Reply #7: I can't find anything to quibble with there. [View All]

My experience is primarily Army too, although I have had occasion to work
with all of the services. I tend to respect the Army the most, at least at the
echelons I dealt with, but that probably says a good deal more about me than
anything else.

The thing about such as "Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, and Powell" is that while
you describe them well, their expertise is narrow, they have the ability to seize
and exercise power, but they lack the knowledge, insight and emotional depth to
govern well, and that is their Achilles heel. I worked with many such (although
not at that level, God forbid), often being a sort of firefighter sent around to
clean up messes, and there were always plenty of messes.

In using the term "peasants and pitchforks" I was thinking of the civil unrest of the
60s, the Bonus Army of 1932, features of the Civil War, times when the US has
had it's own home-grown "destabilization" problems. The US population is generally
well-armed and if is foolish to think those times cannot come again. If you get
enough people of the persuasion of the DC snipers or Tim Mcveigh, there are
bound to be a few who are good at it, and if the ruling elites are forced to drop the
mask of popular rule beyond a certain point, as in the sixties, the levers of power
stop working in the expected way and all bets are off as to the outcome.

One of the things that was striking about the violence-prone "radicals" in the sixties
was what a bunch of naive incompetent twits they were. In most cases they shit
all over themselves, and the FBI was there every step to help them smear it around.

It still seems to be the case that the vast majority of the public continues to
believe everything that is dished out as part of the national political soap opera.
If we get a week of coverage of Reagan's funeral, it is because there really are a
lot of people who liked The Gipper, or a shameless attempt to shore up Shrub.
Whereas I submit that the truth is that the reason we have a week of it 24/7 is
neither of those, but rather to shore up the Religion of the State and the legitimacy
of the government as a whole, which stands revealed in all its feckless incompetence
and treason to the Constitution that it claims to derive its power from. If the
public ever begins to realize that it is all show biz, then things will start to get
interesting. The thing I found most telling about the rise of Reagan was that
they put a man who really was an Actor in the White House. That ought to have
told us all we need to know about how things are really run in this country.