Limbaugh-Leninism

The de facto Dear Leader of the Republican-centered conservative movement: Rush Limbaugh, seen here in front of a large portrait of the object of his greatest affection.


"Kto kogo?"

"Who/whom," or "Who does what to whom?" -- the central question of politics, according to Vladimir Lenin.



A nineteenth century pundit wearily observed that British political parties behaved like competing carriage drivers, energetically splattering each other with mud while frantically pursuing the same course to the same destination.


An unknown Russian long ago devised the now-familiar joke in which a bright college student, drowning in inpenetrable ideological cant, asks the smug Party hack posing as a professor to explain, in easily understood terms, the material difference between capitalism and socialism.


"Oh, that's easy to explain," replied the professor, his face twisted into a triumphant smirk. "Capitalism is based on the exploitation of man by man; socialism works exactly in the reverse!"


Granted, the latter gibe ignores or misrepresents the ideal of free market capitalism. But it is part of a large and ancient literature of wisdom -- much of it encoded in humor -- regarding the myriad ways that embittered enemies who supposedly represent diametrically opposed principles can wind up mimicking each other even as they seek to annihilate each other.


A suitable, if simplistic, depiction of this tendency is found in the classic Star Trek episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," a Civil Rights allegory from the series' notoriously uneven third and final season.


The story, which is told with an unusually clumsy narrative touch, has the crew of the Starship Enterprise, en route to aid the victims of a planetary ecological disaster, intercepting a fugitive named Lokai, who had commandeered a Federation shuttlecraft. Lokai is given medical care and taken into custody as a suspected hijacker. Although nobody comments about the matter, Lokai's skin is black on one side and white on the other.



Subtlety wasn't this story's strong suit: Frank Gorshin (left) steps out of his Riddler costume to play an even campier role in an even more embarrassing outfit in one of Star Trek's more heavy-handed theme episodes.



Shortly thereafter, the Enterprise encounters a second ship, which -- owing to a depleted production budget -- is said to be "invisible."


That remarkable craft carries personage nearly identical to Lokai, who identifies himself as "Commissioner Bele" from Charon (a mythical planet found in "the southernmost part of the galaxy," nudge-nudge wink-wink, not the then-undiscovered moon of Pluto). Bele demands that Captain Kirk surrender Lokai into his custody, claiming that the fellow Charon native is a terrorist, seditionist, and mass murderer whom he had pursued for centuries.


At one point Bele surprises Kirk and Spock by referring to Lokai as the obvious product of a "lesser breed." Nonplussed, Kirk points out that Bele and Lokai are obviously members of the same race. This prompts an offended and incredulous Bele to elaborate: He and his people are black on the right side; Lokai and his followers are all black on the left side, and thus inferior. This supposedly critical difference provoked a conflict that was literally millennia old.


Bele demands that Lokai be turned over to him for trial and execution. Lokai demands that the Enterprise crew rally to his defense and kill Bele. Kirk and his colleagues, who have better things to worry about, can't wait to be rid of both of them. But the particulars of the plot don't matter much here. Suffice it to say that Bele, whose request for custody is turned down (there's the matter of the stolen shuttlecraft to deal with), eventually hijacks the Enterprise and sends it to Charon, where he believes he will at long last be able to bring Lokai to justice.


Upon the ship's arrival it is learned that the inhabitants of the planet had long since exterminated each other. Rarth than extinguishing Bele and Lokai's murderous mutual hatred, this revelation prompts them to flee the ship and return to their dark and lifeless homeworld to finish their struggle.


Unbearably campy today, this episode must have had some resonance when it was first broadcast in 1968: The description of the burned, ruined cities littering the surface of Charon would carry some emotional weight during a year that saw flames erupting in riot-torn American cities.


But when the unwieldy racial metaphor is dropped, the story actually works as an allegory for any supposedly irreconcilable conflict in which hate-motivated factions seek to exterminate each other over differences only they can discern.


Recently in this space I described how the "progressive" and "conservative" factions in our political system are working, in dialectical symbiosis, to build a totalitarian Homeland Security State, each of them foolishly assuming that the apparatus of regimentation and coercion would be used to punish the other. There is a desperate need, I wrote, for people of all political persuasions "to decide that they love liberty more than they despise their political enemies...."


