Xark!

'It's not gun power'

Earlier this week, during a Facebook discussion about assault rifles on my friend Bill Strasburg's wall, one of his pro-gun-but-civil friends replied to something I'd written with this nifty artifact of today's bizarre conservative political culture:

"Dan, When the gov't attempts to oppress you, what are you going to use to fight back? We've seen in history, multiple times, where gov'ts have murdered millions of people after they took their guns away."

The reason I like this statement so much is that it represents a core element of the post-rational fantasy world that is currently collapsing around the heads of so many (overwhelmingly white) Americans these days. Despite the fact that our Second Amendment grants us gun rights predicated on the value of a well-regulated militia, the final fallback position for today's pro-gun partisans is the argument that untrained civilians need assault rifles so that when our own government's black helicopters come for us, we'll be able to fight back. Which our Founding Fathers could have specified as their constitutional intention, yet mysteriously didn't.

It makes me wonder. How many white American men my age have based their adult gun politics on the experience of watching the original Red Dawn as teenagers in 1984 and thinking "That looks awesome! WOLVERINES!"

But here's the thing so many of these would-be insurgent guerillas simply fail to grasp, no matter how you explain it. In a world where governments possess spy satelites, drones, wiretaps, sniffers, intelligence databases equipped with Non-Obvious Relationship Analysis agents, plus all manner of convert, overt and law-enforcement firepower, your little Bushmaster looks... cute.

Remember Saddam Hussein's Revolutionary Guard? They had some of the best tanks money could buy from the old Warsaw Pact. They spent the early stages of the first Gulf War hiding those tanks, because tanks just made better targets for our aircraft, and when they finally brought them out to fight, those tanks just made better targets for the guys in my old unit.

Sure, the Iraqis were far more effective as guerrila fighters in the Second Gulf War, but not effective in the sense of "winning." Once our armed forces adopted a more evolved counter-insurgency playbook, those Iraqi "freedom fighters" (or "Islamic terrorists," depending on your politics) were eventually reduced to something approaching irrelevence. 

Which brings us to today's collapsing conservative fantasy world.

My reply to Bill's friend referenced the changing landscape of war and resistance, but concluded with this: "We do have power as citizens, and we need to use it to fight against oppression. But it's not gun power."

If the time ever comes when American citizens must choose between surrendering their liberties and resisting their government, the last thing we'll want to do is pick up assault rifles and take to the streets. Picking up an assault rifle and taking to the streets just makes you a high-resolution target. Holing up in your home with an assault rifle just isolates you for easy removal. Trying to form a group of people with assault rifles just makes you visible to communications monitoring, and then here comes the drone strike. 

Our power as citizens today is primarily based on our ability to communicate in the open and to organize -- loosely -- in full public view. It's the power of information and networked transmission that can bypass mass-media propaganda channels. It's the power of distributed networks, without identifiable nodes of control. Our own Department of Defense created the original Internet as an adaptable communications system that could survive a nuclear attack because it could find a way around whatever portions of the system the enemy destroyed. It works that way for regular people, too.

Corporate interests in the "online market" have pretty much paved over the Web idealism of 2005-07. But it's important that we remember that people power, regardless of whether one lives in a democracy or a dictatorship, is based on information, communication and clarity of purpose. 

In other words, assault rifles don't deter government oppression. People do.

We are the Founding Fathers (& Mothers, too!)

There are several ways to measure the length of continuous Chinese civilization, but for the sake of discussion, lets set the beginning point for China at the establishment of the first unified Chinese state. That would be the Qin Dynasty, which began in 221 BC, giving us 2,232 years of China as an evolving cultural identity and political reality.

And with that in mind, ask yourself this question:

Would anyone in China today argue that only the ideas expressed during the 15-year run of the founding Qin Dynasty should be counted as valid statements of the Chinese ideal? Would anyone in their right mind conclude that only the Qins should count as the founding fathers of China?

The Revolution Will Be Commercialized

"Nowadays, for both poles of the political spectrum but especially for the right, politics is a business—the entertainment business. The freak show, as Mark Halperin termed it, has been turned into a fully merchandised product. It was Fox’s Roger Ailes who had the insight that the American right was an underserved market, one with a powerful kind of brand loyalty. Fox News has turned a disaffected segment of the populace into a market, with the fervor and idiosyncratic truth standards of a cult. Wingnut-ism has been monetized, is one admittedly partisan way of looking at it. Palin stokes the disaffection of her constituents and then, with the help of Fox, offers to heal them, for a price. And—surprise—they’re more affluent than most Americans. Fifty-six percent make over $50,000 a year, according to a Times/CBS poll. Running for president is no doubt part of her business model. But forget elections (as many Palin supporters already seem to have done); she’s already the president of an alternative America—and also its CEO."

-- Gabriel Sherman, in his April 25th article about Sarah Palin for New York magazine.

Amy Goodman arrested in St. Paul

Journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now is an honest, sensible, principled journalist and American.

What the hell is going on in Minnesota?

Pushback in London

It didn't take people long to push back against those "report odd photographers" posters put up by the police in London...

