9/12 Thoughts

I'm not a day late on this. I don't have any 9/11 thoughts. 9/11/01 was twelve years ago. The victims and perpetrators, like Generalissimo Francisco Franco, are still dead. The man who planned and orchestrated the attack is dead. (Huzzah, Navy SeALs!) So are several successive generations of Al Queda's second tier, and countless thousands of jihadi wannabes, courtesy of the finest men and women serving in any military at any time in history. Because after watching mere office workers step off the 90th floor into Oblivion, how could anyone sane or intelligent (which eliminates jihadis on both counts) not know with utter certainty that we were going to deliver a smackdown of biblical proportions, because America?!?

But that's the past.

My thoughts turn to 9/12, and dealing with right here, right now. This whole thing went all pear-shaped the moment we started restricting our civil liberties here, instead of blowing the imaginary civil liberties of terrorists there to Mars on a cloud of shrapnel and nitrocellulose.

In no particular order:

Dear President Assclown: Just stop. Go sit down. Dubbya, love him or hate him, spent months building a coalition, and making the case worldwide for more months before committing a single troop to harm's way. Of course, unlike you, he actually served, so golfing and doing reefers before this bong-hit decision making wasn't the option it apparently is in the White House today. When you finish the box of cupcakes and three bags of potato chips, c'mon back to Earth, and sit your ass down. And hang up the phone. 87% of your own "supporters" know you've fallen on your head on this thing. Step away from the red phone, before you get a blister from thinking too hard. If you hadn't mostly sacked everyone above brigadier who'd tell you that your crack-smoking fantasies about how we go to war won't work here, they'd all stand up and tell you the same thing, and a good bit more tactfully, but as you've shown no sign of intelligence thus far, let alone listening to criticism, in your entire life, I feel I'm on pretty safe territory here, as the odds of you reading this are only slightly lower than the odds of you being able to comprehend it in the first place. But just to cover the bases, I say it again: step away from the military option. Guns are for grown-ups, and you're hopelessly under qualified on that score.

Abandon forever the asstardian idea from Colon Powell (that's not a typo, he must've been talking out his back end) of "You break it, you bought it". That's fine for antique shops, but retarded foolishness in international affairs. Which folly has been amply demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, to date. 
It's time to return to our traditional response: "If we break it, you damned sure had it coming, and we're going to keep on breaking it until you jackholes stay in your little effing swamp and leave us the hell alone. And if high explosives don't make the point, we can start dealing cards measured in kilotons and megatons. Ask Japan how that works with fanatics who don't understand the concept of unconditional surrender. Tell 'em Harry Truman sent you."
Let's just call that the Aesop Get Off My Lawn Doctrine of American Geopolitics.

And we let Iran know their clock runs out in 24 hours, then we send the bombers every day until they surrender.

If terrorists shoot an American, we should bomb their village into powder. If they hijack a plane, we should erase their home country's airport, and forbid its reconstruction indefinitely. If they attack a ship, we seize their fleet of oil tankers. They get hissy and kill people over cartoons of their prophet, we level Mecca. That is how you break bad habits from childish thugs with access to adult toys. When the countries who harbor them and give them aid live in mortal fear that anyone remotely connected to them is going to bring the entire USAF down around their heads in the morning, to the point that they bring us a platter of heads of the guilty if an American tourist gets so much as a stubbed toe or an undercooked steak, we can focus on more important things. I'm betting they run out of villages and airports and oil tankers long before we need to go to three shifts a day at the Amalgamated Ordnance Factory, but either way, I'm willing to risk it to send that message. You've reached our saturation point, so either straighten up and mind your own business, or else we're dusting off plans for your country after we eradicate you from it and re-introduce endangered species to graze over your bones and rubble. Simple, clear, and unambiguous.

Disband the TSA, and break up DHS into its constituent pieces, minus DHS.
We don't need the reichssicherheitshauptamt here, and never did. Those fat bozos couldn't find their asses with both hands, a map, and a rear-view mirror, and all they've done is molest millions, irradiate millions more, and never do anything but terrorize law-abiding citizens, rape the Constitution, loot luggage, sleep on the job, and generally fuck things up seven ways to Sunday. We don't need them; we have the IRS and the US Postal Service for that, and we can't afford the pensions, even if all the president's cronies and illegal alien relatives are currently qualified for the TSA accelerated management program.

It's time for Church-style hearings on the NSA.
Frank Church gutted and crippled the CIA in the mid-70s, just in time to handicap us from seeing the tsunami shift coming in Iran, and totally miss the collapse of the former Soviet Union.
The NSA, nominally about keeping us safe from foreign threats, has instead turned their energies on the much easier target of ass-raping the Bill of Rights, and creating 1984 on steroids among harmless Americans. Just because Hopey Dopey is the incompetent jacktard of all-time as an Affirmative Action President, doesn't mean one of the next few screwballs won't be Stalin or Napoleon. So if ever an agency needed to be gut-shot, filleted, and fenestrated from a twelfth-floor window, it's the mostly secret leviathan at Fort Meade.
And the first senator who calls for these hearings, and offers blanket amnesty to Snowden, is the front-runner in 2016.
When the NSA puts their energy into spying solely on foreign enemies once again, and none into their current Orwellian nightmare program of hometeam civilian snooping, maybe they can be safely turned loose, provided they have actual adult supervision. 

Reagan, the consummate D.C. outsider, knew this 35 years ago: government isn't the solution to anything (except unbridled freedom and prosperity, both of which it consumes like a grizzly on crack), government is the problem.

We need to kill Obamacare, wean down Social Security and Medicare, and gut entitlements before they suck the last drop of life out of this economy. If we don't, it's already past too late, and the only question will be the severity of the Depression we embark upon when the music stops, and there aren't any chairs for anyone in this rigged Ponzi scheme of an economy.
Our Founders recognized that political and economic freedom go hand in hand, so it's no wonder Obama and his burrowing socialist would-be overlords have done everything both incompetence and malice could achieve in order to undercut, undermine, and hamstring our economic health.

Including throw open the floodgates to tens of millions of illegals. Slamming that door once and for all, on both security and economic grounds, and taking a pause on legal immigration, except for those with actual English-speaking ability, documented higher education sufficient to establish a weekly income, and a burning desire for life as a free American, for about the next 50 years. That'll give the hordes of faux-indigenous peasantry time to either return home to their former Third World paradises, or assimilate to the dominant American culture and let their children take a crack at learning English and making a successful life, rather than jacking it at the point of either their knives or Uncle Sam's gun from those who've figured out how to earn a decent living following the rules.

If we hack away the nonsense that's strangling this country, the rebirth of freedom would be like a rocket launch from Cape Kennedy. If we don't, it's going to be like the launch of the shuttle Challenger, and we're all inside the cockpit.

And on that note, a free people are a restless people, and a questing people. When I was but a small boy, we not only conquered space, we kicked its ass, early, and under-budget. And we haven't equalled that feat in 44 years, nor even come close, which has been more than a peripheral reason for the malaise that socialism inflicts every time it's tried.

So it's time to stop resting on the laurels earned by men now nearly all dead, and earn some of our own by people not even yet selected for the next missions. It's time we got the bureaucrats out of space exploration, and brought back the engineer-dreamers, and started exploring the rest of our solar system and the rest of the universe, just because we can.

And anyone who can't understand that about America needs to move to a hut in the Third World rainforest, weave some flip flops out of palm fronds, and live on a diet of grubs and tofu cakes.

 Our people are too great to be contained by a stagnant prosperity, little dreams, and big government, they need the freedom that comes from small government, booming prosperity, and huge dreams. We aren't built for anything less, and we demand nothing more.