Homeland Insecurity

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

Creating the Department of Homeland Security was President George W. Bush’s concession to the then Democratic minority. Democrats believed creating an unwieldy agency was a muscular response to Islamic atrocities perpetrated on our soil and showed that our nation was serious about the war on terror. With a new administration in Washington, and the retirement of the term “war on terror,” this lumbering bureaucratic monument to Republican bipartisanship is ready to wage war on a threat that stretches all the way back to the Clinton administration – what former first lady Hillary Clinton called the “vast rightwing conspiracy.”

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.  It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration, (emphasis added).

So reads a portion of Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, a report endorsed by President Obama’s Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano. 

And where will this army of darkness find recruits to battle the sons of light and the only legitimate source of “hope” and “change”? The U.S. military, of course:

 …the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks.

A consistent device used in the Napolitano report is the coupling of those legitimately opposed to government encroachment with violent white racist movements:

…rightwing extremists and law-abiding citizens share a belief that rising crime rates attributed to a slumping economy make the purchase of legitimate firearms a wise move at the time.

White racists also drive cars, eat food, wear cloths, marry and have children. Shall we abandon these practices least we be defined as white supremacists? In fact, for most of South’s post Civil War period, the Democratic Party and its paramilitary wing, the Klu Klux Klan, terrorized and disenfranchised people of color by using its political majority, police powers and courts to shield their white-hooded friends who enforced the party’s insane ideas of white supremacy.

The Homeland Security report also taints the U.S. Supreme Court:

Weapons rights and gun-control legislation are likely to be hotly contested subjects of political debate in light of the 2008 Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller in which the Court reaffirmed an individual’s right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but left open to debate the precise contours of that right. Because debates over constitutional rights are intense, and parties on all sides have deeply held, sincere, but vastly divergent beliefs, violent extremists may attempt to co-opt the debate and use the controversy as a radicalization tool.

The Obama administration has no problem believing the high court found the right to kill millions of unborn babies written in between the lines of the U.S. Constitution.  However, it finds the Heller decision and the Second Amendment’s “precise contours” debatable. And this, my friends, is where the lesson lies.

The nihilists – and there are many – hold to the Obama worldview which refuses to believe that the attacks on 9/11 – that brought down New York’s Twin Towers and killed nearly 3,000 Americans – should have been seen and defined as acts of war; and the effort to defend against them called a war on terror. Therefore, Obama simply ordered his administration banish the phrase forever.

There is a disconnect between reality and fantasy, between the truth and the lie, between good and evil. The nihilist, not possessing the celestial moral compass that points true north, is incapable of distinguishing real danger from imagined threat.

Ironically, Napolitano’s report admits as much in the first paragraph:

The Office of Intelligence and Analysis has no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence, but rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment, (emphasis added).

Obama’s perceived enemies and impending catastrophes – rightwing extremists, corporate CEOs, global warming – are clearly the products of a fevered imagination. Unfortunately, nihilist paranoia has a powerful agency provided by a hopelessly bipartisan Republican predecessor. As Napolitano readies her agency to battle the phantom forces aligning against Obama’s bigger big government, real enemies are simply redefined away.

A prominent American once observed, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” He also said, “Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples’ liberty’s teeth.” Such words, no doubt, play into the hands of rightwing extremists, and Napolitano’s agency would, if he still lived, take a keen interest in his movements. The man was George Washington, himself a veteran returned from the wars.