Jihadi, or "Jackass"? Either Way, the Joke's On Us

What if Adam Gadahn, rather than engaging in treason or sedition, is simply involved in an elaborate “Jackass” stunt?

Some people inclined to recreational self-destruction put leeches in their eyes, or commit self-lacerating acts of mayhem with heavy machinery. Perhaps Gadahn's conversion to radical Islam, and his emergence as an al-Qaeda spokesman, was prompted by the same masochistic desire for novelty. It's entirely likely that the greatest damage Gadahn will do to our country will result from the precedent likely to emerge from his indictment for treason.

Gadahn was indicted yesterday (October 11) by a federal court in California for providing “material support” to terrorists and enlisting in al-Qaeda. Prior to his conversion to Islam, Gadahn was a very nice Jewish kid named Adam Pearlman who lived on a goat farm in southern California.

In pursuit of madder music and stronger wine – well, not really, since Jihadis generally disapprove of music, and alcohol isn't halal – Pearlman converted to Islam and at some point reportedly traveled to Pakistan. From that distant clime Gadahn/Pearlman, under the stage name “Azzam the American,” has dispatched several propaganda videos praising the 9/11 attacks, issuing threats against the U.S., and admonishing infidels to join al-Qaeda.

“We have a US citizen who betrayed his country,” insists Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, oblivious to the fact that the same can be said of practically everyone in the federal government who takes a taxpayer-funded salary to carry out activities not sanctioned by the Constitution. McNulty insisted that Gadahn's broadcasts served al-Qaeda's cause by helping to “demoralize” and “intimidate” Americans.

Remember that description of Gadahn's offense well, since it will serve as a standard for future sedition trials, whether or not the FBI ever manages to lay its hands on the wretch.

"The war on terror is a fight for hearts and minds, and Gadahn gave himself to our enemies in Al Qaeda for the purpose of being a central part of their propaganda machine,” insisted McNulty. “By making this choice, we believe Gadahn committed treason - perhaps the most serious offense for which any person can be tried under our Constitution." (In fact, it is practically the only crime for which the federal government can prosecute citizens under the Constitution.)

While the description of Gadahn's alleged crimes may be extravagant, McNulty's description of the young man's behavior is plausible: He does seem to have “adhered” to a group identified as an enemy of our nation, an accusation that certainly should be tested in court.

However, Executive Assistant FBI Director Willie Hulon of the agency's National Security Branch was quick to extract from this specific case a general principle that is pregnant with lethal mischief. Gadahn, insisted Hulon, "represents a new breed of homegrown extremist, who has chosen to betray the country of his birth, and align with the Al Qaeda terrorist network."

So far, rather than being a representative of a “new breed,” Gadahn appears to be sui generis. Yes, it's possible that al-Qaeda sleeper cells have been sown in our home soil. But how many of those cells are composed of “homegrown” jihadis, rather than the imported variety? How can they be identified? And – the key question – what measures do the Feds intend to use in identifying them?

U.S. Atty. Debra Wong Yang, whose Los Angeles office prosecuted the case, accuses Gadahn of “advocating al Qaeda's terrorist agenda, an agenda that includes the overthrow of the United States government and the murder of American citizens.... The charges returned today by a federal grand jury demonstrate that the criminal justice system will not sit passively by while a United States citizen engages in such activities."

So far, Gadahn's “activities” consist not of planting bombs, but rather uttering abominable things. True, making propaganda broadcasts for an enemy in time of war is a criminal offense by any reckoning, but here's the rub: We're not at war. Congress has declined to issue a declaration.

And besides, al-Qaeda is a criminal syndicate, not a sovereign power. This means it should be dealt with primarily as an issue for law enforcement, rather than the military. Yes, that's John Kerry's position, but it's correct anyway – and by being right about this one issue, Kerry has used up his quota.

If the Feebs manage to find Gadahn, he would likely be the first U.S. Citizen to be tried before one of the special tribunals authorized under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. If convicted he could face the death penalty.

Should Gadahn be caught, prosecuted, and convicted, I think a better sentence would be to strip him of his citizenship and banish him from our shores forever, forcing him to live among the Mohammedans, which in my view would be punishment enough.