At the very least, people have to be willing to repudiate the operational principle of mass politics since Lenin, the idea that the fundamental question of politics is "Who does what to whom."


Well, as a friend of mine might put it, that's a whole lot of "Ain't-gonna-happen."



In the same week that one of the Establishment's dying newsweeklies giddily proclaimed that "We Are All Socialists Now," Rush Limbaugh, speaking on behalf of the conservative movement he now leads, effectively admitted that "We're all Leninists now."


Lenin wedded the exterminationist principle kto kogo ("who/whom") to the totalitarian formula for a "scientific dictatorship," which he defined as "Power without limit, resting directly on force."


During the Bush era, conservatism was reduced to nothing more than a set of rationales for the centralization of unlimited power in the executive branch. I had long wondered how conservatives would react when that power was transferred to someone who is not of their tribe: Would they cynically re-discover the dangers of executive tyranny, or would they simply entrench themselves and wait until they were restored to power, confident that they could use it to avenge themselves on their enemies?


In a protracted rant delivered to his audience yesterday (February 11), Limbaugh made it clear that he was choosing the latter option.


"We lost the election," eructated the self-worshiping* radio blatherskite who now serves as the de facto head of the Republican Party. "But they're going to lose down the road. They will not control government forever, and when our turn comes, we are going to turn the power of government against the left.... We're going to build and use the big government that they have built and turn it right against them. We are gonna turn the power of government agains the left, and against Democrats in ways they cannot imagine.... We are going to use the power that the left is centralizing in the federal government to punish them, to break 'em up, and to make them pay for this.... It's time they got a taste of their own medicine, and it's going to happen folks, because they're not going to hold power forever."


Addressing those on the Left, Limbaugh warned that they are "creating a monster that you will not be able to control forever.... We are taking names. We are taking names now. We are monitoring who on the Left is going to deserve payback, and it's going to be hell. This much I promise you."


"If [those on the Left] are going to bastardize the American system, if they are going to make this government large and powerful and intrusive, someday they're going to lose it," continued the founder and president of the Flatulence in Broadcasting Network. "But they are going to lose it after having amassed all this power. We will control it.... We're going to use the power of government just like the Left is using the power of government.... It's going to be a bigger, more powerful, stronger government -- and we're going to turn it against the Left in ways they could never have imagined."


Unlike his lemur-browed, synapse-deprived imitator Sean Hannity, Limbaugh is intelligent enough to know that the Democrats inherited a central government that had been gorged on power during the eight years of Bush the Dimmer's reign. The fact that the final consequential act of the Bush Regime was to create an economic dictatorship headed by the Treasury Secretary has not evaded Limbaugh's notice. The creation of a huge apparatus of regimentation, surveillance, and detention under Bush took place with the active support of Limbaugh and his ilk. So he is lying when he imputes sole responsibility for all of this to the Democrats.


But rather than urging that this edifice of tyranny be demolished, Limbaugh counsels his followers to be patient in the expectation that they will soon occupy its commanding heights, from which they can proceed with the extermination of their political enemies.



How it was: In Utah County, the country's most Republican voting district, a Red State Fascist expresses his political loyalties with all the gentility we've come to expect from his faction.



During the eight years of Bush the Destroyer's rule, the bully-boy Right consistently condemned the Left not for embracing the State, but for impeding the growth of the State when it was under Republican control.


Every expression of skepticism about the Regime's foreign wars or the expansion of its power at home was treated as a form of sedition. (The mush-mouthed cretin Michael Reagan, a third-tier pseudo-Limbaugh, actually called for critics of the Iraq War to be taken out and shot.) Perhaps the one good thing about Limbaugh's revanchist rant was the fact that he's now dropped the pretense of believing in limited government.


