Does anybody remember how, early last year, the Department of Homeland Security released a study on rightwing extremists, and the entire right half of the blogosphere just completely lost their shit, claiming that Obama was declaring war on conservatives, and openly lying about the meaning of the phrase "Christian identity groups"?
Yeah, good times.
They ignored the fact that the study had taken several months to put together, and had been ordered by the Bush Administration, but that's pretty standard for the right ever since the that black guy got elected president. That's how they roll. Panic, paranoia, fear-mongering, and incoherent screaming - the four planks of the New GOP.
Well, last weekend, we learned about a group calling themselves the Hutaree, another militia group paranoid about the rise of the New World Order, accusing Obama of being the Antichrist, stockpiling weapons, selling explosives - you know, the usual schtick. We learned about them because the FBI and local authorities rounded up a bunch of them, accused them of trying to overthrow the government, plotting to kill law enforcement officers, and a couple of related charges.
Theirs was a cunning plan. They were going to kill a cop, run back to their fortified bunkers with their guns and their explosives and their faith in the Four Horsemen of the Apocolyse, and wait while the country exploded into civil war.
With a brilliantly simple plan like that, how could they lose?
Well, today, a federal magistrate in Detroit affirmed the charges, rebutted defense lawyers' claims that these were moral, upstanding Christian members of the Michigan citizenry; in fact, the magistrate specifically said that they looked like they posed a threat to the community, and were probably a flight risk.
I do have one little argument with the charges against them. They're charged with attempting to use "weapons of mass destruction." As far as anybody who hasn't spent months poring over the Federal files can tell, that's because they were making improvised explosive devices. Homemade landmines - all conventional explosives.
Unless these fine Prayer Warriors had a hidden stock of nuclear weapons, or at least chemical or biological agents, the Departement of Homeland Security needs to stop weakening the definition of "weapons of mass destruction."
Ordinary explosives don't qualify. Unless you place them directly on a city's main gas line, even if you blow them up in the middle of a crowd you might get 15 or 20 people, tops. Let's hold back the World-Ending-Threat labels for something that might actually take out more people than you can fit in a small room, OK?
Meanwhile, I do have one piece of bad news. Know how we've been forced to view Islam as a "terrorist religion" based on the actions of a few extremists? Completely ignoring the other 1.5 billion followers of what is, by some reports, the world's fastest growing religion. Well, I'm sorry, but, following that inescapable logic, we are now forced to consider the Christian church to be a terrorist religion, with it's requirements that anybody who doesn't fit in or who talks back must be killed.
Keep your eyes on those pasty white people hanging around the Episcopalian church. They're obviously a threat to our way of life.
2 comments:
Funny, I always thought that a good case could be made for W. as the Anti-Christ. It makes me uneasy that this gives me something in common with the tea-baggers/mindless militias.
Christianity has always been a terrorist religion in many of its forms ... look at the Crusades. Christianity has a hard time living up to the ideals of the guy who founded it.
Just look at Glen Beck's little kerfluffle over Christian churches that talk about "social justice." Um, yeah, Glen, Christianity is in fact all about social justice. Sorry it makes you uncomfortable.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians, they are so unlike your Christ." -Ghandi
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