Word has been given to evacuate my little house that I have lived in with my Zsu Zsu for 4 years.

It is not the creek that has defeated me – it is the Fox River which will crest at 2:00 AM this morning and flood downtown Algonquin. The flood authorities reckon that 4 feet of water will be in my little one story house by breakfast time. The house will be a total loss – not even worth rebuilding. At any rate, it will be uninhabitable for weeks.

We are scrambling to move our stuff – Sue’s son is coming with a truck and we are trying to save as much as possible.

We are planning to move to Ohio – a bitter pill to swallow for me. Sue’s family is there but not much else.

No idea what to do with the kitties. Red Cross will take care of them until we’re settled.

I don’t know when I will post on this space again. Please watch for updates as I will try my best to post whenever I can.

Thank you for all your expressions of concern and your prayers.

Farewell for now…

The votes are in from this week’s Watchers Council and the winner in the Council category was “The “Don’t Make Waves!” Theory of Iraqi Politics” by Big Lizards. Finishing second was “Political Fairy Tales Bumped (‘cause it was getting lost below)” by Bookworm Room.

Leading the pack in the Non Council category was “General James Mattis—Attacking the al Qaeda “Narrative”” by Small Wars Journal.

If you would like to participate in next week’s Watchers Council vote, go here and follow instructions.

It is very likely in the next few hours that I will be forced to flee my home due to flooding. It appears only a miracle will be able to save the house and most of my possessions. We don’t have an “upstairs” that we can move things although we’ve taken a lot of stuff to the loft in the garage.

This happened to me back in ‘94 but at the time, I was living on the second floor of an apartment building. This time, I’m not so lucky.

If blogging is interrupted for a few days, I hope you keep checking back. For make no mistake, the first chance I get, I will start posting again.

UPDATE: 7:00 PM

Dodged one bullet. Three more behind it. Then along about 9:00 PM, another round sweeps in from Iowa.

Forecast tomorrow? Yep. More T-Storms day and night.

UPDATE: 10:15 – “SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME”

The band of storms that were supposed to hit here between 7-10 missed us by around 25 miles to the south. O’Hare got drowned. I hear the Woodfield Mall parking lot is a lake. But we haven’t had a drop since 6:30 and the water has actually receded a few inches.

Funny – measuring hope in inches. But when you’re looking for a sign that catastrophe is avoided, you’ll grasp at anything.

I wonder if Noah had a lifeboat?

One more round to go – early in the AM. Firemen told me to sleep in the living room in case I have to move quickly. Hopefully, I’ll be here to blog about things in the AM.

UPDATE: STILL HERE

Wow. Just Wow. If my luck keeps holding like this, I may just abandon my atheism and embrace religion.

Everything that was being forecast to hit us, drifted to the south instead. We got a little drizzle a bit after midnight but that was all. This morning, the creek has receded several feet.

Not out of the woods yet. They’re still predicting T-Storms for most of the day. And the ground is very saturated – swampy to be precise. But the water in my sub basement hasn’t harmed anything and is starting to go down.

Blogging will continue as normal for the time being.

Perhaps it is too much to ask that President Bush just once try to be a little more realistic about what is going on in Iraq and the prospects for that nation becoming what he has defined as “free.” But if he was ever going to soberly address the enormous problems facing the Iraqi people and government – problems that must be addressed before we can claim any kind of “triumph” – he might not have been able to find a friendlier, more receptive audience than yesterday at the VFW Convention in Kansas City.

Bush delivered a well written speech to the supportive group of vets, touching all the familiar bases about 9/11, al-Qaeda, and the need for supporting General Petreaus and our military. But the closest he came to acknowledging the extraordinary challenges facing the Iraqi government was here:

A free Iraq is not going to be perfect. A free Iraq will not make decisions as quickly as the country did under the dictatorship. Many are frustrated by the pace of progress in Baghdad, and I can understand this. As I noted yesterday, the Iraqi government is distributing oil revenues across its provinces despite not having an oil revenue law on its books, that the parliament has passed about 60 pieces of legislation.

Prime Minister Maliki is a good guy, a good man with a difficult job, and I support him. And it’s not up to politicians in Washington, D.C. to say whether he will remain in his position—that is up to the Iraqi people who now live in a democracy, and not a dictatorship. (Applause.) A free Iraq is not going to transform the Middle East overnight. But a free Iraq will be a massive defeat for al Qaeda, it will be an example that provides hope for millions throughout the Middle East, it will be a friend of the United States, and it’s going to be an important ally in the ideological struggle of the 21st century. (Applause.)

