A Government in Search of its Moment.

The reaction across the blogosphere to the establishment of this new “White House Rural Council” has been almost universally negative. In first reaction it would be easy to recall President Reagan’s warning about the nine most frightening words; “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” The range of adjectives that could and have been applied to this initiative range from “presumptuous” and “arrogant” on the low end and ratchet up on the scale of paranoia to “insidious” and “pernicious” on the high end.

It’s pretty hard not to see the opening salvo in the creation of yet another vast, mindless bureaucratic boondoggle as frightening in and of itself. After all one needn’t look to hard to see all the great benefits that liberal democracy and government assistance have provided to the upper mid-west. Detroit comes to mind as a most shining example.

The question that first comes to mind is just who is it that hatched this hair brained scheme in the first place? And why would anyone think that peaceful if struggling rural communities (full of “bitter clingers”) would want anything to do with the systems and methods that turned such once great places as Detroit into festering slums of poverty, violence, corruption and decay?

Is this the liberal mindset simply gone delusional? Or perhaps an administration seeing itself on the road to political ruin and grasping at creating yet one more dependent class that can be psychologically bound to government assistance? Or is there perhaps something else going on here? While the public hand is being played with this nonsense is the other hand setting us up for something even more dangerous behind the scenes?

Well, for me at least, it’s a bit hard not to become a little paranoid by what I see potentially going on here, so let me lay a few things out point by point.

On the first level there are no doubt a great many naïve liberals out there who can be sold on the notion that this is nothing more than a necessary “outreach” program to the rural “poor” in desperate need of government help. What better way to employ these vast legions of new college graduates with their worthless sociology degrees than to disperse them among the ignorant masses to spread the word of the great beneficent federal government?

On the level just below that are the equally naïve political operatives who will see and this as a opportunity to use a new bureaucracy to try and convince the “rural bumpkins” that without President Obama and his party bringing these new benefits to them they would be either lost, forgotten or somehow suffering in even worse conditions. “So just pull that straight Democrat Party lever the next time you step into the voting booth why don’t you?”

Below these two layers of camouflage we will find the real danger however. Once this little army of well meaning operatives is dispersed they, like good bureaucrats everywhere, will start generating reports about what is going on in their individual locations. Where are they being well received, where are they meeting resistance and to what degree? Once some community or communities have been identified as particularly resistant to and even resentful of yet more government interference in their lives comes the time to send in the “agent provocateur” who in the name of enforcing some new useless, meaningless and unwanted bureaucratic regulation will commit some egregious act intended to create a violent reaction. Be it a demonstration turned violent, the firebombing of some local office or better yet, from their perspective the death of some “innocent and well intentioned” federal employee. They will then have what they have truly been after; the “hard evidence of domestic terrorism” coming from the conservative “flyover country.” They will have their Horst Wessel, their martyr for the cause, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Wessel) their “burning of the Reichstag” moment. I can here it now; “Civil order must be maintained, these acts of lawlessness must not be tolerated.”

Hummmm now just what will they do with all those battle hardened troops that are being brought back from Afghanistan and Iraq? Why would they deploy them to the southern border to stem a real invasion when they can be dispatched back to their local National Guard units and then called out to suppress this “new threat?”

Yeah, yeah I know I’m just ranting like a paranoid loon here. Do I really think this bunch of stumble bums could actually pull such a stunt off? Frankly, no. That does not mean however that such machinations are beyond the mindset of the Fabian socialist, crypto-fascist, very real paranoids, inhabiting the halls of the present administration. This is after all the man who said we need a domestic security force, just as powerful and just as well funded as the military. We just had the President of the Postal Workers Union suggest that the letter carriers be made part of the Homeland Security Department. What better way to create a vast network of government spies than the recruit the very people who visit your doorstep six days a week?

The creation of this “White House Rural Council” may be just the first step. One can only hope that by shining enough disinfecting light on this disease infested cockroach of bureaucracy we can at least send it scurrying back under its rock if not kill it outright.

That said, I think that the deterioration of the domestic and indeed global economy will politically overwhelm this administration long before any such effective network could be put in place. The danger then becomes violent crowds in the streets tired of being out of work, or having the safety net of social wefare pulled out from under them or just plain sick and tired of ineffective government telling them how to run their lives or that all the chaos is their fault. That will bring us back to the very same very real threat of violent government suppression of an angry populace. It’s working out so well in Greece and the Middle East, why not here?

Never mind, just relax, bread and circuses, “So you think you can dance” is on tonight. What more could we need or ask for.