Assassination Redux

The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand set off World War One and led to the deaths of millions.

Folks,

A little over two years ago, I wrote the guest essay below for David Codrea's War on Guns blog. I think it bears repeating.

Mike
III

Guest Editorial: Assassination
by Mike Vanderboegh
26 February 2008

Oswald poses with his Mannlicher Carcano.

PART ONE

"Assassination has never changed the history of the world” -- Prime Minister of Great Britain Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)

"Juggernaut"

Disraeli didn't live long enough to witness the reaction to the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 -- which swept away the entire world that Disraeli knew and left millions of dead rotting in muddy graves. If he had, he might have changed his mind about the power of assassination to work evil in the world far beyond the corpse of a single victim.

As we live in a nation of historical amnesiacs, I doubt that one American in a thousand has ever heard of Herschel Feibel Grynszpan. I have, and I thought of him as I watched one of Barack Hussein Obama's flights of charismatic oratory the other day. Here's a sample:


"... a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany ... and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama" - Barack Obama Lebanon, New Hampshire, January 7, 2008.

Obama, it seems clear at this writing, will be the nominee of the Democrat party in this election. Forget the "Obamamania"; forget the fainting teenage girls in scenes reminiscent of Elvis, the Beatles or Hitler; forget the messianic lines such as those above; forget the fact that the "old bulls" of the Democrat party have finally decided that the eternal traveling soap opera of the Clinton co-presidency is an embarrassment they can do without. Forget all that and remember this:

In January, Mr. Obama raised a stunning $36.1 million in contributions from individuals, more than 2.5 times the $13.8 million that Mrs. Clinton raised from individuals last month. To fully appreciate Mr. Obama's feat, let's put his January windfall in perspective. Recall that Howard Dean emerged as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination at the end of 2003 in large part because he had raised $40.9 million from individuals during the entire year. In the single month of January, Mr. Obama raised 88 percent of Mr. Dean's 2003 total. And, by all indications, he did so without breaking a sweat. Moreover, if a stiff like John Kerry, who managed to raise only $19.4 million from individual contributions throughout 2003, was then able to raise a mind-boggling $180 million during the five months (March-July in 2004) after he sewed up the Democratic nomination, imagine how many hundreds of millions of dollars Mr. Obama will be able to raise before the Democratic National Convention in late August if he knocks Mrs. Clinton out in Ohio and Texas on March 4. No wonder he is running from his commitment to accept public funding for the general election if the Republican nominee agreed to do so. -- Washington Times editorial, "Obama's Financial Juggernaut," 24 February 2008.

If money is the ammunition of American politics as practiced in the early 21st Century (and it is), Hillary is about to go down in a shootout that will look like the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid -- with Obama playing the part of the Bolivian Army. Indeed, John McCain will likely also be far outgunned in the general election, which by all accounts has already begun. Hillary, say those who study the minutiae of American politics, is a dead candidate walking and John McCain ain't feeling too good either. (See Michael Barone's "The General Begins," 23 February 2008)

So, (to use an old phrase of Louisiana politics) unless someone comes up with pictures of Obama in bed with a live boy or a dead girl (and Teddy Kennedy could probably even help Barack out with THAT one) OR Osama's boys go nuclear in New York, Barack Hussein Obama is going to be the next President of the United States. Unless, that is, he meets up with a modern cousin of Herschel Feibel Grynszpan on his way to the Oval Office.

Herschel Grynszpan.

"Kristallnacht"

The son of Polish Jews who emigrated to Germany in 1911, Herschel Grynszpan was born in Hanover in 1921, where his father Sendel had a modest tailor's shop. Herschel had an elder sister, Esther, and brother, Mordechai. After Hitler came to power, the Grynszpan family began to suffer persecution. To keep their oldest son safe, in 1936 Sendel and Berta sent the 15 year old Herschel to Belguim to live with his uncle and aunt. Shortly afterward, Herschel crossed illegally into France seeking work, moving to Paris. He spent the next two years trying to get legal residence in France, without which he could not work or study legally, but was rejected by French officials. His reentry permit for Germany expired in April 1937 and his Polish passport expired in January 1938, leaving him without legal papers. Meanwhile, his family's position back in Germany was becoming desperate. The Nazi boycott of Jewish shops was killing his father's tailoring business and his siblings lost their jobs. On 26 October, the Gestapo was ordered to arrest and deport immediately all Polish Jews in Germany.

