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filthy
SFN Die Hard

USA
14408 Posts

Posted - 05/05/2010 :  12:26:59  Show Profile Send filthy a Private Message  Reply with Quote
This could have fit into Conspiracy Theories just as easily as Politics. It's all about the Oath Keepers, who, according to their leader, plan to swoop down upon liberals as soon as the Democrats are out of power and sign them all up. For those who live with the indigenous tribes in what's left the Amazon Rain Forest, and might not have heard of these whackaloonies, they are regulars at the teabag parties.
PART 2 OF 2

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes is officially non-partisan, though you wouldn't know it by the group's strongly right-leaning image, cultivated through advocacy by conservative political pundits and frequent Oath Keepers appearances at tea parties around the country.

But if you ask him, he'll say that it won't always be this way. One day relatively soon, Democrats will once again become the minority. When that happens, Rhodes said he plans to "switch" Oath Keepers' political image and begin focusing on Democrats and progressives freshly eager to rhetorically target Republicans and their inevitable abuses of power.

Call it the hybridization of anti-partisan politics, at least partially internalized within the police and military structures of America.

Part 1 can be found here.

There is no way I would ever join one of these super-patriot groups. They are no different from any others that grope for power, their corruption disguised by their waving of the flag and their screechings of the Constitution. Screw 'em.




"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)

"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres


"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude

Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,

and Crypto-Communist!

Fripp
SFN Regular

USA
727 Posts

Posted - 05/05/2010 :  13:02:05   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send Fripp a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes is officially non-partisan,


I always love rationales like this. It's like people who insist that Bill O'Reilly isn't a right-winger because "he's a registered Independent".

"Really? An 'Independent'? Wow! Then I take that back!"

"What the hell is an Aluminum Falcon?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought my Dark Lord of the Sith could protect a small thermal exhaust port that's only 2-meters wide! That thing wasn't even fully paid off yet! You have any idea what this is going to do to my credit?!?!"

"What? Oh, oh, 'just rebuild it'? Oh, real [bleep]ing original. And who's gonna give me a loan, jackhole? You? You got an ATM on that torso LiteBrite?"
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filthy
SFN Die Hard

USA
14408 Posts

Posted - 05/06/2010 :  03:50:31   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send filthy a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Portrait of an Oath Keeper.

Taken as a whole, these people are probably neither more nor less batshit than any of the teabaggers but this candidate for a strait-jacket stands out from the crowd.
To listen to right-wingers in the wake of the arrest the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shazad, you'd think that every "liberal media" outlet on the planet had tried to pin the attempt on Tea Partiers. (The whining from Stuart Varney on Sean Hannity's show last night was especially high-pitched.)

I mean, where would anyone get the idea that right-wing Tea Partying extremists might potentially be involved in violent domestic terrorism?

Meanwhile, no one is reporting much on the arrest earlier this week by the FBI of Darren Huff, an Oath Keeper from Georgia who was upset by the arrest a few weeks ago of another "Patriot" believer who tried to conduct a "sovereign citizens" style arrest in Tennessee:

A Georgia man has been arrested in Tennessee--authorities say he headed to Madisonville, armed and prepared to take over the courthouse.

Darren Huff stands charged of traveling in interstate commerce with intent to incite a riot and transporting in commerce a firearm in furtherance of a civil disorder.

The FBI says Huff traveled to Tennessee armed with a pistol on his hip and an assault rifle in his truck, intent on carrying out citizen's arrests of 24 federal, state, and local officials, and on seeing that another man did not face trial for trying to do the same.
Monkey see, monkey do.

I must confess that I too, thought the Times Square would-be bomber was most likely a teabagger gone wild, as did 'most everyone until the guy was actually nabbed. And that puts it in perspective -- their reputation amongst saner folk is so bad that we would knee-jerk suspect them of anything. That ain't good, but there you have it.

This incident would be funny if Mr. Huff had not been armed to the teeth with an AK-47 and a pistol. I mean, what exactly did he hope to accomplish once he sprang gallantly into action? It is not easy to serve bullshit warrants on 24 people all by your lonesome. And once he had them (assuming) what would he do with them? Was he going to rob all the women and ravish all the men, what? The very best he could hope for, if he was thinking coherently, was a hostage situation in the courthouse that conceivably would have gotten him killed by a SWAT cop with no sense of humor.