There is no “pace of progress” with regards to political reconciliation in Iraq. There is, quite simply, no progress at all. And it might be an arguable point that Iraq is, in any sense of the word, a democracy – not when 15% of the population is frozen out of power sharing and hunted down like animals to be slaughtered.

That latter point is the direct result of Mr. Maliki’s inability (or unwillingness) to do anything about the Shia death squads inhabiting the Interior Ministry of his own government as well as their enablers on the Iraqi police force and in the army. The symbiotic relationship between Mr. Maliki’s government and the thugs, militia men, and criminal gangs that make life in the Capitol and elsewhere a living hell for ordinary Iraqis (while giving him the support he needs to maintain his position) will never be addressed as long as the President of the United States keeps his mouth shut about them.

Not a word in the President’s speech about the British withdrawal from the south which has already precipitated a civil war within a civil war between rival militias for control of that vital area. The hand of Iran is most prominent here and there is little doubt that the mullahs will try their best to back the winner in this conflict thus giving them effective control of nearly one third of the country.

And what of our friends, the Kurds? They recently threw in their lot with the Shias by signing a power sharing agreement that froze the Sunnis out of effective representation in Baghdad. Hailed by Maliki as a triumph, the agreement is a recipe for disaster in that it gives the Sunni insurgents a reason to fight on.

I could go on with the familiar litany of catastrophes waiting to happen, missed opportunities, “beat the heat” vacations by the parliament (which never has a quorum to pass anything anyway), the inexhaustible supply of insurgents and their sympathizers – numbered in the hundreds of thousands by our own military – and the hopelessness of most ordinary Iraqis about the security situation.

Does all of this overshadow the genuine progress being made against al-Qaeda as well as some encouraging news about some of the Sunni tribes switching sides? I think any rational, fair minded person who doesn’t have a partisan agenda would have to agree that despite the relative success of the surge to date, the daunting task to make Iraq “free” and achieve any kind of “victory” remains a pipe dream.

The most controversial part of the President’s speech came when he warned against a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq leading to another “Viet Nam” aftermath. Here, the President is on firmer ground – except if you’re a reporter for the New York Times:

In urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.

The speech was the beginning of an intense White House initiative to shape the debate on Capitol Hill in September, when the president’s troop buildup will undergo a re-evaluation. It came amid rising concerns in Washington over the performance of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq, who has made little progress toward bridging the sectarian divide in his country.

I had to read that amazing passage about our pullout from Viet Nam having “few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies” several times before I could believe it. Is the Times actually trying to argue that there were no “negative repercussions” for Thailand or Cambodia, both of them close US allies at the time? And the fact that the collective security group, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, was destroyed by our pullout from Viet Nam didn’t have repercussions for the United States itself? Or that our pull out didn’t damage our ability to deter the Russians?

Our mad rush out of Viet Nam certainly emboldened the Soviet Union to meddle in Africa by using their flunkie Castro as a proxy in Angola as well as giving direct aid to groups like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the El Salvador rebels. To say that our pull out didn’t have negative repercussions for the US or many of our allies is insane.

The President spelled out what some of those “negative repercussions” were:

The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.

[snip]

There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today’s struggle—those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that “the American people had risen against their government’s war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today.”

I think the New York Times, as most on the left in this country, have failed to come to grips with their abandonment of Southeast Asia to the communists. They have washed their hands of the bloodbath that followed, saying it wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t gone in militarily in the first place. That is pure sophistry. The aftermath of Viet Nam – like the aftermath that will occur in Iraq – would have been manageable if we hadn’t pulled out so precipitously and completely. If we had made it clear to the North that bombing would have resumed the moment they reneged on the treaty and if we had kept a substantial residual force in Viet Nam with the promise that our troops would return if they broke the peace agreement, I doubt very much that Saigon would have fallen.

Now this position was not politically viable at the time. Ford was hamstrung by Congress in protecting the South from the North’s cynical refusal to abide by the Paris accords. The result was catastrophe.