Mellowing back to sanity

Cal Thomas and I disagree on some fairly important stuff (Thomas believes that the Bible is reason enough to uphold laws banning gay sex; I believe gay couples should have the same civil rights as straight couples), but it turns out there's some pretty important stuff on which we agree entirely:

As with religion, some people on the right have used patriotism, which should be a unifying theme, to divide Americans. My liberal friends love America as much as I do. They might disagree on some, or all, of my political and religious beliefs, but that does not make them less in love with America, much less un-American.

I don't want to put too much weight on this column (which I appreciated on several levels) or on some kind of conversion by Thomas, who has actually cautioned the right against some of its whacko excesses, like that overblown "War on Christmas" Fox gave us back in 2005. But I do think that it's a good sign that we're hearing this now. Not so much the words, even, but the tone of those words.

Dick Cheney: Not part of Executive Branch

(Cartoonist note: I didn't really get to complete this one before I went to work this morning, so this updated, final version has some differences from the one I put up earlier today-- dc)

Mooninites for morons

Attention, citizens of Boston (and over-sensitive drama queens everywhere)!

This is a mooninite. A mooninite is an advanced, absurdly arrogant and highly annoying creature from the Moon. They first appeared in an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force in October of 2001 and have since been featured in five additional shows (they showed up again for single episodes in 2002, 2003 and 2006, and in two 2004 episodes). The original mooninites episode is still probably the show's zenith (although for me, it's a toss-up between the mooninites and The Wisdom Cube).

They are all excellent spellers, but they are not terrorists. And those alleged bomb-like packages that got Boston's panties all in a twist? This is what they looked like. Terrified yet?

Some people were -- and are -- highly upset about the fact that a couple of "hoaxsters" put these up in Boston (funny -- in nine other cities the people who put them up were called "marketers" and nobody got upset). Then again, some people really need to get over themselves. It's a stupid joke. Laugh or don't. But don't ask me to take this stuff so seriously.

We do whatever we want whenever we want, at all times. -Ignignokt, a moonite

Torture: Pragmatism and politics

The GOP's current intra-party revolt against the Bush administration -- led by presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain and his supporters in the Senate --  is telling us quite a bit about the next two years.

Bush, overburdened with global responsibilities and deprived of maneuver room, has decided that his new strategy for the Nov. 7 mid-term Congressional elections will be to sell his old ideas more forcefully. If he succeeds and the GOP retains its control of both chambers of Congress, then he is virtually assured of completing his second term without facing hard questions about his administration's conduct.

That sounds like a win to some conservatives, but to Bush's critics within the GOP, it's a temporary -- and ultimately destructive -- victory. From their perspective, retaining the House and Senate on the President's terms only delays an inevitable accounting for the mistakes of the past four years. And that could turn 2008 -- a presidential year -- into a debacle for the Republican Party.

If you're McCain, standing on a stack of favorable polling results and gazing ahead at the Presidential horizon, getting that unpleasant accounting started in January just makes sense. So while some see this as nothing more complex than a principled stand, it also adds up to an aggressively smart political move.  Like an early break-away in a critical stage of the Tour de France, McCain is out to win the 2008 nomination right now, a move that could fundamentally change a lot of assumptions within the political class.

Presidents in their final years often slump into lame duck status, but this week's defiance by McCain and three other members of the Senate Armed Forces Committee threatens to turn Bush into a potted plant. Not only is McCain positioning himself to run against Bush's record, his defiance is forcing Republican incumbents toward  a tough choice:  cast their lot with their party's leader-in-waiting, or support Bush and make ready to defend that decision to angry voters.

To clarify: This is not WWII

Time out.

This is not 1939.

President Bush is not Winston Churchill.

Our Islamist enemies are not Adolph Hitler.

Your political critics are not Neville Chamberlain.

You are not Audie Murphy, or Ike, or Ernie Pyle.

There was only one "Greatest Generation," and the rest of us don't get to play rhetorical piggyback on their story. 

This is not the eve of World War II, even though some of us clearly wish it were, conveniently forgetting the horror and devastation caused by "The Good War." Viewed across a gulf of more than 60 years, it all seems rather cinematic now -- archetypal, clean -- and our tendency to find parallels to its storylines is understandable. World War II shaped our modern military, vaulted the United States into the role of superpower and reinvented our sense of national identity and purpose. It was our defining moment in the 20th century, and we yearn for its clarity.

We miss the black-and-white moral choices of that conflict,  the obvious targets, the stand-up fights against a uniformed enemy.  We want its mantle, its righteous cause, its sense of shared sacrifice (not the actual sacrifices, mind you, but the sense of them). We want the blessings of history, the trappings of heroism.

This isn't that.

It's been said that the longer an argument goes, the likelihood that somebody will invoke Hitler approaches zero. Considering that we've been fighting the War on Terror longer than our grandparents fought the Axis, I suppose this current obsession with WWII was inevitable. But we need to resist it.

"Refighting the last war" is a classic military blunder, an occupational hazard for generals. It's worth remembering that this is also true for armchair generals.  Success demands that we recognize the reality now, and confront it with tools that match the job.

Comparisons of our current troubles to those of 1939 are comforting to some and profitable to others. But the blessings of history will be on those who see things as they are, not as they once were.