History tells us that whether right or left wing, amateur revolutionaries are all the same -- they always act according to their warped version of "Patriotism," and they rarely think it through.




"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)

"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres


"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude

Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,

and Crypto-Communist!

Edited by - filthy on 05/06/2010 04:04:21
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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26022 Posts

Posted - 05/06/2010 :  07:49:54   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by filthy

I must confess that I too, thought the Times Square would-be bomber was most likely a teabagger gone wild, as did 'most everyone until the guy was actually nabbed.
I didn't. There are way too many terrorist groups, both foreign and domestic, to be able to pin any attack on anyone until the actors are positively identified.

- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too.
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Dude
SFN Die Hard

USA
6891 Posts

Posted - 05/06/2010 :  10:19:58   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send Dude a Private Message  Reply with Quote
filthy said:
I must confess that I too, thought the Times Square would-be bomber was most likely a teabagger gone wild, as did 'most everyone until the guy was actually nabbed.

Like Dave_W, I did not think it was some crazy teabagger. The part of the whole thing that got my attention was the bomb itself. It was so poorly made that it couldn't have caused any detonation beyond a car fire, if that.

The ability to make high explosives is not some well kept government secret.... boil some bleach(please don't though), add KCl, the cloride becomes a clorate and precipitates out... you have an explosive compound equal to what the military used in WW1.

And honestly, a simple fertilizer bomb isn't hard to make. Get some with a high ammonium nitrate content, pack it into a box, add diesel and a fuse...(make sure to run like hell when you light it) kaboom!

My point is that this guy seems to be a half assed "terrorist". He didn't really want to blow anyone up I think.


Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson

"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin

Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth
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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26022 Posts

Posted - 05/06/2010 :  10:48:51   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
It's my understanding that this punk used the wrong kind of fertilizer.

- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too.
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filthy
SFN Die Hard

USA
14408 Posts

Posted - 05/06/2010 :  12:41:46   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send filthy a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by Dude

filthy said:
I must confess that I too, thought the Times Square would-be bomber was most likely a teabagger gone wild, as did 'most everyone until the guy was actually nabbed.

Like Dave_W, I did not think it was some crazy teabagger. The part of the whole thing that got my attention was the bomb itself. It was so poorly made that it couldn't have caused any detonation beyond a car fire, if that.

The ability to make high explosives is not some well kept government secret.... boil some bleach(please don't though), add KCl, the cloride becomes a clorate and precipitates out... you have an explosive compound equal to what the military used in WW1.

And honestly, a simple fertilizer bomb isn't hard to make. Get some with a high ammonium nitrate content, pack it into a box, add diesel and a fuse...(make sure to run like hell when you light it) kaboom!

My point is that this guy seems to be a half assed "terrorist". He didn't really want to blow anyone up I think.


Agree about the bomb, which made me think that it was some half-assed, teabag idiot. The Taliban knows how to make explosives; they've been doing it ever since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, lo, these decades ago.

I was astonished that he tried to use common fireworks for a detonator. There are many items that would work a lot better, and these didn't even set off the gasoline. Fucking pathetic. And, heh, even then, if what I've read is correct, what he had in there wouldn't have hit an ammonium nitrate/diesel charge hard enough to ignite it.

But I must ask: if the oaf didn't want to blow anyone up, why'd he build the contraption in the first place?




"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)

"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres


"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude

Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,

and Crypto-Communist!

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Dude
SFN Die Hard

USA
6891 Posts

Posted - 05/06/2010 :  17:35:47   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send Dude a Private Message  Reply with Quote
The man lost his home, his wife was estranged, and he was going broke. It's my bet that he was promised an assload of cash if he could set the thing up and make it back to Pakistan. He did have a plane ticket.


Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson

"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin

Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth
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ThorGoLucky
Snuggle Wolf

USA
1487 Posts

Posted - 05/06/2010 :  20:51:40   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit ThorGoLucky's Homepage Send ThorGoLucky a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Vigilantes creep me out because I get the feeling that if they go unchecked it's a matter of time before they come after folks like us.
Edited by - ThorGoLucky on 05/06/2010 20:52:27
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