As luck or something else would have it, Limbaugh chose to unbosom himself of his exterminationist sentiments on the same day that James Adkisson was sentenced to life in prison for his murderous shooting rampage at a Knoxville, Tennessee Unitarian Universalist Church last July 27. Adkisson, a 58-year-old unemployed veteran, wrote a four-page manifesto prior to the assault describing the shooting as an act of politically motivated suicide terrorism: He wanted to conduct a "symbolic killing" of people he held responsible for support in the "damn left-wing liberals" in the media, government, and the Democratic Party leadership.


James Adkisson, would-be suicide terrorist, following his attack on a Unitarian Church in July 2008.


"I'm absolutely fed up," wrote Adkisson. "So I thought I'd do something good for this country [--] kill Democrats til the cops kill me..... Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them. Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I'd like to encourage other like-minded people to do what I've done. If life ain't worth living anymore don't just kill yourself do something for your country before you go. Go kill liberals."


"Someone had to get the ball rolling," Adkisson insisted. "I volunteered. I hope others do the same, it's the only way we can rid America of this cancer, this pestilence."


The two most urgent complaints against liberals listed by Adkisson were that they were "tying our hands in the war on terror" and opposing the war in Iraq -- that is to say, that they were impeding the exercise of government power, not that they were abetting its growth. His home library included screeds written by (or at least on behalf of) Sean Hannity, Michael Weiner (aka Savage, and Bill O'Reilly, all of whom spent the years 2001-2009 promoting the Regime's foreign wars and domestic crimes, and execrating those who opposed the onslaught.


Adkisson appears to be the incarnation of what Lew Rockwell calls "Red State Fascism" -- an aggressive strain of embittered, totalitarian nationalism that has infected the Republican-aligned conservative movement.


His ideological derangement propelled him to carry a shotgun into the sanctuary of a church, where he unloaded on congregants as they watched a children's play. He managed to murder two people and injure six others before he was disarmed and subdued by three unarmed men who acted with courage and composure that command the respect of those of us who do not share their political and theological views.


Left-leaning blogger Sara Robinson makes a compelling point when she describes Adkisson's crime as "exactly the kind of rancid fruit that would inevitably take root in an American countryside thickly composted with two decades of hate radio bulls**t, freshly turned and watered with growing middle-class frustration over the failing economy." She, and others of her persuasion, are likewise on firm footing in predicting that other acts of theatrical political violence by people of Adkisson's ilk are likely to follow.


But then, as it always does, the polarity of this conflict shifts, with self-described liberals dropping pregnant hints about government action to reclaim the "public airwaves" from the Right Wing and issuing dark warnings about prosecuting their political rivals for expressing opinions that incite others to violence.


Neither side seeks to de-fang the "monster" described by Limbaugh; each seeks to be its master and use it to destroy the other. Bele and Lokai swap roles, with the prey becoming the predator, and the conflict continues -- a self-sustaining cycle of mutually reinforcing hatred that will eventually be consummated in mass bloodshed.


Bele was black on his right, Lokai on his left. The Democrats are the party of the welfare/warfare state; the Republicans, on the other hand, are the party of the warfare/welfare state. And both of them are tools of an entrenched Power Elite that is delighted to cultivate the collectivist hatreds from which totalitarianism is sprouting even now.

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*Limbaugh is currently unmarried and, by choice, has no children. (On several occasions he's made it clear that he never had any desire for children.) The very first thing one sees in his living room, according to this account, is a "life-size oil portrait of El Rushbo, as he often calls himself...." What kind of person chooses such a work of art as the centerpiece of a home he shares with nobody else?

My thanks to Mike Tennant at the LewRockwell.com blog for bringing Limbaugh's putrid peroration to my attention.



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The Draft-Nappers Are Stirring

The Patron Saint of the "Leave Us The Hell Alone" Caucus: Charlie Anderson (James Stewart), the Individualist hero of the film Shenandoah.





“Virginia needs all of her sons, Mr. Anderson."



“That might be so. But these are my sons! Mine! They don’t belong to the state! When they were babies, I never saw the state coming around here with a spare tit. We never asked anything of the state, and never expected anything. We do our own living, and thanks to no man for the right."





Charlie Anderson, a widowed father of six sons, deflects the demands Lt. Johnson, leader of a Confederate conscription gang near the beginning of the film Shenandoah.







