options" from Obama's perspective. That's certainly the view of the criminal class that produced him, and in whose service Obama would deploy his remarkably well-developed gift for mass deception.

_
* By using the term "legitimate" in this context, of course, I don't intend to imply that the state enjoys any innate legitimacy.


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Dum spiro, pugno!