Paging Lee Greenwood

Via Antiwar.com this morning, Anthony Gregory gives a succinct summary of the New Paradigm:

We are not really surrendering our gels, forgoing our bottled water, or taking off our shoes for our own good. That’s all a ruse. The TSA is an agency whose function, if not intended purpose, is to condition obedience and subservience into the population. It is an arm of the federal police state and cannot be reformed into anything else. It must be abolished totally and nothing short of that will bring liberty back to air travel.

Even more fundamentally, the media and talking heads — certainly the conservative opponents of TSA — forget why we have a terrorist threat, such as it is, in the first place: Because the U.S. government is waging imperial wars abroad, slaughtering children, propping up corrupt regimes, overthrowing governments, playing geopolitical favorites, cutting people off of international trade, and generally behaving as the biggest bully in the world. The blowback terrorism that results can never be stamped out so long as the wars continue. Those who criticize the TSA but defend the wars, and those who defend the TSA but question the wars, should recognize they are two sides of the same imperial coin. The same statism behind the degradation of domestic passengers is in play in the dehumanization of foreign civilians bombed from the sky. Washington, D.C., sees itself as master of our lives and ruler of the world. So long as we accept its pretensions to control the planet, we will be treated as imperial subjects are always treated: as mere cogs in the machine, disposable and malleable human livestock, at the very best.

As I've said over and over again in this space, Americans who imagine themselves enjoying freedom while sending their armies everywhere else to plant the boot on brown foreigners' necks are dreaming a fool's dream ... and a wicked fool at that. Hire a psycho to go out every morning and collect your "protection" money, and he'll do so ... but at the end of his shift, he'll want to come home and relax, and you'll find that he hasn't turned miraculously into good company. He's still a psycho, and he's got your house keys.

Get out there this weekend and enjoy your Fourth-O-July. Just make very sure you enjoy it in Officially Approved™ ways, O marvelously free American. Otherwise, you'll have these clowns to deal with.