The kind and thoughtful people who seek to relieve us of the burden of planning and managing our own lives are preparing to seize our children, and any of us who happen to be within the targeted age range (most likely between 18 and26). With quiet persistence, the Draft-Nappers are plotting to reinstate military slavery.





As with every presidential administration since that of George Bush the Elder, Barrack Obama and his comrades (particularly the leering wad of incarnate malice known as Rahm Emanuel) are famously enamored of the idea of government-mandated "national service."





One of Obama's cherished conceits is that his reign will somehow usher in an era of national service that will be both "universal" and "voluntary" -- as if disagreements over the merits of government-imposed labor, and the type of activity that qualifies as "service," would evaporate when exposed to his irresistible charisma.





On the strength of American Grit: What it Will Take to Survive and Win in the 21st Century, a new book by Republican neo-con strategist Tony Blankley, it seems clear that Obama's Republican critics will actually out-flank him to the left on the issue of conscription. Blankley's critique of Obama's National Service proposal is not that it would be an impermissible imposition on individual rights, but that it is insufficiently militaristic and of inadequate scope.





The second chapter of Blankley's slender book is entitled "Bring Back the Draft." A return to military slavery is mandatory, he writes, in order "to replenish our dangerously over-stretched armed forces."





Rather than repudiating the interventionism that has left the military "dangerously over-stretched," Blankely takes the opposite view, giddily anticipating additional wars with Iran and Pakistan, and an open-ended, generations-long conflict with the amorphous threat he, and others of his dishonest ilk, have designated "Islamofascism."





As Blankley acknowledges, "there is a limit to the number of people willing to volunteer to be a soldier -- a dangerous career that is often severely disruptive of family life -- and that pool has clearly been tapped out." Accordingly, "We will soon be faced with the choice of severely scaling back our role in the world or expanding the army through conscription."





One measure of the depth of Blankley's totalitarian impulses can be found in the fact that he never considers the possibility that scaling back "our" role in the world (that is, the role assumed by the government ruling us) is the correct and moral thing to do. Nor does he display any hint of considering the possibility that the thin trickle of volunteers to fight the wars that tickle his inverted libido represents something of a public referendum.





If the so-called war against "Islamofascism" were really a life-and-death struggle akin to the Battle of Salamis, recruiting an army at the point of a gun would hardly be necessary. Conscription is never necessary to inspire men to defend their homes and families, and it is never used for that purpose. It is carried out for the sole purpose of compelling men to kill and die on behalf of the State and the degenerate clique running it.





The British-born Blankley, former Chief of Staff to Newt Gingrich and current pundit for both the Washington Times and The McLaughlin Group, has the mien of a gangster, which he cannot help. To judge from his writings, he also has the soul of a Commissar.





His book is a brief but tedious harangue devoted to the theme of using the power of the government to compel people to love and serve that same government. His chapter on the draft abounds with the language of collectivist compulsion, most of it performed in the key of "communitarianism."





Despite the fact that most Americans eschew military service, he insists that it would be possible to forge a "national consensus" on behalf of reinstituting military slavery; such a "consensus" would be an agreement among those heading the two major wings of the ruling Establishment Party, rather than widespread support among the public (which itself would not make conscription legal, constitutional, or just).





Sentencing other people's children to servitude, or worse:

"The Bloody Vote," a WWI Australian anti-conscription pamphlet condemned those who voted in favor of a referendum on the military draft.* (Click to enlarge.)





Blankley's vision of "consensus" is probably quite similar to that of the despicable Woodrow Wilson, who -- as he introduced a bill to impose conscription -- declared that that the draft "is in no sense a conscription of the unwilling; it is, rather, selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass."





The specifics of Blankley's proposal are quite familiar to those who have been watching, with growing disgust and alarm, as proponents of conscription start to fine-tune their arguments and oil the machinery of military servitude: He calls for "a compulsory program for all Americans aged eighteen or nineteen, men and women, after most have graduated from high school. The military, reviewing these graduates' transcripts, extracurricular activities, and medical reports, would select however many they needed to fulfill their draft allotments for a two-year period of military service. Those not chosen by the military would undertake a two-year civil service obligation," which may include "homeland security" roles of various kinds.





