12.03.14
EMP Crazy Protection Act
Hat tip to Steve Aftergood for pointing out the latest and most pathetic accomplishment of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, aka the House Congressional EMP Caucus. (Which was a name the mainstream media could use to get around having to explain that they were, well, electromagnetic pulse crazies.)
Yesterday it was responsible for passing a bill entitled “The Critical Infrastructure and Protection Act,” which — if you took the title seriously — sounded like big stuff.
However, the title was just to mislead. The “act” was simply a request that the Department of Homeland Security begin more research studies on the threat of electromagnetic pulse attack and potential steps for thwarting it.
Deep in the fine print — the bill would have no regulatory power and called for no no new authorizations.
Translated: A feeble attempt to carve out some high-button welfare funding for the same small coterie of right-wing kooks who’ve flogged the menace of electromagnetic pulse for the last fifteen years. And who still appear as representatives of the disbanded “EMP Commission” and assorted related functions, like the lobbying group EMPAct America, in columns and news pieces at fringe right-wing publications.
The best name for the bill, and an honest one, would have been the EMP Crazy Protection Act.
If you want actual names in the cult, simply read through the archives. It’s literally the chronicle of a ton of dog excrement stuffed in a hundred pound bag.
This legislation, like everything else sponsored by EMP Caucus leader Trent Franks of Arizona, will be dead in the Senate. Not going to get to the President.
Indeed, as far as the Cult of EMP Crazy is concerned it has been all down hill stumbling since its leading light, pol emeritus Roscoe Bartlett, was sent into retirement in 2014. (Although he never actually got anything done, either.)
Summarized from that article, the decade-spanning nature of the whole unpleasant movement:
[The] paranoid and steeped-in-authoritarianism mythology of electromagnetic pulse doom was turned into a highly-professionalized and tenacious industry, built on the exploitation of a thick seam of WhiteManistan kook-ism and its love of end-times stories in which the virtuous are saved and the sinners destroyed. It’s a profitable business.
That niche business is “prepper” survivalism.
It’s the selling of property off the grid where one’s family can ride out the collapse of American civilization, the peddling of the equivalent of heroic romance novels on said calamity, and the taking of the show on the road and getting the ticket punched at Tea Party gatherings in red states where the cult can indulge the fantasy of electromagnetic pulse doom as a states’ rights issue.
Running parallel with “The National Infrastructure Protection Act” was sister House legislation making Social Security safe from Nazis.
All four of them.
No, I am not making it up.
Wrote someone at the New York Times:
This is what our elected leaders are doing? At a time when Congress is ignoring immigration reform, stumbling and bumbling over a whole pack of wars, threatening to shut down the government once again, failing to provide adequate living wages to working Americans and adequate unemployment benefits to non-working Americans, letting the bridges and highways fall apart, and so many other things?
Yes.
Ted Jr said,
December 3, 2014 at 8:56 pm
Aren’t the “Lame Duck” session participants famous for doing idiotic things since some of them have no electorate to face?
Another error in government design which the taxpayer gets to pay for.