The Grynszpans were among the estimated 12,000 Polish Jews arrested, stripped of their property and herded aboard trains headed for Poland. When they got to the border, they were forced to walk two kilometers to the Polish border town of Zbszyn. But the Poles, every bit as anti-Semitic as the Nazis, refused to admit them. The Grynszpans and thousands of other Polish-Jewish deportees were left stranded at the border, fed only occasionally by the Polish Red Cross and Jewish welfare organizations. It was from Zbszyn that Berta Grynszpan sent a postcard to Herschel in Paris, telling him what had happened and pleading with him to rescue them and arrange for them to emigrate to America - which was an impossibility. Berta's postcard reached Herschel on Thursday 3 November. Herschel decided to avenge his parents' persecution.

Four days later Herschel wrote a farewell postcard to his parents and went to a gunshop where he bought a 6.35mm pistol and a box of 25 rounds, for 235 francs. He then walked to the German Embassy and went inside, asking to see an embassy official -- he later said he had wanted to kill the German ambassador. The clerk on duty asked Ernst vom Rath, a junior embassy official, to see him. When Grynszpan entered vom Rath's office, he pulled out his gun and shot vom Rath three times in the abdomen. He shouted "You're a filthy boche" and said he was acting in the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews. Grynszpan made no attempt to resist or escape. He freely confessed to shooting vom Rath, who died two days later. Grynszpan said that his motive for doing so was to avenge the persecuted German Jews. Ironically, vom Rath was in fact an anti-Nazi and was under investigation by the Gestapo at the time of his death. Heck, he wasn't even an anti-Semite but he died just the same.

The Nazis had been planning to let loose their Brownshirts on the Jewish community for some time. Grynszpan's act was just the excuse they were looking for. Vom Rath died on the fifteenth anniversary of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, the greatest day of the Nazi calendar. That night Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made an incendiary speech to veteran Nazis at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich. Goebbels hinted that there might be "spontaneous outbursts" against the Jews. The assembled Nazi leaders needed no further encouragement.

Thus began the anti-Jewish pogrom known as the "Night of Broken Glass," or in German, "Kristallnacht." On the night of 9-10 November 1938 the Nazis fanned out across Germany. During Kristallnacht over 7,500 Jewish shops were destroyed and 400 synagogues were burnt down. More than 1 billion Reichsmarks' damage to property was reported - and Jews were unable to file insurance claims for property losses. Ninety-one Jews were killed and more than 30,000 were sent to concentration camps (where over a thousand died within a short time of beatings, outright murder and disease). The rest were released some months later. Those who could, left Germany after that. The ones who didn't perished later with all their kin in the Holocaust. Herschel Grynszpan set out to make an anti-Nazi gesture, inadvertently killed an anti-Nazi, and gave the Nazis the excuse for the first nationwide assault on the Jews. It was the Law of Unintended Consequences writ large. And it was only the beginning. As William Shirer wrote in Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:

On the flaming, riotous night of November 9, 1938, the Third Reich had deliberately turned down a dark and savage road from which there was no return, A good many Jews had been murdered and tortured and robbed before, but these crimes, except for those which took place in concentration camps, had been committed mostly by brown-shirted rowdies acting out of their own sadism and greed while the State authorities looked on, or looked the other way. Now the German government itself had organized and carried out a vast pogrom. The killings, the looting, the burning of synagogues and houses and shops on the night of November 9 were its doing. So were the official decrees, duly published in the official gazette, the Reichsgesetzblatt . . . which fined the Jewish community a billion marks, eliminated them from the economy, robbed them of what was left of their property and drove them toward the ghetto -- and worse." (Page 434)

