The Blue-Shirted Gestapo ... May They Rot in (expletive deleted)

Think about it: When you spend 20 years of your life doing something, it tends to get rather thick. It's who he is, what he is, and he likely will always identify with them.

I had a friend in the 70's (you could probably have described both of us a graduate student hippies by then) who had been through the first session of Ranger training but opted not to continue when it was over & returned to his normal infantry unit. It was an accomplishment just to complete those first few weeks of training. It's not at the top of the elite food chain, but it's up there.

 

or, just watches too many B grade videos - I'll put my money on the latter.

 

That's something I can't understand. I have cousins in almost every branch, and I only didn't serve because they refused me a medical waiver.

At what point would a career soldier decide that it was a worthy cause to go from defending the Constitution to shitting on it?

 

at the point where one was never really in service in the first place.

Remember, everyone who is part of the TSA is a liar, cheat and/or thief - why would you believe a single thing they say or write?

 

I'm USN retired. I was never involved in anything like special forces but I was in a limited specialized field. Just for some understanding there were 11 of us in my training program, 3 of us made it to the end and completed training.

Military service leaves an indelible mark on a person but that does not override what the persons current job is and how they must do things differently.

 

That was kind of my point. My relatives in the service hold the employees of the TSA in universal contempt.

 

Agreed, both the good and the evil have served honorably in the military. And military units, particular military intelligence units, have waged war upon their own populations. Each person must be judged on his or her own adherence to the constitution, to his or her own efforts to overcome the limitations of error, mistake, or weakness.

 

My words were ill-chosen. What I should have said is that others besides Rangers also serve honorably, within and without the military, and one should take care to recognize this character even among those with whom one disagrees.

 

People in the military are trained to kill people and break things. Ordnance on Target!!

It's the political leadership that complicates the military role.

 

Use of the military in a political role generally destroys the military as well as the civil polity. Case examples include Argentina, Chile, Pakistan, and almost all the major Arab states.

 

Since the end of Reconstruction, the US has barred the armed forces from serving in a law enforcement capacity in anything short of massive riots, best known to the public in the restrictions contained within the Posse Comitatus Act.

Militarized policing is a horrible idea. One only need look at the totalitarian societies which turn their militaries against their own people to understand why we must never allow that here. We deplore the papers, please mindset, but look who typically barks that order: a communist foot soldier and his pal, both walking the streets with AKMs under their arms.

Militaries are designed to occupy, kill, and destroy.

We don't want that military ideology in law enforcement.

The militarization of SWAT has been a fatal disaster for many innocent people, like elderly grandmothers riddled with automatic gunfire in "high risk" drug warrants issued on bad informant information and linked to the wrong address.

It has also made its way to local police departments. The days of the friendly beat cop are over, replaced instead with the taser-equipped hardass who thinks everybody is guilty and that he is above the law. Don't even interact with these people, they're zombie goons now. The cop who would have formerly received help from decent people will now be told to f- off by decent people tired of seeing videographers getting anal probes from nightsticks or watching doctors pulled over, bullied into consenting to searches, so the cops can tear up another nice car looking for nonexistent dope.

People like Bart should never be let anywhere near civilian law enforcement. They haven't been welcome there since the end of Reconstruction and they weren't welcome there until the terrorist/compliance/safety paranoia all went through the roof in the early 21st century.

 

Bart and those like him should never be in any position at all where there's even the faintest illusion of authority. TSOs have no authority but Reichskommissar Pistole saw fit to give them ugly blue uniforms and fakey-fake tin badges, so now they think they have authority and go around spouting "You have NO RIGHTS, I repeat NO RIGHTS at a checkpoint." Organisms who say things like that need to be fitted with shock collars and subaural implants so that such outbursts are automatically followed by 50000 volts and painful, deafening, ear-splitting recordings of "TSOs have NO AUTHORITY, I repeat NO AUTHORITY at a checkpoint." I just worry that it might not be enough to cause permanent and life-destroying/family-wrecking mental and/or psychological trauma.

 

Well, all I can say is that I expected better from you.

I'll readjust.

 

I'm trying to understand your point, cupcake. Want to try again?

 

You really need to learn to just let it out and not hold all that anger in.

 

I would disagree. It really depends on the person. My father was in the Air Force, retired after 20 years. for 5 of his last 6 years he wore a key around his neck (prototype ERCS -- Emergency Rocket Communications System). The odds were 1:4 it would have been his voice giving the "go code". He always had kind of a cold, harsh, disciplined, inflexible attitude -- did he get from the job, or did it perhaps make him more suited for the job? Hard to say.

 

BRAVO.

 

I note you have stopped denying those simple facts and have started simple ad hominem attacks. Why the shift now, Ding Dong?

 

Well, I'm giving Bart a big pass on all this. He has his opinion, it's mostly wrong, but I don't see a need to excoriate him for it.

 

If his opinion was simply an opinion, and not actual action taken to assault American citizens and treat them like a subject population, I'd agree with you.