No, Secretary Napolitano, It's Not Just Politics

The Department of Homeland Security (aka Heimatsicherheitsamt) wrong-footed it with the pathetic excuse for an intelligence assessment of the purported "rightwing" extremism threats facing the US. The blithering idiot who wrote the seven pages of tripe which would have merited a low "C" at best had it been offered as a mid-term exam by one of the Geek's students back in his academic days was not only superficial (to put it kindly) but also demonstrated an ignorance of American history which falls into the category labeled, "abysmal."

Most critics have focused on the reference to recruiting efforts supposedly directed to combat veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who are experiencing difficulty finding employment or "readjusting" to civilian life. This piece of nonsense replicates the fear of the former combat soldier which has been exhibited after every one of America's Twentieth Century wars, particularly World War II and the Vietnam War. Those among us who have directly experienced only peace and whose knowledge of war has been gained from films and television are sure that any man who has killed or faced death has been changed for the worse for evermore.

Having been an object of fear and loathing after returning to the world, the Geek is both amused and disgusted by the nameless bureaucrat's expression of the latest incarnation of this particularly American phobia.

Other critics have been perturbed by the "assessment's" sputtering that advocates of a broadly interpreted Second Amendment or support of border security and immigration control are somehow more likely to be "extremists" than those Americans who favor labor's right to organise or the freedom to drive energy inefficient muscle cars or oppose capital punishment.

While the record is clear that individuals who oppose a woman's right to control her reproductive destiny are far more likely to employ violence or the threat of violence to gain their goal of ending abortion than are those who support a woman's right to choose, it remains unjustifiable on the face to assert that any and every opponent of choice is ready and willing to plant a bomb or put the cross hairs on a abortion providers head. Violence, actual or threatened, is not the prerogative of any particular ideology or movement to the exclusion of all others.

The Geek is far more perturbed by two factors which have either not been mentioned by critics or given only cursory attention by them. One of these is extrinsic to the contested "assessment."

The extrinsic consideration is Secretary Napolitano's defense of the the tripe which came out of her department. When challenged on the absence of named "extremist" groups she replied that these groups were too numerous to name. She did make a passing reference to the bombers of abortion providing clinics. The problem with this is simple. The bombings, illustrated by the Atlanta two-stage attack, were the work of individuals operating alone, not groups.

Worse, she has hauled the ghost of Timothy McVeigh, chains rattling out from our collective closet of anxieties as the justification for fearing disgruntled veterans. Yes, McVeigh and his partner, Nichols were veterans. Neither were combat heroes. McVeigh had failed the Special Forces Q course and was rather much of a foul ball as a troop. To select this individual out of the more than forty million living Americans who had served during wartime because he and Nichols (perhaps with foreign guidance) built and used a very lethal vehicle borne improvised explosive device is a travesty. It is a fact. But, a fact which is both irrelevant and misleading in the context of the "assessment."

The Geek's second tooth-gnashing objection to the DHS "assessment" is the author's definition of the "extremist" typologies. The writer sees one type as being motivated by racial, religious or ethnic prejudice. The Deep Thinker of DHS does not state how the conclusion that prejudice derived hatred is owned exclusively by the "rightwing."

The brilliant analyst of DHS avers that there is a second type of right wing extremist. This second type can be recognised by "rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority."

Stop! Hold it right there, Deep Thinker! You too, Madam Secretary.

If the Guru of DHS Intelligence had even the slightest acquaintance with the founding of the United States, the worthy wallah would know that the Constitution was predicated upon a strong suspicion of centralised, concentrated power. The basic concept back there at the beginning of the American experiment was that of establishing a creative tension between the several states and the federal government as well as between the three departments of the federal government.

The majority of those who wrote and ratified the Constitution and Bill of Rights as well as the vast majority of Americans over the next century and a half were biased in favor of local and state governments. There was a healthy distrust of the remote authority of the central government. Not until the stresses of the Depression and World War II was there any leaning on the part of most Americans toward the federal government.

Indeed it was not until the twin challenges of the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement with the latter calling into effective question the hoary notion of "States' Rights" did the balance of political authority shift in favor of the federal government. To put it in baby words, while federal supremacy was established as regards preservation of the union by the War Between the States, the notion that federal authority should not be equalled, let alone surpassed by that of the states and localities emerged only over the past forty-five years.

That reality is the reason, Deep Thinking Intel Guru and Madam Secretary, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments are in the Bill of Rights. While overlooked and all-too-often ignored, they have not yet been repealed. Just how in hell a person who sees a genuine merit in these two amendments becomes by that view a "rightwing" extremist defies logic and rationality.

The pervasive federal authority is not a creature of long standing. It, in the guise of the administrative state, came into being following the court packing effort of FDR and the Supreme Court's capitulation to political reality with the so-called judicial revolution of 1937. The one-size-fits-all approach of administrative law promulgated and enforced by bureaucrats in the warrens of DC have brought more than a little resentment in their wake over the past several decades. Opposition to the administrative dictates of unelected and (like the DHS analyst) nameless officials is to be expected, is justified and in no way constitutes a threat to the republic.

In a tag to the language quoted above, the DHS Fountainhead of Wisdom adds, "or rejecting government authority entirely." We've been through all of that before more than a century ago as the Great American People shivered in fear before the spectre of anarchism. The slouch hat wearing, bomb tossing anarchist of southern European ancestry became a staple of the fear mongers of the closing days of the Gilded Age. This semi-mythical beast usually equipped with an Italian, Jewish or Eastern European name was the bogeyman used to assure the passage of numerous "criminal syndicalist" acts intended to make the world (or at least the US) safe for capitalists and such behavior as exploiting workers, banning unions and threatening the uppity members of the hoi polloi generally.

Back then the golem of the anarchist was invoked by the Right to repress those on the Left. What's going on now? The Left is intending to bash the Right with the long gone threat of armed and dangerous anarchists, that is people who reject the "authority of government entirely?"

No. Of course not. Well, maybe. Gosh, you don't suppose.... Nah. Can't be. Can it?

Of course an outfit so out-to-lunch as to produce and then defend a document so gripless as this "assessment" might just be that assertively stupid.