Charlie Pierce is alarmed and wondering just what in the hell is going on out Jesusstan:
Tell me, as we all sweat out whether or not anyone in Iowa gives a polar vortex about traffic problems in Fort Lee, can we all spare a moment to be concerned that some of our fellow citizens are both well-armed and completely off their nut?
- * Numerous completed bombs.
- * More than 100 pounds of chemicals, including acids, fuels, oxidizers and explosives precursors.
- * Glass jars labeled "ammonium chloride," sulfur" and "potassium chlorate."
- *Additional components of destructive devices, including igniters and detonators.
- * Instruction manuals and books detailing explosive manufacturing and booby traps, with titles like "The Poor Man's James Bond," "Booby Traps," "Deadly Brew" and "Highly Explosive Pyrotechnic Compositions."
- * Miscellaneous weapons, including an automatic Ruger Mini-14 rifle, other guns and knives.
- * Unspecified "controlled dangerous substances" and packaging materials.
And this guy wasn't the only one this week, either.
Andrew Scott Boguslawski, 43, also had a remote-control device to detonate the bombs, Madison County Prosecutor Stephen Pronai said. Boguslawski's civilian job is as a groundskeeper at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in south-central Indiana. Prosecutors could not say definitively yesterday whether the blueprints in his car were for the facility where he worked. Boguslawski also had a bulletproof vest in his car, Pronai said. "He said something to the trooper about making a bomb vest," Pronai said. Lt. Col. Cathy Van Bree, a spokeswoman for the Indiana National Guard, said Boguslawski is a specialist in the guard who does intelligence analysis and has top-secret clearance.
Lovely. So he not only stockpiles the stuff, but he's been trained on how to use it, and he's had access to information as to where it would do the most damage, and all of that on our dime.
The argument really isn't about guns, per se. The argument is about a well-financed, and profitable in return, marketing strategy by weapons manufacturers and their sublets in Congress, and the media bubble that they all inhabit, through which people are fed a constant diet of indigestible paranoid crud about the government and the people in it. This isn't all coming directly from some crackpot on a shortwave in upper Michigan. It's the barely concealed subtext of everything that Wayne LaPierre has said in public in his entire career. It's what's behind the winks from Princess Dumbass of the Northwoods, who brags in her book-like product about giving a gun for Christmas as an act of "civil disobedience." There is a culture being created, and there are reckless, opportunistic people who are turning a buck on it, and not everybody marinating in that culture is necessarily the most well-balanced jar on the shelf. This isn't about guns. It is about weaponry. It is about why someone would arm themselves so luxuriously, and how they came to believe it was necessary. I think we've been awfully damned lucky so far.
The only part of that post that The Gadfly would protest is the last line where Pierce states, "I think we've been awfully damned lucky so far."
To which The Gadfly would respectfully remind Charles that the human being being cradled in the arms of this other human being in the following photo probably does not share such a sentiment:
That is a photo of a fireman emerging from the smoking rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building carrying a dying infant in his arms. The Federal building was bombed on April 19, 1995 in Oklahoma City, good old U S of A. The attack killed 168 Americans, including 19 children in a daycare center. The attack was perpetrated by some right wing, government hating assholes not at all unlike the kind noted in Mr. Pierce's blog post above, who believed they were simply doing their patriotic duty of ensuring that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of babies in daycare centers," or some such other bullshit all in the name of FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOM!!
The Gadfly believes, sadly, that it is just a matter of time before these lunatics perpetrate a similar crime against their fellow citizenry, and as Charles Pierce correctly noted, their lunacy is being goaded, akin to jamming a stick in a hornet's nest, by the likes of conservative public political and media figures such as Sarah Palin, Wayne La Pierre, the jackals at Fox "News" and the screechers on AM hate radio.
And when that crime eventually is committed, watch how quickly those instigating fuckers scurry from public view, like cockroaches do when a light is turned on, and then begin caterwauling loudly from their hiding places about how they and their precious "political views" are being scapegoated and repressed by the evil liberals, and never, ever, of course, accepting any accountability for their own actions in motivating the loons to begin with.
The Gadfly truly hopes he is wrong about this. But it has become pretty clear to him that the disease of Obama Derangement Syndrome has metastasized in right wing political circles, and the violence-tinged rhetoric and veiled threats from these bastards has most definitely escalated to near fever pitch.
That does not bode well, and from The Gadfly's perspective that means that it is going to be a long, and dangerous, 2+ more years until the 2016 election.
----TFG
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