Can we avoid a similar fate in Iraq? No one knows. But this quote from an unarmed official commenting on a much more pessimistic report than the President gave to the vets, highlighting the dire situation we face over the next 9-12 months seems to sum it up for both Democrats and Republicans alike:

The new report also concludes that the American military has had success in recent months in tamping down sectarian violence in the country, according to officials who have read it.

The report, which was intended to help anticipate events over the next 6 to 12 months, is “more dire in its assessments” than the administration has been in its own internal discussions, according to one senior official who has read it. But the report also warns, as Mr. Bush did on Wednesday, that an early withdrawal would lead to more chaos.

“It doesn’t take a policy position,” one official said. “But it leaves you with the sense that what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working, but we can’t let up, or it’ll get worse.”

If that doesn’t sober up both supporters of the war and those who wish a quick exit from Iraq, then nothing will.

I can’t stand the sight of spinach.

All my life, I’ve wanted to be like Popeye and eat my spinach. But the sight, smell, texture, and consistency of Spinach makes me want to puke.

If I walk into a house where cabbage is being cooked, I feel physically ill at the smell.

The thought of eating oysters makes me gag.

I am sure that I’m not alone in any of those powerful dislikes. And if I sought out my fellow spinach haters, cabbage bashers, and oyster despisers and we all got together and decided to tax those of you who love and cherish those foods, there would be a hue and cry throughout the land guaranteed to effect a swift repeal of any such tax.

Why then, do many of you wish to pick on smokers and take my property – my hard earned money – in the form of a monstrously discriminatory tax simply because there are more of you than there are of us?

Granted, smoking is extremely hazardous to the user and not so good if you’re standing next to someone puffing away. Banning smoking indoors everywhere is something we smokers must come to accept – although I would love to see the law altered so that entrepreneurs could open “smokers only” bars and restaurants. Everyone from the owner down through the employees and customers would have to either be a smoker or sign a waiver to the effect that they don’t mind the smoke.

I can even see the efficacy of banning smoking at the ballpark or other places where large numbers of people are in close proximity to each other.

These are accommodations I am willing to make. What I am not willing to do any longer is sit still while the rest of you bully me around and take my money for exorbitant taxes while sanctimoniously weeping about it being for “the kids” or “for health care.”

I could give a good goddamn what it’s for. As long as smoking is legal, you have absolutely no right to target me and my property for excessive, ruinous taxes whose expressed purpose is to force me to change a behavior you find objectionable.

If smoking is such a health hazard, so much a threat to children, you have only one option; ban it entirely.

I don’t want to hear about Prohibition and the problems enforcing the Volstead Act. Smoking is portrayed by government and activists as evil – thus making those of us who choose to smoke an easy target for what under any other circumstances would be considered theft at the hands of government and a bunch of health Nazis. If you want to save me from what you see as my own folly, keep kids from starting smoking, cut health costs associated with smokers that is putting such a drain on resources, then for God’s sake have the balls to ban cigarettes!

Instead, you enjoy the exercise of power too much over your fellow citizens – and the use of funds associated with your ill gotten gains – to stop now. Government is on a rampage not against tobacco but against its users. And that is unconscionable in a free society.

The state of Illinois will most likely add nearly a dollar to the cigarette tax in a few days. The extra 20 bucks a week Zsu Zsu and I will have to pay to indulge our habit and pleasure is nothing compared the affront to our rights as citizens to be secure in our property from unreasonable taxes. Targeting a minority for such treatment would not be tolerated if we were talking about religion, race, sex, or sexual preference. But since smoking is frowned upon by society, that disapprobation is transferred to the smoker and any indignity becomes possible, even desired.

I enjoy smoking cigarettes. It makes no difference to me whether you accept that or not. There are things about you, I’m sure, that I couldn’t understand or stomach. Perhaps you’re an oyster eater or cabbage lover. So be it. You have no fear of having an excessive amount of your property taken from you in taxes just because you enjoy those slimy mollusks. Perhaps if I started a campaign to demonize oysters and tax the processing, selling, and eating of them beyond all reason and fairness, you might get an idea of how I feel.

I’m not asking for the elimination of cigarette taxes nor even a reduction. I am asking for a moratorium. Either that or a ban on the growing, selling, and consumption of tobacco. It is time to stop treating smokers so unfairly.

My internet has been acting goofy since a terrific T-storm hit around 6:00 AM this morning. It seems that my next door neighbor and I are the only ones experiencing this on again-off again phenomena. Comcast says someone will be out around noon to see what the trouble is.