Yes, this apparently suits him just fine, at least right now, but chances are someone who was raised as a Jewish kid from California, and developed a taste for thrash metal, will eventually grow tired of the ascetic lifestyle imposed on followers of the Prophet. At some point he will ache to see women attired in something other than ambulatory tents, and to hear Biohazard rather than the ululations of the local muezzin – and when this happens, he will suffer.

Yes, I'm being facetious – about a number of things, including the possibility that Gadahn will be caught, since he's probably an intelligence asset, albeit a highly deniable one.

The Los Angeles Times points out that “FBI counterterrorism officials were aware of Gadahn for years.” While in California, “Gadahn had become close to two radical Muslims who were followers of the radical cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called blind sheik who is serving a life sentence in federal prison for his role in the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center.”

Remember the terror cells that were strewn about our country, and have taken root in some unlikely places? Sheik Omar was the Johnny Appleseed of the American Jihad, and he was deliberately allowed into the country by the CIA. In 1990, Omar was issued a visa by the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, despite being on a State Department terrorism “watch list.” The embassy official who approved that visa was a CIA officer.

It's also worth pointing out that Sheik Omar was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international terrorist fraternity whose chief organizer in recent decades was Said Ramadan. According to Robert Dreyfuss's book Devil's Game, Ramadan became a CIA asset in 1953, and afterwards was involved in every significant phase of building the modern Islamic terrorist network.

After arriving in the US, Sheik Omar was brought into the bosom of a group of radical Muslims who had received training and support from the federal government; they became the cell that staged the first World Trade Center attack. Within that group was a former Egyptian army officer named Emad Salem, who was working as an informant for the FBI – and who was able to demonstrate, after the bombing, that the FBI had prior knowledge of the attack.

The Feds likewise had several informants in the Elohim City white supremacist redoubt that served as a key staging base for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. In fact, it's likely that there's not been a significant incident of this kind since COINTELPRO went into business decades ago that has not been run by people connected to the feds in some way.

Whatever becomes of Gadahn, and however he became the bizarre and repellent spectacle he's become, the real story here is that our rulers have now established a precedent for indicting and prosecuting those whose utterances are said to “demoralize” the public in the never-ending “war on terror.”

So if this is Gadahn's idea of an elaborate prank, the joke's on us.

Fencing Us In, Not Keeping "Them" Out

To say that Congress's vote to erect 700 miles of “secure” fencing along the southern U.S. border is an “empty” gesture is a felonious act of understatement. It is barren of any meaning save cynical political opportunism: The fence offers politicians on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border (which is slated for abolition in 2010 anyway) to strike faux-populist poses while screwing down the police state lid on their respective helot populations -- who are soon to be co-mingled in one polity, anyway (about which more anon).

Mexico is threatening to protest the border fence at the UN. Please forgive me for not being terrified by the news. Outside of the guild of professional wrestling referees, it is impossible to find a body with less credibility or power to enforce its decisions than the United “Nations" (nor should it have that power, of course).

The Bush regime's media auxiliaries have touted the “border fence” as testimony of the comparative seriousness of the Republicans in matters of border control. This is just one of several themes that the shills and spokesthings for the Grand Old Pederast Party have been throwing at the wall in the hopes that something will stick. This is done in the desperate (and probably forlorn) hope that the Republicans can change the subject from the perverted Page-Turners on the Hill – the scandal serving as the proverbial elephant in the living room as mid-term elections approach.

Illegal immigration, like terrorism and narcotics trafficking (all three of these subjects are related, naturally), is probably impossible to prevent, but can be mitigated through intelligent policies, such as ending “birthright citizenship.” Milton Friedman's insight that it is impossible to have a welfare state and open borders remains valid.

Were the US serious about dealing with illegal immigration, we would abolish birthright citizenship, scale back (preferably eradicate) the federal welfare state, end subsidies and other material support for Mexico's kleptocracy, and stop undermining the status of English as our common tongue. But this problem – once again, like drug trafficking and terrorism – is simply too profitable, both to the regime in Washington and its corporatist consorts, to solve.

