Open Letter To DHS Secretary Napolitano
By Mitch Berg
To: Janet Napolitano, DHS Secretary
From: Mitch Berg, Right Wing Extremist
Re: Assess This.
Secretary Napolitano,
I heard your response to American Legion president Rehbein’s criticism of your agency’s report.
Your line (as heard on NPR this morning): “It’s an assessment, not an accusation”.
With all due respect (emphasis on “due”), Secretary Napolitano, that’s a warehouse full of baked wind.
An “assessment”, well, assesses. It quantifies, or at least qualifies, something; in the case of a “risk assessment”, it is supposed to give the “why” as well as the “who”.
But as John Hinderaker pointed out in skewering the report earlier this week, your report doesn’t “assess” anything; it runs down a shopping list of conservative groups, without explaining why any of them are a risk; no incidents, no people, no specifics, merely “watch out for pro-lifers, NRA members, tax protesters, and veterans; they’re all prone to being recruited by all those scary “militia” groups!”
That’s not an “assessment”; it’s a mass drive-by smear, no less so than “assessing” that black men are “prone” to being lazy, that Mexicans are “liable” to be illegals and that women are “likely” to be slaves to emotion to the point that they can’t be trusted with anything important.
If everyone’s a (potential) extremist, then nobody’s an extremist. Unless your only goal is to define “dissent” as “extreme”, “dangerous” or “mentally ill”.
Which, to be fair, seems to be not unthinkable with the Obama Administration; anyone who’d say “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and…it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” probably isn’t a stranger to the notion that “dissent is derangement”.
Which was more a Soviet thing than an American one, at least heretofore.
So, with all due (heh) respect, Secretary Napolitano, “assess” this:
Thanks, and do have a nice day.
That is all.
April 16th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Since I am not a veteran, and Napolitano’s back-stepping and partial apology to them is not applicable, I’m waiting for clarification. Because she classifies me as a terrorist due to my pro-life, pro-gun rights and pro-immigration enforcement veiws, I need to know when the bus to the re-education camp will arrive at my home, or if I need to report to the camp on my own. Alternatively, I need to know if government agents will come to my door to ensure my taking the government-supplied suicide pill, or if I will have to have money on hand to pay for the ammunition used to liquidate me.
April 16th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Just to pre-empt Angry Clown, I’ll say that his likely impulse to pay for the ammunition used on me is very thoughtful, but I’d rather he not make the offer.
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