I apologize for not having anything new and invigorating for your to read. However, until I do get something up, allow me to direct your attention to the comments in my post from yesterday about our beloved truthers.

Aside from having to delete a good dozen comments for obscenities, the rest of our querulous gang of self deluded nincompoops tried their hand at comedy writing – with mixed results. Some of their pleas to LISTEN TO THEM - and you can always tell when they are serious because THEY ALWAYS CAPITALIZE THE WORDS - are indeed, worthy of the Daily Show. Others are more indicative of the scribblings of 7 year olds who have been given paper and crayons at the institution in which they are rightfully ensconced.

Either way, if you wish to peer into the minds of the truly lost, peruse the comments from yesterday. I guarantee an eye opening experience.

I’ll have something up around mid afternoon I hope.

Join me at 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM central time today for The Rick Moran Show on Blog Talk Radio.

My special guest today will be Ed Morrissey of Captains Quartersblog and we’ll be following up on my post this morning about the History Channel’s superior documentary on the conspiracies surrounding 9/11. Ed and I, being the old fashioned Irishmen that we are, will hold an Irish wake for the truthers by getting drunk on the air and fondly reminiscing about how the 9/11 truthers made us laugh, cry, pull our hair out, and stare at in wonder.

You might want to join me at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM central on Ed’s excellent BTR show CQ Radio where we will begin the discussion on what I believe to be a body blow to the truther movement. 646-652-4889 is the live call in number for Ed’s show.

You can access the stream for my show here. Or you can click on the button below.

If you’d like to call in live to The Rick Moran Show to talk to Ed or me, the number is 718-664-9764.

UPDATE

To listen to the podcast you can click on the media player below. If you want to download the show and listen to it later, go here.

In what will surely be seen as a defining moment for the 9/11 truther movement, the History Channel has delivered a blow for sanity and rationalism by airing a superior documentary entitled 9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction.

There’s no other way to say it; the truthers got reamed.

They got reamed to the point that the truthers who produced the internet video Loose Change are scrambling to alter the third version of their conspiracy mongering tripe, even going so far as to drop any reference to the twin towers being blown up by the government (they continue to insist WTC #7 was brought down by explosives).

The documentary took no prisoners as it destroyed almost all of the major conspiracy theories associated with 9/11 while revealing the real motivations of the truthers; that they are part of a political movement driven by raw, unreasoning hatred of George Bush, the American government, and to some extent, America itself.

Prominently featured were historians like David Brinkley, Editor in Chief of Popular Mechanics James Meigs, and structural engineers, explosives experts, and a host of scientists, military experts, and eyewitnesses to the disaster. The cumulative effect of the testimony of the anti-conspiracists was absolutely devastating. The show left little doubt of the unhinged nature of the truthers, showing many of them – including radio host Alex Jones who has given vast amounts of air time to every kook, crazy, and nutcase with a theory on 9/11 – looking like the anti-intellectual fruitcakes they truly are.

The format was perfect. A truther would lay out a conspiracy theory which was then immediately debunked by 2 or 3 experts. Over two hours, a couple of dozen myths associated with 9/11 were laid to rest permanently including the “missile” that hit the Pentagon, the shoot down of Flight 93, the “implosion” of the towers,” and other theories not based on fact.

The implosion theory was debunked several times over. First, by the best forensic structural engineer in the country who, with the help of some excellent graphics and animation, showed exactly how the planes caused the towers to fall. An explosives expert (a young guy who was flabbergasted at the ignorance of the truthers regarding demolition) pointed out it would have taken weeks to rig the buildings for implosion and would have involved stripping drywall and ripping out walls. The nail in the coffin was supplied by one of the engineers who prepared the final report (working for the independent American Society of Civil Engineers) who showed how the collapse of the towers accounted for such things as the puffs of smoke seen in lower floors as the collapse was occurring as well as the speed of the collapse.

By the end of their presentation, I was on my feet cheering.

The emotional highlight of the documentary occurred when they had members of the victims families responding to the truthers. A confrontation at Ground Zero on the anniversary of 9/11 with the truthers screaming at family members who disagreed with them was shocking. One family member said every time she heard one of the conspiracy nuts it was like “a stab in the heart.”