The Cold War begat the behemoth called the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), a self-sustaining, incestuous cluster of corporate interests and government bureaucracies that thrive on perpetual war. The Homeland Security State (HSS), which incorporates many elements of the MIC, similarly subsists on the persistent peril of terrorism.

The obvious selling point of the HSS is its supposed mission of protecting us from savagely bearded Mohammedans bent on swaddling our women in burqas, beheading infidels at random, and reducing the rest of us to Dhimmitude – a scenario as grim as it is implausible. But in order to “strengthen itself in exercise, and entangle [itself] in precedents” (to borrow James Madison's useful expression yet again), the HSS is working to exploit public concerns over illegal immigration.

A few weeks ago we learned that several major military contractors, both nominally American (Raytheon, Northrup) and foreign (Sweden's Ericsson), were in competition for a $2.1 contract to provide electronic sensors and other hi-tech hardware for the Border Patrol. The prize was ultimately awarded to a consortium led by Boeing (also known as the lead agency in Beijing's corporate lobby).

Query: With so much money to be made – both by corporate contractors and the politicians whom they ply with campaign contributions and other emoluments – from illegal immigration, why would any serious effort be made to end that “crisis”?

Query the second: With the United States and Mexico scheduled for consolidation in 2010 via the Security and Prosperity Partnership (commonly called the North American Union), why are huge sums going to be spent on hi-tech surveillance and monitoring devices along a soon-to-be-abolished border?

Apart from the corrupt enrichment of the political class, the obvious answer is that the border “crisis” is being used as a convenient way to build the sinews of our domestic surveillance state.

A good example of how this works in practice was offered by a series of raids conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an appendage of the Heimatsicherheitsdienst ("Department of Homeland Security" in the original German) in the Northeastern U.S.

Noted one press account (and pay careful attention to the highlighted portions):

"Homeland Security agents took to Ohio streets the past week, arresting 154 undocumented immigrants. The agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices in Boston, Philadelphia, Buffalo and Detroit came heavily armed and loaded with files and warrants for deportation. They took in immigrants from 30 countries and every continent save Antarctica.... The men and women had been caught entering the country illegally and were ordered to court but never showed or had been ordered deported but never left, authorities said.... No recent event spurred the sweep, government officials said.

`Sept. 11 showed us that, to have security, we have to have an immigration system with integrity,' said Marc A. Raimondi, national spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists had taken advantage of lax enforcement, he said. `You can't have integrity if there is no consequence for abusing the laws or ignoring a court order.'

Among those taken were immigrants who had been in the U.S. for a decade or more. They must leave homes, jobs and maybe children born here who are U.S. citizens.

`If they had complied and left 10 or 15 years ago, that wouldn't be the case,' said Rob Baker, field office director in charge of detention and removal for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Ohio and Michigan.

He noted that, by the end of September, seven agents will be based permanently in Cleveland to cover such operations throughout Ohio."

In addition to serving as a pretext for the quartering of Homeland Security goons in local communities, the issue has inspired at least some local officials to petition the Feds to intervene in that fashion.

Here's one example:


"A state Superior Court judge based in Hazleton has written to Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff seeking more manpower in the fight against illegal immigration. Judge Correale F. Stevens, elected in 1997, has been hearing from county judges and local elected officials about the growing problem of illegal immigrants settling in Northeastern Pennsylvania."

Another example is provided by a Hazleton, Pennsylvania ordinance punishing people who transact business, hire, or, rent housing to illegal immigrants. That example illustrates how the immigration “crisis” can be used to compel common citizens to act as informants and enforcers.

After signing the measure, Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta said his office would “train city workers in how to check people's immigration or citizenship status....” He also asked the City Council to approve a measure “requiring all tenants to register with the city and prove their legal residency.”

Here's where the issue gets really interesting. Once again, pay careful attention to the highlighted portions:

"`We're also going to be talking with Immigration and Customs (Enforcement) to see if possibly we could receive some assistance,' said Barletta, who said he wore a bulletproof vest to the vote as a precaution because the issue was emotionally charged.... Other municipalities across the country also have considered acting to address illegal immigration. Ordinances similar to the Hazleton measure have been proposed in the Florida communities of Palm Bay and Avon Park and the California towns of Escondido and San Bernardino."

