Black Helos Here At Last

National Guardsmen standing guard at New York's Holland Tunnel.Sure, we'd heard some people on the radio mumbling about the "First Brigade" being stationed somewhere in our own United Snakes, & that they were up to to no good, but not having received any printed, textual info about it, we didn't take it so seriously that we were walking around looking over our shoulder every ten seconds, expecting to see the red dot of a laser sight from an M-16 on our back. Now we are. Holy crap. They don't appear to be kidding.

Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, dedicating 20,000 troops to domestic response -- a nearly sevenfold increase in five years -- "would have been extraordinary to the point of unbelievable," Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said in remarks last month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But the realization that civilian authorities may be overwhelmed in a catastrophe prompted "a fundamental change in military culture," he said. The Pentagon's plan calls for three rapid-reaction forces to be ready for emergency response by September 2011. The first 4,700-person unit, built around an active-duty combat brigade based at Fort Stewart, Ga., was available as of Oct. 1, said Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., commander of the U.S. Northern Command.

Yet there is squawking from the other side of the aisle when President-elect Obama's proposal for some vague volunteer force thing or another is decried as an attempt to get the brown shirts back together.

Bush seems to have gotten his wish, he's officially turned America into a banana republic. This reporter was quite impressed w/ Madrid in 1970, when Generalissimo Franco was still alive. The number of uniformed people, & the variety of uniforms was out-done only by the number of soldiers, police officers & whatever who were armed w/ sub-machine guns & wandering the streets. "Never in America," we thought. We are proved wrong often.