Not that these nutcases care much. As the documentary showed, the truthers real goal is to blame Bush. And the disturbing poll numbers showing that 46% of the country believing the whole truth about 9/11 is being hidden by the government shows why this documentary should be viewed by everyone.

You can tell how deeply this program hurt the truther movement by the fact that they didn’t try to answer any of the points made by the piece but rather attacked the source:

An upcoming documentary entitled The 9/11 Conspiracies, to be aired on the History Channel, may represent the biggest hit piece to date on the 9/11 truth movement and is rife with bias, cronyism and conflicts of interest

The so-called documentary promises not to look at the flaws in the official story from a neutral perspective but to start out by suggesting that any deviation from the official line is “outrageous”.

The program also features so called independent “experts” who are actually in the employ of the program makers themselves who in turn rely on scores of multi-million dollar contracts with the government and the military-industrial complex.

Hit piece? It is hard to see how much more fair minded the History Channel could have been. They allowed the truthers to spout their conspiracy theories to their hearts content and then rationally, reasonably, calmly poked so many holes in them they resembled a piece of swiss cheese.

Pat Curley of the excellent truther debunking site Screw Loose Change called the documentary “the dream debunking piece. It’s Hiroshima for the Truthers.” One might throw in Nagasaki as well.

Pat concludes:

Overall: Devastating blow for most of the kooks; ironically the CIT nuts get a little thrill as their theory at least gets a little boost. The cumulative effect is pretty overwhelming. The voicemorphed calls thing gets smashed in their faces. Awesome, absolutely the most satisfying moment in a very satisfying two hours!

He is referring to the jaw dropping theory that all the communications from passengers on the doomed planes were faked! Family members tearfully rebutted those outrageous charges. And the young editor of Popular Mechanics, who tried very hard not to laugh when he was debunking some of the more unbelievable theories, actually said he was personally disgusted by the implication that family members were somehow involved in the conspiracy by covering up the fact that the phone calls were not really from their loved ones.

The show will air again this weekend. Check your local listings but I have it in the Chicago area airing at 7:00 PM central Saturday night and 11:00 AM central on Sunday morning.

Don’t miss it.

UPDATE

Due to some outrageously obscene comments by the you-know-whos, comments are now being moderated.

The post could be book length, but it won’t be. That’s because in order to examine the notion of the US being an imperialist power, I don’t need more than a couple of paragraphs.

Glenn Greenwald (objecting to Drezner’s characterization of him as a “pacifist”) says case closed:

For those who actually understand what the term means, there is no reasonable ground for objecting to the term “imperial” to describe America’s role in the world. Even our Foreign Policy Community elites have begun acknowledging that we are acting as an empire and are openly debating the best forms of imperial management. And the seemingly endless string of military interventions over the last several decades under a whole slew of “justifications” leaves no doubt that we see ourselves as world rulers who violate sovereignty and use military force at will, whenever—as Drezner himself said—we perceive that it promotes our interests to do so. That is what an empire does, by definition.

As I have said in the past, the notion that the United States is a peaceloving nation is belied by the facts. Since Viet Nam, we have intervened in Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iraq again, and numerous air raids carried out against Ghaddafi, Saddam, and Slobodan Milošević.

Trouble just seems to follow us around, I guess.

Actually, the use of military power does not necessarily make a nation “imperialistic.” Rather, the reasons for those interventions are what determines whether a nation is building or defending an “empire” or not. And in each intervention I listed, US motives for using military power could be defended as a response to chaos, tyranny, or despotism.

Face it, people. We are “it.” History, geography, and the efforts of our forefathers have all combined to make the United States a superpower. For most of our existence, we ignored our potential to dominate world affairs – even though we could have done so easily from the turn of the 20th century on. Even after World War II when our victorious armies in Europe and Asia could have remained in place and dominated those continents as they had never been before, we chose to bring the boys home and – unprecedented in world history – actually disarm.

From an army of 8 million men we contracted to just over a million by 1949. From an astonishing 80,000 planes at the end of the war, we barely had 5,000 by the end of the decade. The same with our 50,000 tanks that were reduced to 2,000. An 800 warship navy was cut to around 300.

Now, it would be a silly imperial power who would do such a thing. Of course, we had the bomb but it wasn’t clear at that time what kind of a military weapon the bomb might actually be. Until the Soviets got their very own nukes, Truman didn’t know quite what to do with the gadget. He used it as a threat but it is not clear if he would have followed through and made good on those threats. Nuclear doctrine did not mature until the early 1950’s. And when it did, reliance on conventional forces for almost all conflicts – save the Big One with Russia in Europe – was the accepted strategy of the US.