The bulletproof vest was most likely a gratuitous piece of political stagecraft. The intended message, most likely, was that radical elements among the illegal immigrant population (and their advocates) would take a pot-shot at the stalwart mayor.

While not minimizing the dangers posed by some elements on that side of the conflict – such as the toilet bowl crust in human form called coyotes who exploit, abuse, and sometimes kill illegal immigrants – it's possible that Mayor Barletta had more cause for concern about falling prey to an angry landlord or business owner: The Hazleton ordinance suspends the operating licenses of businesses caught hiring illegals, and authorizes fines of $1,000 a day on landlords who have illegals as tenants.

One need not be an advocate of open borders (I certainly am not) to experience a momentary twinge of misgiving over the idea of forcibly deputizing businessmen and landlords to inspect citizenship papers.



The most unsettling aspects of this ordinance (which was, predictably, immediately challenged in court by the ACLU), are first of all the fact that Hazleton is clearly a pilot project, and secondly, that this draconian experiment – creation of a “Your Papers, Please” Regime In One City – is being quietly supported and keenly observed by the DHS.

It is true, of course, that some communities along the U.S.-Mexican border have literally come under siege by illegal immigrants, as well as paramilitaries (from both the Mexican military and militias in the pay of that country's narcotics cartels – or do I repeat myself). But in keeping with Grigg's First Law of Federal Action (“Those problems Washington does not create, it exacerbates by intervening to impose a `solution'”), some people in those besieged communities have discovered that they may have more to worry about from the federal agents supposedly there to “protect” their communities from the invaders.

The Tucson Citizen recently reported that the Border Partol – which, remember, is going to benefit from the billions of dollars' worth of surveillance gear – has been seizing automobiles “based simply on the presence of a passenger who is an illegal immigrant.... The vehicle's owners then face steep impound fees and long waits to retrieve their cars....”

This practice was successfully challenged in court in the 1999 case Gete vs. Immigration and Naturalization Service – yet it persists to this day.
“It doesn't make any difference whether you're taking [illegal immigrants] to the grocery store or taking them from the desert to the hospital,” insisted Border Patrol spokesman Jesus Rodriguez. “There is no free pass.”

The same applies, of course, to people who car-pool with fellow workers who are here illegally.

“Are they saying we're supposed to check somebody's immigration status?” asks real estate agent Cecilia Gutierrez-Arce, a legal permanent resident of the US whose family includes “US citizens, illegal immigrants and a Border Patrol Agent.” “Are we supposed to be spying on our neighbors? Our relatives?”

Chris Simcox of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps answers that question in the affirmative: All Americans have the civic duty to issue the demand “Your Papers, Please,” and report illegal immigrants to the Feds.

“It would certainly have a chilling effect on employers,” Simcox points out.
It certainly would. And it would also certainly habituate Americans in the practice of acting as spitzel, chivatos, stukachi – each of those terms is the epithet “informants” rendered in German, Spanish, and Russian.

Obviously, the federal government has the constitutional responsibility to secure our borders and normalizing our immigration situation . And just as obviously the political class has abetted the problem, thereby cultivating a politically useful crisis. Now we're told that our choices are between open borders and bloody chaos, or the creation of a garrison state (the latter being the regime's preferred solution to every conceivable problem).

Many conservatives are convinced that a surveillance state within secure borders would be an acceptable arrangement. Apparently I'm not a genuine conservative, because that's not a description of any America I would want to live in.

North Korea has exceptionally secure borders. So did Soviet Russia under Josef Stalin. I'd like to think we could do just a bit better than that.

Tonight's Episode: The Tory Perspective, or There Goes my Severance (THIRD UPDATE; see comments section)

A brief preface:

This one is long and unfortunately heavy on history, but PLEASE stick it out. Toward the end of this entry I will share some very significant personal news that is directly related to the substance of this essay. Forgive me for “burying the lead,” but in this case it's necessary to do so.

In the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, those now honored as the fathers of American Independence were often disparaged as extremists – uncouth radicals given to hyperbole, ad hominem attacks on on King George and his agents, alarmist assessments of seemingly innocuous policies, and other off-putting rhetorical excesses.