Gerald Schwab, who witnessed the events of Kristallnacht as a German Jewish boy and who later researched the case, titled his 1990 book The Day the Holocaust Began, as indeed it did. One wonders what Grynszpan made of the awful result of his assassination of vom Rath. We cannot know because two years later, after the fall of France, Herschel passed into German custody and thereafter disappeared into what the Nazis called "Nacht und Nebel" -- Night and Fog. Never heard of "Night and Fog?":

"After lengthy consideration, it is the will of the Führer that the measures taken against those who are guilty of offenses against the Reich or against the occupation forces in occupied areas should be altered. The Führer is of the opinion that in such cases penal servitude or even a hard labor sentence for life will be regarded as a sign of weakness. An effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by taking measures which will leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender. Deportation to Germany serves this purpose." -- Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, Nacht und Nebel Decree to the Gestapo, 7 December 1942.

Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel ordered: "The prisoners are, in future, to be transported to Germany secretly, and further treatment of the offenders will take place here; these measures will have a deterrent effect because - A. The prisoners will vanish without a trace. B. No information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate."

Having served the Nazis unintentionally but well, Grynszpan vanished into the Nacht und Nebel. Grynszpan apparently died in one of their camps in the final year of the war. In one final ironic twist, Grynszpan's parents -- who had been so concerned about Herschel's safety that they sent him to "safety" within pistol range of vom Rath -- survived the war.

The Last Crossroad, or, Take Another Spin Around Dealey Plaza

"If I were Barack Obama, I wouldn't walk my dog in Fort Marcy Park." -- Neal Boortz.

Boortz's crack was obviously directed at the Clintons, who have a history, as they say. Personally, I think Obama can survive the Clintons. Their old voodoo has lost its juju, and one almost pities them in their bewilderment as Obama dances around their already-dug political graves -- almost. What is unclear at this point is whether Obama can survive the other dark forces lurking under the surface of our body politic.

We are coming up on a crossroads in our Republic's long journey, perhaps the last crossroads -- one fork of which can lead to "Kristallnacht" and "Nacht und Nebel." To the power-hungry elites who are tired of tiptoeing around the sensibilities (and latent power) of the American armed citizen to achieve their goals, Barack Obama may be worth more dead than alive.

Obama's friends and supporters have long worried about the target painted on his back. In an Associated Press story that ran a couple of days ago, David Crary reports:

For many black Americans, it's a conversation they find hard to avoid, revisiting old fears in the light of bright new hopes. They watch with wonder as Barack Obama moves ever closer to becoming America's first black president. And they ask themselves, their family, their friends: Is he at risk? Will he be safe? . . . But concern about Obama's safety transcends racial lines. He has white supporters who see him as an inspiring, youthful advocate of change in the mold of Robert F. Kennedy, and they are mindful of Kennedy's assassination just two months after King's. Pam Hart, the principal of a multiracial elementary school in the Philadelphia suburb of Cheltenham, said she is struck by the contrast between some of the black students there, innocently excited about Obama's candidacy, and the more anxious perspective of older people who lived through the violence of the 1960s. "My 70-year-old aunt—every time I call her, she says she's really afraid Obama is going to be assassinated. She is so worried that history will repeat itself," said Hart. (Source: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8UVHBRO2&show_article=1)
Indeed, Monica Guzman, a liberal blogger at http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/, reports that "An ugly topic is capturing attention on the Internet: Today the phrase 'assassinate Obama' appeared on a list of the top 100 Google search terms."

Guzman worries that reporting on the possibility of Obama's assassination will make it a fact. Other folks see Biblical prophecy at work. At http://www.satansrapture.com/ , Harry Walther claims that he has decoded the Bible to predict this headline:

"BIBLE CODE: OBAMA ASSASSINATED; HILLARY CLINTON WINS AS PRESIDENT, WELCOMES ANTICHRIST 2010 AD."