This is essentially the same proposal contained in legislation sponsored by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-New York), who, oddly enough, is treated with reflexive partisan scorn by Blankley. And it is also quite similar to the plan proferred in the Establishment publication Foreign Policy by retired U.S. Army Colonel William L. Hauser, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and naval veteran Jerome Slater of the State University of New York, Buffalo.





The program envisioned by Hauser and Slater would "combine a revived military draft with a broader public-service program as already practiced in some European states -- a `domestic Peace Corps.'" Unlike Blankley, they would permit draftees "to choose between military and nonmilitary service" -- that is, to select their preferred form of servitude -- at least initially. Given that providing additional military manpower is the entire point of the proposal, the domestic service "option" would probably last just long enough to get the measure enacted by Congress.





Discussing what they consider the ancillary benefits of military slavery, Hauser and Slater list what they consider "a number of positive social consequences." For instance: "Conscription will enable the forces to reflect the full spectrum of American pluralism, in terms of both socioeconomic classes and racial/ethnic groups. It is unacceptable that less than 1 percent of the country’s eligible population serves in the armed forces, with almost no war-relevant sacrifice being asked from the rest of society. It ought to be axiomatic that the hardships and dangers of military service be more widely shared."





"Dulce et decorum est?" Hardly: "For Leader, People and Fatherland he gave his life," announces this form letter filled out by a unit commander each time some hapless German conscript wasted his life in the service of "his" government.





This might be "axiomatic" to someone who has deeply imbibed the spirit of Prussian militarism. For a commercial republic, there is nothing "unacceptable" about a military that is largely peripheral to public concerns, rather than being -- as Hauser and Slater apparently desire -- the central, defining social institution.





In a fashion similar to that of Hauser and Slater, Herr Blankley scorns Americans for neglecting the "common life," of losing a sense of "common purpose and common destiny." Restoring the draft, he insists, will bring about "greater national cohesion and unity" to a country that has become "atomized." Absent such benevolent regimentation, Blankely laments, "our country will degenerate into nothing more than a giant trading bazaar where many different people happen to live together."





Oh, please spare us the ignominy of living in a peaceful country where self-regulating people engage in free, mutually beneficial commerce, rather than functioning as living cogs in the State's killing apparatus!





Before signing on as Chief of Staff to the self-appointed "Teacher of the Rules of Civilization" (that would be "Mr. Newt" himself), Blankley was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan. It's bad form for those who craft the words that dribble down the presidential chin to take credit for their contributions, so we're not sure exactly which of Reagan's orations benefited from Blankley's wordsmithing.





However, we can be confident that Blankley had nothing to do with Reagan's assessment of Jimmy Carter's decision to re-activate the Selective Service System in 1979. Reagan pointed out that conscription "rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state. If we buy that assumption them it is is for the state -- not for parents, the community, the religious institutions, or teachers -- to decide who shall have what values and who shall do what work, when, where, and how in our society. That assumption isn't a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea."





The Nazis' totalitarian siblings in the Communist camp were equally enamored of the concept of universal, compulsory service, including conscription; after all, that principle was inscribed by the finger of Karl Marx as the eighth plank of the totalitarian decalogue, the Communist Manifesto.





Like Nazi and Communist totalitarians, Blankley believes in the state ownership of the most intimate form of private property: The individual.





Oh, sure, his book is littered with puerile, rant radio-caliber invocations of the sanctity of the "free market" and "private enterprise" (this despite the fact that he supports a national industrial policy for the supposed purpose of achieving "energy independence"). But he apparently cannot understand or isn't honest enough to admit that a government that can steal one's very person for the purpose of military service can take whatever else it wants -- and do whatever it wants -- at any time of its choosing.





Pursuing evil dreams of state-mandated coercion and death: Bernard Baruch, Woodrow Wilson's Commissar for the war economy.





The operational principle in conscription, as the vile Bernard Baruch, head of the Wilson Junta's War Industries Board, pointed out in August 1918, is that "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.”





That principle was embedded Section 18 of the Selective Service Act.