Heading up the Department of Rhetorical Excess for the Freedom Faction was Samuel Adams, who was also its canniest and most effective organizer.

As Mark Puls points out in his splendid new biography Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution, Adams – although eclipsed by Washington, Jefferson, and his own second cousin John – was the chief instigator of the independence movement. To paraphrase James Madison, Samuel Adams took alarm at the first experiment on the liberties of the American colonists, and resisted abuses of power before they became institutionalized as policies.

During a 1761 conversation with John, who at the time didn't see the British government as a potential threat, Samuel “said he was suspicious of British power in the colonies and believed that leaders in London had `hostile designs' to rule over them,” notes Puls. “For more than a century, Britain had a `hands-off' policy concerning the colonies, but that attitude seemed to be changing.... Samuel told [John] to be on guard for signs of growing power by royal officials.”

The wealth and productivity of the Colonies had indeed provoked more than a few concupiscent glances from London. Once France was effectively chased from the Americas at the end of the Seven Years' War, England emerged as the most powerful Empire since Honorius woke up one morning in 410 AD to find himself hip-deep in Visigoths.

But debt is always empire's greedy and implacable consort, and London was looking to the Americas to pick up the tab. This meant, among other things, keeping Redcoats garrisoned along the western frontier – allegedly to provide security against terrorism from the Indians, but in fact to exact what London considered due obedience to its dictates.

As taxes were ramped up, efforts to avoid them escalated as well. This prompted London to begin a “war on smuggling,” employing “writs of assistance” operating in a fashion somewhat like roving wiretaps, national security letters, and other “homeland security” measures operate now.

And King George's administration created its own special tribunals – admiralty courts in Nova Scotia (from which the British had expelled the Acadians in the New World's first instance of “ethnic cleansing”) to prosecute those who ran afoul of the new impositions.

None of this was lost on Samuel Adams, even though most of the public was utterly oblivious to what was going on. He himself had been an elected tax collector, albeit one who displayed a pronounced indisposition to force people to pay up. The one good thing to come out of that disreputable job, notes Puls, is that Adams “developed a feel for the pulse of public opinion that no other local leader could match.”

But Adams, unlike the trend-sucking invertebrates that typify the contemporary PR industry and the cringing, timid sycophants who pay for their advice, wasn't content to “ride the wave” of public opinion. Leaders don't ride waves; they make them. This is why Adams made an issue out the 1764 Sugar Act when practically nobody else paid attention to it.

“In his view,” writes Puls of Adams, the Sugar Act “would lead to more taxes, more royal officials, and dependence on Britain, and eventually would render the self-governing legislatures powerless.... If an outside body such as Great Britain was allowed to tax [the Americans], then their liberty was gone.”

But Adams stood practically alone; nobody else in the political clubs or merchants' associations seemed to understand or care about the issue. He needed “to rouse the indignation over the taxes” -- which were imposed not just on sugar but on various other raw materials and finished products -- “and turn theoretical arguments about government and liberty into battle cries.”

This meant haranguing as many audiences as he could reach, using suitably alarmist and intemperate language, and then organizing a boycott of British goods that was calculated to provoke heavy-handed reprisals from London. This was intended to make clear and tangible the latent tyranny of London's policies.

Adams on one occasion defined his political strategy as: Put them in the wrong, and keep them in the wrong. He was, in a word, a provocateur. He was also an unabashed demagogue, both in the original sense of being a teacher of the public and in the less elevated sense of being prone to what some might now characterize as “violent” and “extremist” rhetoric.

And Adams was not at all afraid to tear into those he deemed collaborators with tyranny, including those who were passive out of a desire for respectability.

“If ye love wealth more than liberty,” wrote Adams in addressing that cowardly and sanctimonious lot as the War for Independence began, “and the tranquility of servitude more than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May you chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were ever our countrymen.”

Now, that's extremism. Would to God that our nation today were to come down with an epidemic of it.