I give this little history lesson in order to make the point that even today when we are the only superpower with an $11 trillion economy producing nearly a quarter of all the goods and services on the planet and a pop culture that people can’t get enough of, by virtue of our size alone, we dominate the planet.

There are those who are uncomfortable with that fact. Perhaps you can give us all the benefit of your wisdom and tell us how we could stop “dominating” the planet without tearing our economy to shreds, destroying our culture, causing a worldwide economic catastrophe, and give free rein to every cutthroat, thug, maniac, and butcher who would then seek to take advantage of the fact that the only thing between them and their sick goals is the United Nations.

Oh, you can work around the edges of the problem. The US must work more within the international framework. Fine. Tell it to the people of Darfur where we have consistently tried to the get the United Nations to refer to what is happening there as “genocide” only to be rebuffed. We may yet be forced to intervene there considering the ongoing slaughter and because of every ineffectual and counterproductive thing the UN has done.

Perhaps you think we should radically disarm. Okay, for the sake of argument let’s cut our military by 90%. Just a few jets for air defense, a couple of divisions for homeland security, and perhaps a couple of ships to evacuate our citizens when the world inevitablly blows up. Happy? Good. And the next Tsunami that hits Indonesia or some other natural disaster that the world needs to tend to, we’ll fly a couple of UN bureaucrats out there to help with morale. Since that’s all the help victims of those disasters are going to get for a couple of weeks, let’s hope too many people don’t die because of it.

Nor should we worry about the little wars where the bigger neighbor will invade the smaller nation just because there’s no one there to stop them. The idea that UN sanctions would scare off any of these cutthroats is laughable.

What else? Get Hollywood to stop making crappy movies? Or maybe make it impossible for other countries to purchase our music, our movies, TV programs, and other manifestations of the most wildly popular cultural exchange in human history.

Now we’re where the Greenwalds of the world want us to be. No more of this runaway globalization, no more militarism. No more cultural dominance. Just the US taking its rightful place as subservient to the UN and other international bodies. Let the Europeans run the world. They’ve been doing it a long time and experience has to count for something.

I put it to you; for all our faults, foibles, stumbles, good and bad motives thrown in for good measure, the world cannot do without us as we are now. You can have a president that grovels before the UN or the EU. But that won’t change the fact that when the EU’s chestnuts are in the fire, they won’t turn to the French to bail them out. Love us, hate us, spit at us – you can’t ignore us.

Are we an imperialist power? The only people who seem to care are those who wish to call us “imperialists.” For the rest of the world, the US is a fact of life, a force of nature. And, I might add, a welcome sight when the boogyman is knocking at the door or Mother nature goes on a bender.

Can we do it while acting more humbly? Must we be so “arrogant?” Next tyrant we overthrow, we should be sure to apologize before having our military rip his regime a new one. Maybe that will satisfy those who see anything relevant at all in this stupid argument.

I don’t get it. I mean, I know that Bush and the open borders crowd want to bring as many “undocumented workers” as possible “out from the shadows and into the light” so that presumably, those who were at one time considered lawbreakers would magically be forgiven their sins and morph into upstanding citizens of the republic with just a wave of government’s magic wand.

This, after all, is the position advanced by the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and other business groups who salivate at the prospect of millions of low wage workers toiling away, allowing them to keep that balance sheet nicely in the black. It’s really not a question of the new arrivals doing the jobs that Americans won’t do. It’s a matter of the immigrants doing those jobs at wages no self respecting American would tolerate.

That’s why I’m excited about this new union they’re talking about forming. It’s called the North American Union and from what I’ve heard, it will solve our illegal immigration problem, strengthen our economy, increase our security, and generally make life in these United States a heaven on earth.

Just tell me where to sign up to join this new union. I wonder if they have health benefits? Paid vacations? Sick days? Personal days? What about pensions?

What’s that you say? I’ve got it wrong? The North American Union will do WHAT?

Secretly, the Bush administration is pursuing a policy to expand NAFTA politically, setting the stage for a North American Union designed to encompass the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. What the Bush administration truly wants is the free, unimpeded movement of people across open borders with Mexico and Canada.