As Thomas Woods, Jr. and Kevin R.C. Gutzman point out in their book Who Killed the Constitution?:





"That section stipulated that the president could order from any manufacturer that produced goods needed by the military or the Atomic Energy Commission, once the contents of the order had been approved by Congress. If a manufacturer failed to fulfill the order by the president's deadline, the president could have that manufacturer's property seized and operated for the purpose of producing the goods needed by the government."





Certainly, the government would have to provide "just compensation" for the stolen property, just as it pays its military slaves a token wage. But the assumption here is that all property -- including our individual lives -- belongs to the state, and that we enjoy the use of our property and the ability to direct our own lives only by the grace of the state.



No, he doesn't belong to the state: Justus Samuel Grigg, born on February 3, 2009. (Click to enlarge.)









Even as they enlarge upon the horrors -- whether real, exaggerated, or fabricated -- of "Islamofascism" in distant lands, Blankley and his fellow Draft-Nappers are diligently working to impose totalitarianism here at home.





No scimitar-wielding Mohammedan has materialized on my doorstep to demand that I surrender my children as a "blood tax" demanded by the state. I know what variety of greeting I would give such a personage were he to appear. The same is true for any functionary of any government who would presume to claim my children as the property of the official gang that employs him.





Music Video Extra



"Military Man" by Gary Moore and the immortal Phil Lynott -- not, alas, by Thin Lizzy, as mistakenly reported in the title. This was the last live performance by the irreplaceable Mr. Lynott before he died, at age 36, of his own foolish and self-destructive drug addiction.



This is a particularly fierce rendition of the song, which could serve as a soundtrack to a reading of Smedley Butler's tract "War Is A Racket."





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*In my original version I mistakenly referred to a "British" referendum on conscription during WWI. I regret the error, and appreciate the correction from commenter Cindy Williams.









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Dum spiro, pugno!

Police State Keynesianism: Stimulating Tyranny

Victims of the Regime's Narco-Terrorism: Cheye Calvo (right) and his wife Trinity.



There's no way to know how badly things would have gone at the Berwyn Heights, Maryland home of Cheye and Trinity Calvo if Amir Johnson hadn't shown up when he did.


Johnson, a private on the local police force, was making his accustomed rounds in the neighborhood when he saw a swarm of heavily armed men laying siege to the Calvo home. Inside, Cheye and his mother-in-law, Georgia Porter, were being held face-down at gunpoint with their hands tied behind their backs. The Calvo family's two black Labradors, Chase and Payton, were dead from gunshot wounds. The assailants who killed the dogs were leaving bloody bootprints throughout the home.


This home invasion was, of course, a law enforcement operation, typical of "no-knock" drug raids conducted practically every day across the country. The most significant difference wasn't that Cheye Calvo was completely innocent of involvement with narcotics; innocent people are terrorized and killed by drug raiders all the time. The key distinction here is that Mr. Calvo is Mayor of Berywn Heights. That's one reason why Officer Johnson intervened to help.


"That guy in there is crazy," one of the stormtroopers complained to Johnson as he emerged from the crime scene (that is, the scene of a crime committed under color of state "authority"). "He says he's the Mayor of Berwyn Heights."


"That is the Mayor of Berwyn Heights," Johnson told assailant, a member of the Prince George's County police department (which has overlapping jurisdiction with the town police). Johnson quickly contacted Berywn Heights Police Chief Patrick Murphy to tell him that a SWAT team had just laid waste the the Mayor's home and killed the family's dogs. Glancing around, he couldn't see any evidence of a search warrant. Inquiries about this omission were greeted with the assurance that the document was "en route."


Then, rather than continuing on his daily rounds, Officer Johnson stayed put, in order to make sure that Mayor Calvo and his mother-in-law weren't mysteriously hurt or killed.


"Not that I don't trust the police," Johnson later commented to the Washington Post. "But I wanted to personally witness what [was] going to happen to my mayor, so if they [the SWAT team] say this guy went for a gun -- and he didn't -- it's not going to happen on my watch."


Roll that comment around in your mind for just a second.