Thomas Paine was a similarly gifted practitioner of patriotic invective, even though he didn't possess Samuel Adams' genius for organization (and was less commendable in many other important ways). Paine's most memorable – and important – use of his God-given gift of patriotic vituperation came in his treatment of King George in Common Sense.

The chief task before Paine in composing that Pamphlet was to provoke a sufficient portion of the torpid American public – not a majority, but rather an active, informed minority, who would influence a plurality – into reclaiming their sovereign rights from a government bent on centralizing power and reducing the colonists to peonage.

To that end, Paine directed his fire at the person of King George III, describing him as the “Royal Brute of Great Britain,” a “crowned ruffian” who was “nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang; whose savage manner of preeminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers.”

This isn't to say that Paine believed America would be better off with a different king. Rome had some experience with this kind of thing, as Montesquieu observed in The Spirit of Laws. "Instead of being roused from her lethargy by Caesar, Tiberius, Gaius Claudius, Nero, and Domitian, she riveted every day her chains,” he observed. This was because, "If she struck some blows, her aim was at the tyrant, not at the tyranny."

What Adams, Paine, and other intemperate, insult-spewing “George haters” of the Founding Era understood, however, was that it is impossible to take aim at tyranny without targeting the tyrant as well. It wasn't enough to speak in diaphanous generalities about abuses of power; the abuser had to be named and shamed, along with his collaborators, both active and passive. When a political system had become corrupted into a tyranny built on loyalty to a man, those who agitate for freedom will have to deploy arguments against that man – that is to say, ad hominem attacks.

As the late Murray Rothbard pointed out, Paine “delegitimized and desanctified the king in American eyes.”

I'm not that familiar with the reaction of Tory pamphleteers to the attacks on King George and his agents. I would be willing to bet, however, that some of them -- while professing to sympathize with the grievances of their over-taxed fellow Americans, and acknowledging the troubling trend toward despotism – saw King George, the most powerful ruler of his time, as a persecuted “victim” of those rhetorical assaults.

As the British noose tightened on Boston in reaction to the agitation of the Freedom Faction, Tory publicists no doubt strove to find some way to focus blame on Samuel Adams and his kindred “extremists,” whose radicalism had supposedly precipitated the crisis, and whose unproductive personal attacks on the King supposedly alienated moderate and respectable people.

The Tory position, in a phrase, would be this: Samuel Adams and his fellow radicals are to blame for our troubles, because they pissed off the King and those who support him.

What would the Tory Perspective sound like today -- an era when America is living under another hereditary Emperor named George, who is also the most powerful ruler on the planet?

Transposing the basic sentiment into contemporary terms, it might take the form of a warning against “Feeding the Police State Through Hate” -- the “hate” in this instance consisting of rhetorical attacks, done in the style of Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine, against the beady-eyed, in-bred, bloody-handed little simian who presently defiles the presidency.

“The major problem in attacking the wrong-doer rather than the action is the natural human tendency to allow room for the wrong in sympathy with the victim of ad-hominem style attacks,” lectures this voice of what could be called Tory “respectability.” “ As critics of the Bush administration level personal insults at President Bush, his apologists defend every presidential usurpation of power and assault on the Constitution -- in the name of fighting the war on terror, of course.”

“Apologists for the Imperial Presidency play upon the natural revulsion of the uninformed for this type of personal name-calling and ranting,” continues this tutor in moderation, who insists that “principled Constitutionalists ... can agree that giving power to the offender by attacking the person rather than the action plays right into the hands of those who seek to exploit it.” The Bush administration “has almost perfected the art of exploiting this flawed approach, and are masterfully using it to excuse their abuse of the Constitution -- along with the alarming accumulation of power in the Executive Branch.”

The man who performed that feat of verbal contortionism appears to have been auditioning for the rhetorical equivalent of the Cirque du Soleil: He places the blame for our descent into presidential dictatorship on those who have been warning about it, even as he has studiously avoided engaging in the struggle against the all-but-consummated transformation of our republic into a Reich.

Indeed, had our Founding Fathers acted on counsel of that sort, the United States would never have come into existence. And following that advice today will certainly result in the extinction of what remains of our liberty.