Whatever you may think of Harry's Bible scholarship (and I don't presume to know the will of God myself) Walther does have some good advice straight out of the book of Luke: "Watch and be ready . . .Pray always that you are accounted worthy to escape all these things and stand before the Son of God." (Luke 21: 34-36.)

That's certainly good advice for Obama, given that everybody including his friends are discussing his potential imminent demise. Witness this excerpt from New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny's "Hushed Worry About Obama's Safety":

Here in Dallas, those memories were raised in conversation after conversation with several of the 17,000 people who came to see Mr. Obama at a rally last week. “Right around the corner is the John Kennedy Memorial; everyone all around me was talking about it,” said Imogene Covin, a Democratic activist from Dallas. “In the back of my mind, it’s a possibility that something might happen because he’s something to gawk at right now. But you know why I think he will be safe? He has a broad range of people behind him.” That afternoon, Mr. Obama’s motorcade passed Dealey Plaza and the Texas Book Depository building, where the fatal shot was fired at President Kennedy in 1963. Several campaign aides looked out their windows, silently absorbing the scene. Not so for Mr. Obama, who later said he had not realized he was passing the site. And no one in his car pointed it out. “I’ve got to admit, that’s not what I was thinking about,” he said. “I was thinking about how I was starting to get a head cold and needed to make sure that I cleared up my nose before I got to the arena.” (NYT, 25 February 2008)

Oswald's Mannlicher Carcano poses without Oswald.

PART TWO

"Cui Bono?"

Of course the assassination of Barack Obama would play into the most hackneyed prejudices of the collectivist left and the "mainstream" news media who serve their interests. Not that Obama isn't an object of great concern to those of us who revere the Founders' Republic. As Bob Owens and other gun rights activists have pointed out, Obama is profoundly anti-freedom when it comes to firearms. (See http://pajamasmedia.com/2008/02/obama_shooting_himself_in_the.php) This gun-grabbing tendency of Obama's may play a role in the general election, especially if the Heller decision goes against an individual interpretation of the Second Amendment. Of course, he has to make it to November for that to be an issue.

In addition, there is something about Obama's mesmerized followers and lack of substance that frightens many thoughtful folks. "By the Lord above, Mike, they're worse than Jonestown koolaid drinkers!" said a friend of mine after personally witnessing an Obama rally. "You could tell that they'd die for him, or kill for him, without a doubt in their minds or even knowing why," he marveled. In this, Obamamania approaches the cult of Thulsa Doom from Conan the Barbarian, as David Codrea and others have pointed out on waronguns blogspot.

Worse than that, though, is the emerging notion that Obama may be more anti-freedom and more, yes, anti-American, than Hillary Clinton on her worst day. Witness this incredible piece of analysis from "Spengler" at the Asia Times, "Obama's women reveal his secret":

"Cherchez la femme," advised Alexander Dumas in: "When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman." In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama's women reveal his secret: he hates America. We
know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real Barack Obama. No man - least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father - can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife...

Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother's revenge against the America she despised.

Ann Dunham died in 1995, and her character emerges piecemeal from the historical record, to which I will return below. But Michelle Obama is a living witness. Her February 18 comment that she felt proud of her country for the first time caused a minor scandal, and was hastily qualified. But she meant it, and more. The video footage of her remarks shows eyes hooded with rage as she declares: "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment."

The desperation, frustration and disappointment visible on Michelle Obama's face are not new to the candidate's wife; as Steve Sailer, Rod Dreher and other commentators have noted, they were the theme of her undergraduate thesis, on the subject of "blackness" at Princeton University. No matter what the good intentions of Princeton, which founded her fortunes as a well-paid corporate lawyer, she wrote, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong."

Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public. Early in Obama's campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator. "I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There's Barack Obama the phenomenon. He's an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there's the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy's a little less impressive," she told a fundraiser in February 2007.

