CSotD: Voices From The Cornfield
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This is a recasting of a Currier & Ives poster of Patrick Henry giving his “Liberty or Death” speech, in which he sounded a warning to King George and, in response to cries of “Treason!” from other legislators, replied “If this be treason, then make the most of it!”
I’ve seen posts on social media about tomorrow’s gathering in which they give elaborate, extensive ways to conceal your identity with sunglasses, hats and even a pebble in your shoe to disguise your normal gait.
Paranoia, however, is not exactly Patrick Henry’s approach.
I subscribe to the Haystack Theory, which states that the more information they gather, the less they can process and the less likely it is that they’ll settle on you, since Cointelpro targeted leaders of the antiwar and civil rights movement, not faces in the crowd.
When I was in Boulder in 1970, we got a frantic phone call from a mother in New Jersey because the FBI had been at her door looking for her daughter, and somehow knew she was headed for our house.
We had a quick house rap in which three solutions were proposed:
- Clean the house absolutely, top to bottom, or …
- Bluff them by hanging out a sign saying “Welcome FBI,” or …
- ****’em.
We quickly eliminated #2 on the theory that antagonizing the feds was a bad move. Then we eliminated #1 because, if they wanted to bust us, they’d bring their own evidence.
I’ve been following Proposal #3 ever since.
So far so good, and I’ve reached an age where I don’t much care anymore. That is, I care about freedom and the country and all that good stuff, but I was supposed to die of cancer a decade ago and if they tossed me in the joint, somebody would feed my dog.
So come and get me, Fat Boy. But he won’t, not because he’s scared of me but because he’s never heard of me. If J. Edgar was keeping a file on me, it was one sheet, just a list of more interesting people whom I knew.
Several cartoonists have traced the “No Kings” pledge to 1776 or thereabouts, and I like de Adder’s because it includes — gasp! — destruction of property. I don’t recommend that, but it’s good to know some of our founders did, just as it’s good to know that John Adams served as attorney for the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre.
Take a lesson, Mike: Justice matters, morality matters, even when you don’t like the people being accused, and even if doing the right thing keeps you from getting your own way.
I threw this together in his first administration, back when he had a few people in his Cabinet who kept him from flying off the rails and wishing everybody into the cornfield.
But if little Donnie wishes many more people out there now, the GOP will have to redistrict it.
One major difference this time around is that he has staffed the White House with quislings who honestly believe that dissent is unpatriotic, and that differing with Dear Leader is disloyal to the nation.
It’s promising that several airports have refused to air Kosplay Kristi’s asinine video blaming the Democrats for the shutdown, but she’s not lying or purposely shoveling out propaganda. She genuinely believes that opposing Dear Leader is treasonous.
Perhaps he really is the only person — in his immediate circle, that is — who can memorize and repeat five common words. It’s not like he’s surrounding himself with stable geniuses.
What is he surrounded with?
JD Vance says it’s just the sort of thing that kids say, just like it’s only lockerroom talk to brag of grabbing women by their genitals, though a jury ruled that Dear Leader had genuinely done just that.
It is indeed the sort of thing young people say. Young Nazi people, white supremacists and other scum of the earth.
Meanwhile …
You would think after Hegseth’s disclosing military secrets to a reporter that everybody would wise up to the lack of security in group chats. But if you thought it, you’d be overqualified to serve in the current administration.
Hegseth has at least learned that the less reporters know, the better for keeping secrets, though he seems a bit unclear on the First Amendment. Fortunately, reporters are not, and so they have refused to agree to his policy that they only report on the things he wants them to report about.
Hegseth hopes that the press has been silenced by this policy, but that only works if they wear an official Pentagon press pass around their neck like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, publicly declaring their shame.
The worst thing you can do is to make reporters curious. One of the first mistakes the Nixon cabal made was to hire an expensive lawyer for the Watergate burglars, which made Bob Woodward’s spidey senses tingle.
If they’d left the miscreants in the hands of a public defender, the whole thing might have been blown off as “a third-rate burglary.”
For those who missed it, the entire Pentagon press corps turned in their press passes. They weren’t “confiscated” and that second paragraph is a hoot, because the entire accredited Pentagon press corps now consists of OAN, the American version of Pravda, and Pravda’s former publisher just fell out of a window.
I guess party loyalty ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe he should have worn sunglasses and a hat and put a pebble in his shoe.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The White House has restricted the press pool there as much as possible to media outlets they trust, and now Hegseth’s Secret Club is working to do the same.
My freshman year, a professor told us that the next morning we should either be on the bus headed for the March on the Pentagon, or outside it protesting those who were going, but that “neutrality” was morally unacceptable.
A few years later he was teaching songwriting at the Berklee School of Music where Aimee Mann was a student. I don’t know if she took his course, but she wrote this, and it’ll do:
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