03.04.11
Extremism, Cult of EMP Crazy, a US Foreign Legion and KKK license plates
Today’s dose of mainstreamed extremism comes through TIME magazine, a publication that exists to pander to aging not real bright white people. So, perforce, its supermarket readers must include retirees/Tea Partiers whose disposition must be taken into account when covering various odious southern reptiles.
Therefore one gets the paroxysm entitled “On Civil War — Confederate Group Stirs Debate.”
In it one learns of the sincere effort to put an old Ku Klux Klanner on a Mississippi license plate. The obese Haley Barbour says he will not allow it into law, which is nice of him.
It’s lede reads somewhat like the announcement of an unusual ladies tea in Cranford, New Jersey:
In 1867, former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of a newly formed organization called the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest had been a slave trader before the Civil War; he was also the commanding officer during a battle known as the “Fort Pillow massacre” in Tennessee at which some 300 black Union troops were killed in 1864. (Whether they died in combat or were killed after they surrendered is still a matter of dispute.)
Now, in honor of the Civil War’s 150th anniversary, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) are seeking to put Forrest on a Mississippi license plate. But the state government opposes it.
“Chuck Rand, a member of the SCV, calls any assumption that the Forrest license plate is racist a ‘knee-jerk reaction’ by people who don’t understand the ‘real causes’ of the Civil War,” it reads, sampling the p.r. of the bona fide douchebag without actually getting around to calling him that, so to speak.
Moving right along, DD’s electromagnetic pulse crazy news filter netted an item from Townhall on the Google news tab. It’s not so interesting for the standard Glenn Beck theme that the revolutions in the Middle East may turn into a drive to establish a Muslim caliphate but for the startling advocacy of a US Foreign Legion:
This also means we’ll need a much larger U.S. military, which to minimize public opposition here at home should be mostly individually recruited from freedom loving souls around the world (not from existing foreign armies). This “International Freedom Force??? of 1,000,000 or more would be commanded and supported by our own military.
However, the French Foreign Legion is a small unit — 7,700 men. That’s not really up to the Townhall writer’s ambitions.
Historically, it should be noted the Waffen SS tried this approach, too. That did not turn out so well.
Of course, one can imagine all the good will which would meet a Muslim-containing US “International Freedom Force” in, uh, Middle East places to be freed from the “caliphate.”
Anyway, here’s the electromagnetic pulse script:
… an Islamic Caliphate stretching its axis of evil from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, and the radicals gaining a stranglehold on well over half the world’s oil and the Suez Canal to boot. They would then likely extend their reach southward across much of Africa.
With huge natural resources under their control and aided by massive Chinese investment capital and technical support, the radicals would pose an intolerable threat to the economies of the free world. But far worse, with their newfound wealth they would amass a nuclear arsenal that could enable them to either bring the West to its knees by threatening Armageddon, or actually bring about Ahmadinejad’s dream of “a world without America??? and “annihilating Israel.??? And let us also be mindful that but a single nuclear missile, fired from a freighter off our shores and detonated some 300 miles above Kansas, could generate an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would knock out virtually our entire electric grid system and, according to the chairman of the congressionally authorized EMP Commission, kill 70 to 90% of the entire U.S. population from starvation and disease within one year!