He gets most of the point…

Dan Garner’s editorial in the Ottawa Citizen today hits the broad mark, but I personally have a couple of issues with his portrayal of the “right wing” blogosphere.

I do find that the alarmism of a lot of those conservative worthies he mentions (see my links list for several of them) a bit shrill at times and certainly wearying in that it triggers my realist/paranoid streak, pushing it more into the latter end of the spectrum. That said, there IS a threat to our western way of life, and probably the reason the LGFs and others of the world are so shrill is that the rest of the media pooh-pooh the idea of there being any threat at all.

There are lots of places that jihadist money could go which would be a lot easier for the notional Propaganda Minister to pull off; various Muslim advocacy groups in Western countries would take money with no compunctions about where it came from as long as it was Muslim in origin. This could of course be part of the multi-pronged propaganda/misinformation approach of this “Goebbels” but I think that there is enough paranoia and honest concern amongst conservatives to be self-sustaining without money from “the enemy”.

Gardner’s big point that the paranoia and Homeland Security-type security theatre are a boon to Al-Qaeda’s plans to suck us into self-defeating and bankrupting foolishness is spot-on, though. That old saw from Benjamin Franklin about a people who give up liberty for security deserving neither is still the best way to keep things perspective.

I have in the past advocated aggressive yet more surgical and economical ways to deal with our half-assed enemies, and nothing I have learned from my first-hand experience has changed my mind. Basic security in airports and a spirit throughout the population to not let clowns with improvised weapons take over our conveyances will suffice to handle our tactical security problems. Aggressive counterintelligence and an ability (and willingness) to act on it would root out must threats pro actively and not require the entire populace to live in a police state. As well, leaving the various shitty governments of the world alone and minding our own business (e.g. Iraq) would go a long way toward safeguarding our strategic interests.

The evident decline of the USA is of a great deal of interest to any of us concerned about the future, and I’ll try to come up with a coherent piece on that in the near future. There is a good bit of evidence that the US is no longer anywhere close to the Republic that it was envisaged to be in the beginning, and a lot of the signs of that decay are the increasing tyranny people are subjected to in the pursuit of security against crack-heads like bin Laden’s crew. The good work being done which actually stops terror attacks is all done under the radar, where it belongs.