Mary Mitchell
Columnist, Chicago Sun Times
re: "
What Keeps Obama Safe Could Protect the Rest of Us," CST, 12 October 2008
My dear Ms. Mitchell,
If I may, I would like to introduce you to the Law of Unintended Consequences and to Tomoslav Mitrovic. First, let me recap what I understand from your modest proposal to turn Chicago into a police state. I will assume that the limits of your tyrannical appetite are found at the geographical borders of "Shortshanks" Daley's dysfunctional Democratic paradise, but if they do not then what I have to say is even more true.
You recount approvingly the overwhelming police presence now guarding the sacred manse of Barack H. Obama -- the roadblocks, the personnel barricades, the invasive searches of pedestrians walking on public streets, the forced showing of identity cards. "Ausweiss, bitte. Ja?"
Most importantly, you believe that because the only firearms in this utopia are those belonging to the approved minions of the state, you are therefore safe AND you wish this "safety zone" to be extended as far as possible.
You pass over the right of citizens in Obama's gun-free Eden to possess firearms in their own homes, or their right to take such property to and from their dwellings. You are silent on whether the Fourth Amendment still applies to homeowners with firearms within the Golden Circle of the Lightworker's Enfolding Arms of Officially Sanctioned Violence. You are equally silent on how many cops and troops it would take to expand Obama's little cone of safety to the entire city of Chicago. What would the ratio of cops to citizens they are oppressing, uh, excuse me, "protecting," be? One in ten? One in twenty? For all three shifts, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year? How exactly can the rest of us afford to pay for the costs of our own oppression, er, "safety"?
No matter.
Your sneering reference to Alaska suggests that you understand that there are other areas of the country where your proposal would not find favor. Indeed, I think even you understand that there are places where men and women consider themselves free individual citizens and not government-cared-for sheep and who would resist your proposal violently. The fact that for such a tyrannical proposal as yours to be "legal" (not to say constitutional), federal laws would have to be passed to ensure it -- and thus extended to the rest of us unwillingly -- indicates to me that for all your metropolitan sophistication you have not heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences, a law which can neither be repealed nor amended. Nor it seems have you heard of Tomoslav Mitrovic.
At the time of his death in 1999, Tomi Mitrovic was sixty years old. He lived in Belgrade with his wife Lila and he had two daughters, Ivana and Jelena, a grandson, Kosta and an informally adopted son, Dejan, the grown child of his best friend, who had died years before. He was known as an easygoing man, a salt-of-the-earth type who loved America. Said his son later, ''He built himself an American house, and everyone joked about it, but they admired it. He built a ranch house, with three bedrooms and three bathrooms. He saw it somewhere and he liked it, so he built one.'' Tomi even cut his yard short in the American style. He also kept a couple of cats and a stray dog that appeared one day and never left.
Tomoslav Mitrovic was a program director for Radio Television Serbia, the state-run broadcaster that gave the news as Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic wanted it given. Said his son, ''He was just one of the people working there. He had no influence on the programs or on Milosevic. He just switched the cameras and the programs from channel to channel. He was a professional. He worked for his salary. If the political opposition ran the station, he'd work for them, too.''
Tomi worked the night shift on the 22-23 April 1999. Everybody knew that the station might be hit by NATO airstrikes so Mitrovic sent the rest of his own crew home and did the job by himself. He was there when one of several American-made air-to-ground precision guided missiles came in the window and blew him to pieces. He was one year from retirement. The missiles had been sent by Bill Clinton to silence what his Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon called "as much a part of Milosevic's murder machine as his military." Also killed along with Tomi were some twenty-odd video mixers, broadcast technicians, security guards and make-up artists. War criminals all, no doubt.
The attack was seen at the time for what it was: the deliberate widening of the rules of war to include the media and journalists who supported the war effort of an opposing regime. Tony Blair insisted that the bombing was justified since the station was part of the "apparatus of dictatorship." One of his cabinet ministers, Clare Short, said, "This is a war, this is a serious conflict, untold horrors are being done. The propaganda machine is prolonging the war and it's a legitimate target."
Journalists of every stripe condemned the attack. As Robert Leavitt associate director of the New York University's Center for War, Peace and the News Media said, "It really creates a dangerous precedent with regard to freedom of the press. Once we start defining journalists as legitimate targets, it becomes very hard for us to criticize any other attacks on media, including those of Milosevic himself on his own independent media. . . This is really crossing a dangerous line."
For his part, speaking of the Serbian atrocities against the Kosovars, Bill Clinton said this in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars after the strike on the television station: "Political leaders do this kind of thing. (Do you) think the Germans would have perpetrated the Holocaust on their own without Hitler? Was there something in the history of the German race that made them do this? No. We got to -- we got to get straight about this. This is something political leaders do. And if people make decisions to do these kinds of things, other people can make decisions to stop them. And if the resources are properly arrayed, it can be done. And that is exactly what we intend to do."
So, before we go on to how this impacts you, let's be clear about what Bill Clinton did. He expanded the American military's rules of engagement to include the politicians whose decisions start and prolong the wars, and the journalists who support them. And, having expanded the rules, he tried his best to kill as many Serbian journalists and politicians as possible in order to achieve what he felt was the common good for the former Yugoslavia, whether they liked it or not. Those expanded rules still apply today.
So here we are with a new President about to take office who, given the anti-firearms record that he is loudly denying at the moment, will see eye-to-eye with you on gun control, street control, talk-radio control, Internet control, people control and God-knows-what-else control in the New Perfect Paradise Nanny State led by the Lightworker Saint Barack. Yet even you must admit that there are people like me who would resist any more encroachments upon our God-given constitutional liberties. How do you think we would react to such an oppressive scheme as your own? Remember, we're the ones with the firearms.
I tell you, madame, we will fight. The Law of Unintended Consequences as applied to Bill Clinton's stupid advancement of the rules of war to include politicians and journalists will ensure that another American civil war will see the deaths of many innocents and many who are not so innocent. This will include, if I may be permitted to put a fine point on it, American politicians and journalists who attempted to push tyrannical schemes on their fellow citizens. And if you think that civil war cannot come to this country you are whistling past the graveyard of history. We are more divided as a people now than we ever were in 1860. In our opinion, this time it is the "liberals" such as yourselves who are pushing slavery. And we will not consent to be slaves of your nanny state, no matter how well-intentioned you believe your tyranny to be.
You may not think of yourself as a part of what Clare Short called "the propaganda machine" nor as a "legitimate target" of war, but surely even you would admit there are others who may have a different opinion, and who may react accordingly if your well-intentioned push comes to tyrannical shove.
When they buried Tomislav Mitrovic, a Serbian fan of all things American who was ironically killed by an American missile, in the Topcider cemetery of Belgrade in the spring of 1999, he was mourned by hundreds, yet he was just one out of thousands of dead in that conflict. As his son said, "He was guilty of nothing." In fact, he was guilty only of being an unintended victim of the Law of Unintended Consequences, as invoked by William Jefferson Clinton.
I beg of you, Mary Mitchell, be careful what you wish for. You and we, like Tomislav Mitrovic, may get it.
Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson, AL 35126
PS And if your real intention is to stop street crime, you might try allowing the law-abiding to carry concealed weapons. The bad guys don't prey on victims unless they are reasonably sure they can't fight back.
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