Armed Marching in Virginia
Why am I not surprised by this? There were two groups of gun advocates marching near the nation’s capital today with one group in Virginia packing heat. Ostensibly, this was supposed to be a celebration of the second amendment but the symbolism here, in light of all of the recent events involving healthcare and militia group resurgence, should not be missed. In the main, these people believe that the nation is lurching towards a type of socialism where they’ll be relieved of their weapons and made to chafe under some unnamed tyranny.
Most of these people appear to be well beyond fighting age and in a pinch, would be dispatched fairly quickly. There is one group, however, that initially appeared pose a slightly greater threat. This group is named Oath Keepers. It was created by a constitutional lawyer and former military officer Stewart Rhodes and it’s recruitment focus is current and present police officers and military personnel who pledge to disobey any order coming from the president which, among other things, infringes on a states’ sovereignty. Of course, that could be taken to mean almost anything.
Rhodes was formerly associated with Ron Paul and is a libertarian. You may recall that I’ve suggested that the Tea Party and various secession movements have a libertarian strain at their base. Although that’s true, that’s also an Achilles heel at the same time as libertarians tend to have far more intellectual heft than the average aficionado of Sarah Palin and that’s like trying to mix oil and water. That alone will create a riff in this movement at some point along with the casting out of Republican moderates. A stated objective of these groups is to rid themselves of those who they believe are RHINOS (republicans in name only) and strangely enough, former presidential candidate John McCain is on that list.
When Oath Keepers was confronted with the question about who has given orders to violate state sovereignty or take guns from people, Rhodes falls back on Katrina as cover by suggesting that the government herded people into certain areas and confiscated guns. This is obfuscation at its best. The last thing these guys would have done is gone to the Big Easy to protect the rights of African-Americans, so why are they stretching so hard now to use this as an “example”?.
All of this is borderline treason with an implied threat of domestic terrorism. They know they’re outmanned and outgunned, but they’d really like to provoke something so they could claim martyrdom in their cause to be self elected “guardians of the republic”. But like with anything, even planned revolts take a degree of management and attempting to go up against the US government is not something easily done. The same can be said about keeping the peace in your own ranks.
Oath Keepers pulled out of the Virginia rally at the last minute while making accusations that the government was running a co-intelpro program with agent provocateurs against them in an attempt to paint them as being like the Hutarie militia. In other words, since the government was out to “get them”, they didn’t want to appear at an open carry event with known militia groups. This set off a storm of protests from the other groups accusing them of cowardice and of having some intelligence that they didn’t share with everyone else.
I suspect that the folks who run Oath Keepers aren’t fools. They know full well that Obama & Co. are going to take down these militia groups pretty hard and that it would be in the interest of self preservation to not get snared in the offensive. They thought better of it and decided not attend as they see the handwriting on the wall. That hand writing says that the US government is about to spray a can of whup ass on some of these militias and gun toting fools.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the threat from these groups is far less than they want the rest of us to believe. They don’t realize it, but they’re actually helping the democratic campaign operation and I predict that in a year or so from now, we won’t be hearing much from them. The real threat to the two party political system is the libertarian party, but as long as they’re caught up with the tea party, that threat is muted.
The African-American Clarion Call 