Officer Johnson stayed behind to make sure his mayor wasn't murdered by his fellow police officers. A few days later, long after the raiders failed to find so much as a molecule of evidence to justify their criminal assault on the Calvo home, Chief Murphy publicly expressed exactly the same sentiments. Addressing a rally on behalf of the victims, Murphy pointed out that the SWAT team declined to notify him about the impending raid, which would have permitted the Chief to help them arrange a peaceful, orderly search of the property.


"I never imagined, when I set out to protect people from the crooks and criminals, that I would have to protect them from by fellow police officers," Murphy regretfully declared. Granted, it's entirely unfair to consolidate cops and crooks into one undifferentiated group. Police are far more dangerous to innocent people.

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***

Prior to the assault on the Calvo family last July 29, narcotics investigators had discovered that local drug dealers had been shipping drug-laden packages to the addresses of innocent people and then intercepting the packages before the residents picked them up. In mimicrky of that tactic, drug investigators deposited a package on the Calvo family's front step, and then sent in a SWAT team to collect it.


Prince George's County Police officials later maintained that the forcible entry -- the use of a battering ram to break down the door, followed by the cuffing of Calvo and his mother-in-law, Georgia -- was "justified" because Georgia let out a scream when she saw masked, heavily armed men scurrying across the front lawn.


Apparently, being terrified when confronted by state thugs employing terrorist tactics justifies the use of those tactics. In a variation on that rationale, police officials insisted that killing the dogs was the proper course of action because the labs "engaged" the SWAT team by barking at them.

Rest in peace, Payton and Chase.


There's no evidence that either dog bit or otherwise harmed or threatened the police; in fact, one of them was shot from behind, which would make it terribly unlikely that the dog had "engaged" the SWAT team. A thorough inspection of the home turned up only one item worth confiscating: The same box of marijuana the narcotics officers had planted on the Calvo family's doorstep. Nobody involved in ordering or executing the raid has been fired, sanctioned, or punished in any way. Georgia continues to show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The Calvo family lost their dogs, and had to spend countless hours scrubbing the bloodstains from their home.


After having their lives thrown into violent disarray by the raid, Cheye and Trinity -- with the help of a very astute attorney -- had to take pre-emptive measures to protect their reputations following the raid. They got no help at all from the Prince George's County Police. Displaying the familiar mixture of arrogance and contempt that suppurates from police bureaucrats in such circumstances, Chief Melvin C. High and Sheriff Michael Jackson (no, really) refused to apologize to the Calvo family or publicly exonerate them after the police had apprehended the people responsible for the drug package scheme.



As Calvo points out, "police can do what they did to us with impunity. There are no consequences, not for them." But once again, it could have been immeasurably worse. Imagine how the same incident might have turned out had Cheye Calvo not been the mayor, and had Officer Johnson not been willing to keep the SWAT team under surveillance. Johnson himself points out that Calvo could conceivably have been murdered by the uniformed marauders as a way of justifying the raid after the fact. Another possibility is that "evidence" could have easily been "discovered" to justify the seizure of the Calvo family's home for the purpose of forfeiture -- which is the entire purpose of such raids in the first place.


This year, Price George's County expects to spend $2.5 million collected last year through drug-related forfeiture. Drug enforcement raids of the kind that terrorized the Calvo family have no documentable impact on the availability of drugs. They do, however, help generate revenue for local governments. Here's how the racket functions:


Special enforcement units round up small-caliber drug users or dealers for use as informants and provocateurs; these "reliable informants" then provide tips that are used to justify no-knock raids on people identified as drug dealers. This leads to the seizure of cash or valuable assets that can be stolen in the name of "civil asset forfeiture," thereby slopping tax-feeder troughs that may start running low as the current depression unfolds.


Maryland, one of the most government-afflicted states in the Union, has likewise been plagued with this variety of corrupt, predatory "drug enforcement." Just recently, the wire services carried news of a lawsuit filed by Daryl A. Martin, a 35-year-old football coach who was accosted on the streets of Baltimore by an "elite" Special Enforcement Team (SET) of the notorious Baltimore Police Department.