"For some reason this guy still can't manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn't get stale, and his five-year-old is still
better at making the bed than he is." New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time, "She added that the TV version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she'd like to meet him sometime." Her handlers have convinced her to be more tactful since then.

"Frustration" and "disappointment" have dogged Michelle Obama these past 20 years, despite her US $300,000 a year salary and corporate board memberships. It is hard for the descendants of slaves not to resent America. They were not voluntary immigrants but kidnap victims, subjected to a century of second-class citizenship even after the Civil War ended slavery. Blackness is not the issue; General Colin Powell, whose parents chose to immigrate to America from the West Indies, saw America just as other immigrants do, as a land of opportunity. Obama's choice of wife is a fail-safe indicator of his own sentiments. Spouses do not necessarily share their likes, but they must have their hatreds in common. Obama imbibed this hatred with his mother's milk.

It is a disturbing analysis of Obama that Spengler presents and should be read in its entirety by everyone interested in the future of our country. (It can be found here: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html )

Spengler eschews, as do I, the notion that Obama is a closet Muslim:

Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. In the Muslim world of the 1960s, nationalism rather than radical Islam was the ideology of choice among the enraged. Radical Islam did not emerge as a major political force until the nationalism of a Gamal Abdel Nasser or a Sukarno failed. Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America . . ., but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States. There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss.

And Spengler observes, "Americans are the world's biggest suckers." And, he says,

America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice aforethought, he has sought out their sore point. . . . (Spengler details the current economic downturn and observes) In times of stress they have a baleful susceptibility to hucksters and conmen. Be afraid - be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word "hope", they instead hear, "handout". A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as "something for nothing". Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over. . .

It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama. As he recalled in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Obama idealized the Kenyan economist who had married and dumped his mother, and was saddened to learn that Barack Hussein Obama, Sr, was a sullen, drunken polygamist. The elder Obama became a senior official of the government of Kenya after earning a PhD at Harvard. He was an abusive drunk and philanderer whose temper soured his career.

The senior Obama died in a 1982 car crash. Kenyan government officials in those days normally spent their nights drinking themselves stupid at the Pan-Afrique Hotel. Two or three of them would be found with their Mercedes wrapped around a palm tree every morning. During the 1970s I came to know a number of them, mostly British-educated hollow men dying inside of their own hypocrisy and corruption.

Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals - and nothing can be more terrible for the system. Even those who despise America for its blunders of the past few years should ask themselves whether the world will be a safer place if America retreats into a self-pitying shell.

This is tough and scary stuff, to be sure and one might rightfully wonder who is serving it up. Wikipedia says that "Spengler is the pen name of an anonymous Internet columnist published in Asia Times Online since January 2000. He writes from a conservative Judeo-Christian religious perspective but in a provocatively iconoclastic style, using aspects of Western history and culture to comment on current geopolitical events."

My own guess is that he's an ex-pat Brit, probably an ex-MI5 or MI6 analyst/intellectual. (His analysis of Tolkein vs. Wagner found here http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EA11Aa02.html is a classic.) As I know from personal experience in the 90s, while the British may not always make the smart decisions, they always have the best intelligence before doing so. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard comes to mind.

“Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort to assassination is probably not as smart as he ought to be.” -- Barbara Tuchman

So, if we accept that Spengler is correct about Obama's inner demons, we must admit that his election to the office of President can only portend terrible times ahead. Still, one must ask "Cui bono?" Or, to whose benefit would Obama's assassination work?

The Men in Black & the Cigarette Smoking Man

You'll dress only in attire specially sanctioned by MiB special services. You'll conform to the identity we give you, eat where we tell you, live where we tell you. From now on you'll have no identifying marks of any kind. You'll not stand out in any way. Your entire image is crafted to leave no lasting memory with anyone you encounter. You're a rumor, recognizable only as deja vu and dismissed just as quickly. You don't exist; you were never even born. Anonymity is your name. Silence your native tongue. You're no longer part of the System. You're above the System. Over it. Beyond it. We're "them." We're "they." We are the Men in Black. -- Zed, Men in Black, the movie.

