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Janet and Dolores
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

Has anybody ever seen Janet Napolitano and Dolores Umbridge together?

They could very easily be twins, or even the same person. Dolores Umbridge, you will recall, was appointed by the Ministry of Magic to the post of teacher of Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in J.K. Rowling's novel Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix [book] [DVD]. She's a little, round, pink person, falsely cheerful and polite, who reminded me from the first moment I saw her of my paternal grandmother Mabel, may she roast in Hell.

It soon becomes apparent that Umbridge has been placed there, not to teach the young witches and wizards anything, but to suppress an imagined student rebellion against an increasingly paranoid Ministry. After promulgating hundreds of oppressive new rules, waging a Reign of Terror against Harry and his classmates, and torturing her victims with a truth-telling potion, and by making them write punishment sentences in their own blood, she receives a promotion to Grand Inquisitor and begins an outright and frankly fascist takeover of the school.

Naturally, the act of suppressing an imagined rebellion makes it real.

Janet Napolitano, on the other hand, is a vicious, crooked blight on the political escutcheon of Arizona, who slithered into the office of governor by lying about and persecuting innocent individuals she successfully prosecuted as "terrorists". Now, as Barack Obama's head of the Department of Homeland Security, she has inherited the title "Jackboot Janet" from a previous fascist bureaucrat, and is trying the same evil, sleazy tactics on something on the order of half the U.S. population.

Including you—just because you're reading this—and me.

Which brings us to yet another question. Suppose you knew somebody who decided that every person who disagreed with him, to the slightest degree, over the most trivial detail—even on matters of seemingly inarguable fact, like which direction the sun comes up in the morning (he insists it's north)—was potentially violent and out to get him. How would you go about describing the state of mental health of that individual?

I thought so.

Yet, in her role as Grand—I mean, head of Homeland Security, Napolitano has recently defended a secret "report", generated by her own department, but reeking of the influence of Morris Dees and his ilk, that "identifies" every single conservative and libertarian in this country as a likely terrorist and a threat to peace and civil order, equating all of them with neo-Nazis and white supremacy advocates.

What's worse, this "report" that has been issued in nanolicate to police departments across the country (it stopped being secret thanks to some anonymous whistle-blowing cop in Missouri) warns them to be on the alert for cars bearing bumper stickers concerning such issues as eliminating the (unconstitutional and illegal) Federal Reserve System, opposing (unconstitutional and illegal) victim disarmament, preventing the establishment of an (unconstitutional and illegal) North American Union, electing third party candidates, calling Global Warming into doubt, and holding that the Constitution is the highest law of the land.

There's more—a lot more—but you get my drift. Napolitano's bogus "report" endangers the lives, liberty, and property of every decent, rational, Productive Class man, woman, and child in America. A cop who has been taken in by this murderous hoax, who performs a "routine" traffic stop—perhaps to tell a driver that his taillight is out—and notices a bumper sticker from the National Rifle Association, or promoting Ron Paul (who is actually mentioned in the "report"), or calling for the repeal of the federal income tax, will feel compelled to pop the safety strap on his holster, "just as a precaution".

We all know exactly where that leads. Ask Amadou Diallo—Oops! We can't do that. He's dead, gunned down in one of many examples of "contagious shooting" by stupid, lazy, incompetent, corrupt, and cowardly New York cops. Just ask Donald Scott, Patrick Dorismond, Ismael Mena, Mario Paz, Pedro Oregon Navarro, Esequiel Hernandez—Oops! We can't ask them, either. They're all dead too, along with Vicky Weaver and her son, and 80-odd Branch Davidians including two dozen little children, as a direct result of various kinds of police hysteria.

Exactly the same kind of hysteria that Napolitano is cynically and deliberately attempting to foment with her phony "report". We are all uppity slaves and have to be put down one way or another. Spartacus and his fellow gladiators must be crucified along the Via Appia once again.

This time, everybody goes to the ovens, right, Janet?

It isn't enough that Homeland Security be forced to withdraw this "report" or even issue a renunciation of it. We are all way past that now. We are clearly nearing some kind of a breaking-point in this country.

Simply to hear a mental and moral lightweight like Janeane Garafalo define a desire to keep what you earn as racist, or to see the tight-lipped, white-knuckled fury of left-wing socialist pols and pundits (not to mention news correspondents arguing hysterically with individuals they're supposed to be interviewing) as they rabidly denounced the recent wave of Productive Class "tea parties" across the country, meant to protest "a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evincing a design to reduce them [meaning us] under absolute despotism" tells us everything we need to know.

The First Amendment protects only the people and ideas they approve of. Everyone else, shut up, pay your taxes, climb into this boxcar.

A great many libertarians seem to be denouncing the tea parties because the majority of the participants in them were conservatives, addressing conservative concerns. But in fact there are still a lot more conservatives than there are libertarians, and the tea parties were bound to come out the way they did as a result. Nevertheless, they were the stuff that history is made of, an extremely good sign, overall. Our task as libertarians is to do the philosophical steering, to get people headed toward the future, rather than milling around in the unpleasant present, or whimpering over their lost but glorious past.

We must be kind, we must be patient, but we must stand firm.

For example, it isn't enough that Napolitano be forced to resign in disgrace for attempting to incite a second civil war. Following her resignation—which should be extremely public and involve handcuffs, leg irons, and belly chains—the woman must be incarcerated or institutionalized, basically put somewhere so she can't hurt anybody, even herself, ever again. We saw Dolores Umbridge get carried off by centaurs, but there's never any of those around when you really need them.

As for the Department of Homeland Security itself, since it has no standing under the Constitution, it must be abolished, but not until each of its employees is thoroughly investigated for having committed crimes against the Constitution, and then barred—under provisions of the 14th Amendment—from holding public office anywhere, ever again.

The FBI and the CIA are equally unconstitutional and therefore illegal.

They should be next.

Special thanks to Verne D. Fukawi
www.ncc-1776.org/tle2000/libe84-20000807-01.html#letter4

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a literary home.

Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo" May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was published by BigHead Press www.bigheadpress.com has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, or at www.Amazon.com.

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