President Bush intends to abrogate U.S. sovereignty to the North American Union, a new economic and political entity which the President is quietly forming, much as the European Union has formed.

No wonder Canadian bacon has been flooding our markets recently. And have you noticed that there seem to be a lot of Canadian actors and actresses working in Hollywood? It’s an invasion I tell you!

And by the way, you do realize that Taco Bell is now the second largest fast food franchise in the world, don’t you? You know what that means? And what’s with all this Mexican beer I’ve been seeing lately? The brazenness of it all! They’re even advertising Corona on television.

If Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly say it’s true, then it must be so. And to cinch the case, the idea has been advanced by none other than the Dark Lords who work for the Council on Foreign Relations.

If we keep looking, I have no doubt we’ll find connections to the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Democratic Party, and other anti-American, anti-sovereignty groups.

“Nobody is proposing a North American Union,” countered Robert Pastor, the American University professor to whom conspiracy theorists point as “the father of the NAU.” They cite his 2001 book, “Towards a North American Community: Lessons from the Old World for the New,” as the basic text for the plan. They also note his co-chairmanship of a Council on Foreign Relations task force that produced a 2005 report on cooperation among the three countries.

The cur! I’ll bet he wears a lapel pin with the US, Mexican, and Canadian flags:

Wearing a lapel pin featuring the flags of the U.S., Canada and Mexico, Pastor told AIM that he favors a $200-billion North American Investment Fund to pull Mexico out of poverty and a national biometric identity card for the purpose of controlling the movement of people in and out of the U.S.

So the “conspiracy” is now very much out in the open, if only the media would pay some attention to it.

Yep. Sounds like we should get ready to start saluting the flag of the North American Union rather than Old Glory. One sure sign that we’re about to lose our sovereignty is creating a fund to pull Mexico out of poverty. It’s right here in my “Conspiracies for Fun and Profit” handbook.

Perhaps we should look a little deeper into this conspiracy. Just what are our elites up to?

In March 2005, the leaders of Canada, Mexico, and the United States adopted a Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), establishing ministerial-level working groups to address key security and economic issues facing North America and setting a short deadline for reporting progress back to their governments. President Bush described the significance of the SPP as putting forward a common commitment “to markets and democracy, freedom and trade, and mutual prosperity and security.” The policy framework articulated by the three leaders is a significant commitment that will benefit from broad discussion and advice. The Task Force is pleased to provide specific advice on how the partnership can be pursued and realized.

To that end, the Task Force proposes the creation by 2010 of a North American community to enhance security, prosperity, and opportunity. We propose a community based on the principle affirmed in the March 2005 Joint Statement of the three leaders that “our security and prosperity are mutually dependent and complementary.” Its boundaries will be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter within which the movement of people, products, and capital will be legal, orderly and safe. Its goal will be to guarantee a free, secure, just, and prosperous North America.

I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced. All this talk about enhancing security and prosperity is just a smoke screen. In order to ascertain the real intent of these people, you can’t take what everyone is saying at face value. You have to gaze beyond the words they’re saying and look into their very souls in order to glimpse the true nature of this massive conspiracy.

And that word “community” – another smokescreen to hide the real word they dare not use; UNION! Insidious, I tell you.

Just think of it. No more Fourth of July. No more George Washington. No more “Made in America.” And the prospect of being forced to watch Mexican soaps on TV is just too horrid to contemplate. All this cross border, cross cultural mixing has only one purpose; a political union with Mexico and Canada.

Would the NFL be forced to adopt Canadian football rules? Would soccer become the national past time? Would we see even more baseball games on television? These are the kind of nightmares that could become a reality if this North American Union thing actually goes through.

And of course, they would never put such a notion as a North American Union to a vote. We’re just going to wake up one morning and find out that America is no more. Those slick bastards! Lull us to sleep and then put one over on us when we aren’t paying any attention. Too clever by half. But not clever enough. Not when we have patriots like Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly guarding our sovereignty. Don’t you sleep better at night knowing that those two watchdogs are on the case, protecting America from being subsumed by hordes of Mexicans and pasty faced Canadians who would invade our country and steal us blind? I sure do.

No doubt there are some of your who can’t see where there is any conspiracy to unite North American under one flag. I pray that you come to your senses soon. Before you know it, we’ll be buying our Tacos with Canadian dollars and then it will be too late.