"You're above the system." Isn't that the side of the current administration's bureaucracy that we see in the case US vs. Olofson? The ATF certainly acts as if its above the law. This is nothing new. Still, it would be silly to imagine that every evil event is the result of some conspiracy or another. I have never been one to believe that there is one human spider at the central web of our Republic's enemies. There are many competing spiders and many evil webs and the only thing they have in common is that they serve Lucifer's purpose. And despite having been pulled into the private investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing, I don't waste much time chasing "conspiracy theories." But a student of history would also be a fool if he didn't admit that unseen hands often pull distant triggers, either deliberately or inadvertently.

The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963. The dynamite came from an FBI snitch.

It is not insignificant that the Klan bombers of the 16th Street Baptist Church here in Birmingham in 1963 that killed four innocent little girls got their dynamite from an FBI informant, Tommy Rowe. (For more about Rowe, see The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo by Dr. Gary May, 2005.) It is also pertinent that Emad Salem, the FBI informant on the inside of the first World Trade Center bombing conspiracy, offered to his handlers the option of doing a "switcheroo" on the bombers, substituting a harmless powder for the deadly explosives and thereby preventing any potential catastrophe. The FBI spurned his offer. And if you believe that Tim McVeigh's call to federal informant Andreas Carl Strassmeir at Elohim City, Oklahoma prior to the OKC bombing was a wrong number, you probably still believe in the tooth fairy as well. For my money, these facts representing 30 years of FBI incompetence and/or complicity (take your pick) form what I call a pattern.

Again, cui bono? The reaction to the 16th Street church bombing broke the back of segregation in the south. It also discredited for a generation the Founders' concept of the Tenth Amendment, which had been stupidly linked to the denial of constitutional rights that segregation represented. (Much as the concept of secession, which the Founders certainly envisioned as a possibility if the central government became too onerous, was discredited by its use to defend the institution of human slavery.) The OKC bombing reelected Bill Clinton. (He said so himself, on the plane coming back to DC the day after the election. "It broke the spell," he told reporters.) And the first World Trade Center bombing (before all those embarrassing little facts about their prior knowledge came out) reinforced the FBI's cultivated image as the squeaky clean defender of America. Dragonslayers need dragons if they are to be willingly fed by the gullible peasantry.

Was Lee Harvey Oswald really the "lone gunman?" Or was President Kennedy killed by the Cigarette Smoking Man from X-Files? How about Martin Luther King? Was it "Old Smokey" as Mulder called him, or James Earl Ray? Does it matter? The Nazis did not send Herschel Grynszpan to vom Rath's Paris embassy office. But they certainly benefited from his death.

Justice Robert Jackson once warned, "I cannot say that our country could have no secret police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot become totalitarian without a centralized national police." He also said this: "The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice."

In the aftermath of an Obama assassination, all oppressions will be masked as justice. And it doesn't take much imagination to figure out what would happen to individual liberty in this country (especially that of American gunowners) if Obama is assassinated during the campaign. His killer would no doubt be found wearing a "Minuteman" hat, with a Gun Owners of America membership card in his wallet. The worst provisions of the PATRIOT Act and the other counter-terrorism laws passed in the last ten years would be focused on us, the armed citizenry of the United States.

So while the prospect of an Obama presidency is scary, the threat of an Obama assassination is worse. Personally, I'll take my crises one at a time as they present themselves. If Obama gets elected and proves to be as great a danger to our liberties as we fear, I'll worry about that then. But for now, if Obama comes to my town to make one of his kool-aid drinker, swooning teenybopper highfalutin' speeches, you'll find me and my friends working the crowd, protecting his skinny butt from harm. If you're smart, you will too. Just watch out for the FBI, the Men in Black and the Cigarette Smoking Man -- and the powerful elites they serve.

Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com