Oh and can I have 5 bucks on ” Bomb Threat closes inner city polling station”

@Promnight: I’m looking at the hate and vileness of the far right, and I see a festering boil in dire need of lancing.

Per Huffpo – will PA be Geezer’s Kursk?

The only reason I know has to do with a quarter of my mongrel European heritage.

You mean PB?

But I’m a Pollyanna at heart and I can keep my chin up through all but one of those calamities.

Unless insurrection is that deflating feeling I get just after I’ve pestorked?

There’s been a good deal of discussion inside the military about this and some philosophy developed by military academics. Gary Hart, no less, weighed in the dialog between society and its military in a book on the subject called Citizen Soldier that argued for a draft, in part, as a mechanism to slow the march to war.

The convergence of trends that are most discomfiting now unwholesomely combines the presence of long-time career military in the officer and non-commissioned ranks – and the emphasis on non-conventional war which has discussed under so many neologisms that I can’t remember any of them.

Scholars at armed forces colleges forty years ago were arguing for the refocusing of priorities for smaller, more intense off-battlefield engagements, the likes of which US armed forces are enduring now in Baghdad. Some scholarship envisioned affinity group conflicts requiring military engagement inside the United States, right, like all the lesbians in Seattle go militant and seize the port armed with cat dishes or something.

The non-conventional warfare scenario takes men and materiale off of the battlefield, into cities and neighborhoods and here the monster is made: soldiers get acclimated to shooting civilians and civilian non-combatants. The saner ones go crazy from it when they get home. The monsters take it as part of the job, shrug and collect their checks and count the months to their pensions.

Guys who’ve gone through years of this kind of desensitization are coming how now. If there is conflict, real civil conflict that brings large numbers of protesters into the street and provokes military response, even from National Guard troops who’ve been doing long rotations in Iraq, we will likely see large civilian casualties as soldiers respond from their experiences in Iraq and their alienation from civilian society.

@Promnight: there is no way the US military would ever support an insurrection. I may be paranoid to even need to feel comforted by this thought. But I do.