Martin recalls that he was on the way to a tailor shop when he was pulled over and swarmed by several police officers, who -- without probable cause or even bothering to supply a reason -- searched his car and then subjected him to what amounted to a public strip search.


After frisking Martin's buttocks and genitals through his clothing -- while making lewd and disgusting comments -- Officer Shakil Moss reportedly forced Martin to strip below the waist, then, after putting on a clear plastic glove, performed a body cavity search in front of a stunned crown of onlookers. Martin, understandably, describes the experience as akin to being raped.


"I think this group of officers randomly pulled over and searched dozens of people a day," comments Martin's attorney, Steven D. Silverman. "If they found something, the altered the statement of charges to make [the search] appear constitutional. If they found nothing, they would send you on your way." Martin's suit against the Baltimore PD is the second to be filed in the wake of the now-disbanded SET's rampage.


Even before the suits were filed and the team was closed down, dozens of cases built on evidence and testimony provided by the SET were thrown out. But so far, none of the officers has been cashiered from the force; instead, they were simply handed new assignments. While relatively uncommon, incidents of this kind are not aberrations; they are the logical, predictable result of the incentive schedule produced by the Regime's "War on Drugs."


Conducting drug raids is immensely lucrative and (official propaganda notwithstanding) exceptionally low-risk. And there are no significant negative career repercussions for most police officers who make mistakes -- even when they involve well-respected civic officials like Cheye Calvo. If the Anointed One's "stimulus package" passes intact, we're likely to see a huge escalation in officially sanctioned criminal violence of the kind suffered by Daryl Martin and the Calvo family.















Gotta keep the tax-feeders fat and happy: Iowa Senator Tom Harkin (left) joins law enforcement lobbyists at a press conference demanding billions more for the fraudulent, murderous War on Drugs.

Obama's $900 billion wad of socialist boodle includes $3 billion for the federal Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, as well as another $1 billion to revive the Clinton administration's Community Oriented Policing (COPS) program. Both of those initiatives will expand federal subsidies of -- and, thereby, federal control over -- "local" law enforcement, thereby further diminishing whatever remains of local accountability. The Byrne Grant program is the deadlier of those two subsidies, not merely because it's significantly larger but also because its raison d'etre is to fund counter-narcotics programs.



This means more money for criminal gangs in uniform like Baltimore's Special Enforcement Team, or the Campbell County, Tennessee outfit that beat and tortured a small-time drug dealer for several hours to force him to sign a "consent" warrant for the search of his home. It means more money for tax-funded snitches, and for no-knock SWAT raids that will leave innocent people terrified or dead. It appears that we're being introduced to a new variety of Keynesian socialism. First, there was Welfare State Keynesianism, then Military Keynesianism, followed by Reconstruction Keynesianism - you know, the pleasant business of propping up foreign dictators, bombing their countries into rubble, and then ladling out "cost-plus" contracts to politically connected contractors to "reconstruct" those countries. Now we see the advent of Police State Keynesianism.



Byrne funds are disbursed as block grands to the states, which means that they are distributed at the discretion of state governments. Every effort is made to keep this process opaque by burying the specific funding mechanisms as deeply as possible.


The United States Conference of Mayors "Mainstreet Economic Recovery" Plan offers some useful clues: This wish list of "infrastructure" and "job-building" expenditures contains Byrne Grant requests from cities such as Sunnyvale, California; Hialeah, Florida; Athens, Georgia; Elizabeth, New Jersey; Albany, New York; and Akron, Ohio. Residents of those cities should make preparations for a spike in drug-related police violence.


Although the rest of us may not have the benefit of advance warning, it will be easy to deduce where the Byrne Grant funds are flowing. We'll just follow the trail of blood.


A quick personal note --

Justus Samuel Grigg was born at 9:12 a.m. on February 3rd. He's a healthy, beautiful little boy who resembles his older brother, William Wallace.

Justus and Korrin are both doing well. His arrival, and the necessary preparations for it, help explain my recent absence, for which I apologize. I am deeply grateful for all of the wonderful and thoughtful suggestions that came in reply to my request for baby names, and I promise to post photos as soon as possible.



On sale now!










Dum spiro, pugno!