Date: 19 Apr 95 19:42:02 -0600
From: [l--e--l] at [lever.ncdl.com] (L. Neil Smith)
To: [N--B--N] at [tomahawk.welch.jhu.edu]
Subject: MORE ON OK CITY

                BILL CLINTON'S REICHSTAG FIRE
                   -- by L. Neil Smith --

     How very convenient.  

     How very damned convenient.  

     A heinous act is committed in Oklahoma City -- the bombing
of a federal building in which many lives, including those of a
dozen innocent children, are blasted away -- and the spokesmen of
both established political parties see nothing in it but another
opportunity to nourish their insatiable desire for control over
the lives of others at the irrational, unnecessary expense of a
sacred American tradition, more two centuries old, of unfettered
individual liberty.

     The spectacularly popular Republican showman who frequently
identifies himself on his national radio program as the "Doctor
of Democracy" spends two days wallowing in orgiastic fantasies of
collective punishment -- a variety of socialism characteristic of
Europe or Japan (where the light of the Constitution never
shines) wholly alien to anyplace in America but the Army and the
public schools. He pompously declares the moral equivalent of war
and implies that it is time for Americans to sacrifice their
time-honored and vital liberties for mere physical security.

     Meanwhile, American history's most discredited president and
his power-hungry wife get a second lease on their worthless and
destructive political lives as, lower lip extended and trembling,
he struts and pouts on national television like the comical
transvestites in _The Rocky Horror Picture Show_, pretending to a
strength of character and resolve he never possessed and never
will.

     Having done her level best to start a second Civil War, his
Attorney General, a dangerously stupid and incompetent piece of
work who has allegedly stated on more than one occasion that
anyone is a potential criminal or terrorist whose opinions
regarding life's most fundamental issues happen to differ from
her own, is now free to assert without public opposition that she
is vindicated.

     Likewise, equally stupid and incompetent people in the
national mass media, who have sucked up unceasingly during the
20th century to those in power and have lately made a habit of
attempting to identify distinguished and respectable civil rights
organizations such as the Libertarian Party and the National
Rifle Association with hate-motivated groups like the skinheads
and the Ku Klux Klan, continue to profit from the lies they
shovel daily at the public.

     Efforts in Congress -- some of them apparently in earnest --
to repeal more than four decades' worth of viciously
unconstitutional legislation get sidetracked and, if the
president and his cronies have their way, derailed altogether.

     Outlaw government agencies responsible for one increasingly
illegal, murderously violent attack on innocent citizens after
another receive a massive whitewashing by the whorish,
authority-bedazzled media, while local police who have taken to
imitating those agencies renew their "license to kill".

     Private talk and public forums on the computer internet,
previously immune to scrutiny, censorship, or control by the
establishment media or the government get closed down "for the
duration" -- for which anyone even faintly familiar with history
reads "forever" -- to the colossal relief of both major parties.

     Americans who were beginning to regain control of their own
political lives can now be lumped together with racists and
perverts -- and effectively silenced.  The Bill of Rights,
threatening for the past several years to make an unwanted
resurgence in American political life, goes into the shredder,
instead.

     What a windfall.  

     What a damned convenient windfall.  

     It's exactly the kind of windfall enjoyed by Adolf Hitler's
National Socialist German Workers' Party when the Reichstag, the
seat of representative government in that country, burned down
and the newly-elected Nazi chancellor, blaming the fire on his
political enemies, used it as an excuse to turn his country into
a dictatorship.  Historians are generally agreed that the Nazis
themselves started the fire -- whereas the pattern of the
Democratic Party in America has been to wait around, like
vultures on a cactus, until something horrible happens (the
assassination of a presidential candidate, the shooting of a
score of restaurant patrons) that they can make the best
political use of.

     Nevertheless, the effect is the same.  

     The simple, politically inconvenient fact, however, is that
terrorist incidents do not stem from any insufficiency of
government, but invariably from too much of the stuff.  This
country's problems in the Middle East -- very much on America's
guilty conscience following the explosion in Oklahoma City --
would not even exist if American politics were kept within
American borders.  Yes, that's what I said -- and if this be
isolationism, let us make the most of it!