The author of those words is Alan Scholl, a man for whom I have great affection and no little respect. My feet have been under his table on more than one occasion, and my family has worshiped alongside his. We have been the beneficiaries of his kindness and generosity, and until last Tuesday (October 3), I was a professional colleague of Alan's on the staff of The John Birch Society, for which he serves as Director of Mission and Campaigns.

On Tuesday I was fired because I refused to shut down this blog, which I created and maintained on my own time.

According to Alan and the others who made the decision to fire me, I have used this private, after-hours web diary to express opinions and espouse positions contrary to the purposes and principles of the JBS. They insist that I have given scandal to those who have erroneously been identified as the Society's “core audience” -- Bush-enraptured Republicans, the very people working most energetically to build a presidential dictatorship.

Alan, who is in charge of shaping the Society's campaigns, has said, in so many words, that the JBS cannot undertake a campaign to oppose the emerging Fuhrer-Reich because by doing so it would become a “pariah.”

Given that the Society is already routinely – and dishonestly – compared to the KKK and groups of that ilk, what does it have to lose in terms of its public image by taking a principled stand in favor of civil liberties? And what does it have to gain by passively “riding the wave” on immigration and related issues, rather than (forgive the mixed metaphor) distinguishing itself from the conservative herd by standing up for the Constitution, individual liberties, and the rule of law?

With the legal foundation laid for an American gulag, I have to ask: Is freedom worth risking one's reputation, and livelihood? We know the answer of those who pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.”

There are many, many good and capable people working in and for the JBS. Its principles are still sound, as is the concept behind its creation, which was to be the modern equivalent of Samuel Adams' Commitees of Correspondence. Those principles, and that concept, remain laudable and worthy of the attention of sober and serious patriots.

What the JBS needs, at the leadership level, is modest amount of Samuel Adams' intrepidity.

The New American, for which I was a contributor since 1990 and a Senior Editor since 1994, remains the finest journal of its sort in circulation. It still draws on the talents of many capable and principled writers, the best among them – now as it has been for some time – being William F. Jasper, the surviving Senior Editor and a very close friend.

Bill tells me that the Society is recovering very well from a tumultuous (and badly overdue) change in administration a year ago. Many key people, both volunteer leaders and former staffers, have returned to the crusade. The organization boasts a terrific media department as well as an impressive – and expanding – web presence.

It is my sincere hope and prayer that the organization grows and prospers – but more importantly, that its leadership quickly rediscovers the advertised purpose of the JBS, which is to lead an organized, principled struggle to restore our freedoms.

And by the way --



It looks like I'm not the only commentator recently pink-slipped for committing unabashed acts of "Bush Hatred":

"Comic Paul Mooney (most recently of Chappelle's Show) was midway through a taping of the famed Harlem theater's weekly variety show when the plug was abruptly pulled. Mooney claims the show's producer, Suzanne de Passe, told him material in his monologue had offended unnamed officials from Time Warner, whose chairman, Richard Parsons, heads the Apollo Theater Foundation's board of directors and is among the country's most prominent black Republicans."

"They wanted me out of there, the Republicans, the Time Warner people," Mooney insists. "They said I was Bush bashing, and it was hatred. I felt like I was in Iran or Cuba or somewhere." (Emphasis added.)

The routine, as Mooney describes it, was fairly vulgar, but not the sort of thing that used to get Lenny Bruce locked up. Were I in his place, I would have dropped the remarks about presidential daughters Jenna and Barbara, who are non-combatants, and focused entirely on the Wee Decider himself. Indeed, the bit that "killed" did exactly that: "Mooney also did a bit on how the letters in Bush's name can be manipulated to produce the number 666, proving Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez's recent claim that Bush is the devil. `The audience went crazy for that,' he says."

"My point is ever since 9/11, we lost all our rights," Mooney contends. "They're practicing on the minorities, but when they get good at it they're going to do it to the white folks."

As a fellow "Bush-Basher of Color" who just lost a job for giving offense to the Dear Leader and his followers, I'm not entirely in accord with Mooney's analysis: It seems to me that the regime is "practicing" on all of us without regard to color. I do agree with Chris Floyd's take on this incident: "[T]he ethos of the Leader-state officially ratified by Congress last week is spreading fast...."