Timeline: Government Under Attack
By Dawn Lim and Ross Gianfortune dlim@govexec.com March 5, 2010
Thursday evening's shootout between Pentagon police officers and a gunman apparently motivated by anti-government sentiment was the latest in a spate of attacks on federal employees and facilities and serves as a stark reminder that public servants too often find themselves unexpectedly in harm's way. The following timeline reviews major attacks during the past two decades.
Feb. 18, 2010. A small jet is flown into a building housing a federal tax office in Austin, Texas, injuring 13 and killing two. The pilot, Joseph Andrew Stack, was angry with the Internal Revenue Service.
Nov. 5, 2009. An Army psychiatrist goes on a rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people and wounding dozens. The alleged gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was a Muslim who had been in contact with a radical Imam and was about to be deployed overseas.
June 1, 2009. A gunman opens fire on a U.S. military recruiting office in Little Rock, Ark., killing one soldier and wounding another. The suspect, a Muslim convert, opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but was not affiliated with a larger terrorist network.
Phi Beta Iota: The full list is both very incomplete, and hugely misrepresentative. The list does not include the hanging of census workers, the increased calls for Tyrannicide, the many under-reported bombs and threats across the country, and the growing underground economy that is turning its back on a government many now consider to be an unaffordable burden. The list also fails to address the nuances between state-sponsored attacks, state-allowed attacks, Islam-oriented attackes, and domestic insurgency such as documented in Harvest Of Rage–Why Oklahoma City Is Only The Beginning and Rage of the Random Actor. The list also avoids addressing the behavior of the US Government acting “in our name” but far removed from our values as a Republic Of, By, and For We the People, a story told in many books, such as Blood Money–Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq on top ofSAVAGE CAPITALISM AND THE MYTH OF DEMOCRACY–Latin America in the Third Millennium and Open Veins of Latin America–Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent; and in journal articles such as Why they hate us (II): How many Muslims has the U.S. killed in the past 30 years?.
The U.S. Government no longer represents the majority of the American people. Between a White House run by a pogomist and a pollster, a corrupt Congress, a two-party tyranny serving special interests rather than the public interest, and a bureaucracy that is grotesquely inflated, ignorant, and over-paid, the federal government is both out of touch with reality and out of touch with the sovereign people who–it must be said–have abdicated their civic duty is allowing the situation to get so bad. We trace the break-down to Newt Gingrich's scorched earth campaign against Speaker Jim Wright, a story told in The Ambition and the Power–The Fall of Jim Wright : A True Story of Washington. That is when Congress became a pawn to be bought, winner-take-all, and also when Congress abdicated its Article 1 “balance of power” responsibilities in favor of being a foot-soldier to the corrupt political party in power and ideally to a same party President. In combination with the League of Women Voters rolling over and playing dead for the theft of the Presidential Debates by the two-party tyranny, a theft that removed third, fourth, and fifth party candidates from prime time television; and with the calculated blocking of ballot access across the USA by corrupt Secretaries of State who moved beyond Congressionally-mandated gerrymandering (which should be unconstitutional) to simply block all third, fourth, and fifth parties from being able to nominate much less elect anyone, the USA no longer qualifies, by international standards, as an honest open democracy.
The USA, the Republic, is still alive in the hearts and minds of its most patriotic citizens, and we believe that in the long run American the Beautiful will heal itself–if and when that happens, it will be a bottom-up renaissance, for at the very top, the U.S. Government is dead, dumb, and blind to the concerns and needs of the people it is supposed to be serving.