     If, as it presently appears, the Oklahoma tragedy relates,
instead, to the infamous and tragically needless events of 1993
in Waco, Texas, then it is time to drastically reduce the role of
government in American lives, as well, not to condone and expand
the scope of the state terrorism which apparently provoked it.

     There is only one way to accomplish that -- and to prevent
this bombing from being used as yet another excuse to terrorize
and punish millions of Americans who had absolutely nothing to do
with it -- but there are many ways to begin.

     First, all federal agencies must be disarmed, their
employees forbidden to carry personal weapons on the job (or to
wear masks or to affect military clothing), and their heavy
weaponry and vehicles-of-war surrendered to the nearest units of
a denationalized National Guard.  These agencies must then be
reduced to that number specifically authorized by the
Constitution under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.  If a few
remaining federal investigators wish something to be done that is
both lawful and requires the use of force, they may apply to
local law enforcement for assistance -- and, more importantly,
for consent.

     Next, the "War on Drugs", a disastrous Republican error
which, by design or otherwise, has provided most of the
justification for government incursions on individual liberty in
recent years -- and which has served only to enhance departmental
appropriations, numbers of personnel, and the dictatorial power
of bureaucrats and politicians (while enriching their nominal
enemies the so-called drug lords) -- must come to an immediate,
screeching halt.  It was never anything but a war on the Bill of
Rights in any case.  And any law -- like RICO -- which authorizes
unconstitutional seizures of property must be repealed.

     All foreign aid, defense assistance, and overseas military
presence must end, and a drastic reduction in "diplomatic"
activities undertaken, as well. Americans are not the "cops of
the world" and every attempt to make them so merely adds to the
likelihood of another disaster such as that we have just
witnessed.  Scholars mindful of the dismal political history of
the 19th and 20th centuries, once warned that the Vietnam War
would lead to shrinkages of freedom at home, and they were right.
We are witnessing the culmination of that process.

     Stringent -- make that, "draconian" -- enforcement of the
highest law of the land, the Bill of Rights, must become
America's number one political priority.  The population that
must be scrutinized all collect government paychecks.

     These measures would constitute a good beginning.  The
question arises, how is it to be accomplished?  Certainly not by
relying on the Democratic or Republican Parties which have long
since betrayed all of their constitutional responsibilities.
Before the Oklahoma City bombing, the media were full of reports
that Americans are hankering for a third party, although mention
was seldom made of which party it might be or what they believe
it should stand for.

     America has had a third party for more than twenty years.
Perhaps it's time to make use of it.  Those who wish to see it
achieve power and do the things listed above (and more) must work
with those who only wish to continue living in a free country.
If both groups -- to give an illustrative example -- were to
begin putting bumper stickers on their cars that say, "NEXT TIME
I'M VOTING LIBERTARIAN", it wouldn't matter what all those bumper
sticker _stickers_ really intend.  For some it would be the
literal truth.  For others -- those who only want their own
parties to straighten up and fly right -- it would be a threat,
one that could be conveyed in letters and phone calls, as well.

     Try thinking of the Libertarian Party as a rolled-up
newspaper, useful in making the Republican puppy (I've given up
on the Democratic bitch) go where he's supposed to -- not on that
beautiful antique carpet we call the Constitution.

     BAP!  BAP!  BAP!  

     BAD Bobby, BAD Newtie!  

     BAP!  BAP!  BAP!  

     Of course to Janet Reno, such an exercise of free speech
would be terrorism.

     But then, so is the rest of the Bill of Rights.

L. Neil Smith <[l--e--l] at [lever.ncdl.com]>
Author:   THE PROBABILITY BROACH, THE CRYSTAL EMPIRE,
THE LANDO CALRISSIAN ADVENTURES, HENRY MARTYN, and PALLAS
Editor:   LEVER ACTION BBS (303) 493-6674, FIDOnet: 1:306/56
Founder & International Coordinator:
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