Needlenose

Armed protesters on the National Mall?  On the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing? 

Last summer I had remarked on how the complete repudiation of the GOP at the polls would spark a repeat of the wrong-wing wackiness and terror of the late ’90s.  I was really expecting more militia activity, abortion clinic terror and media hate talk, all of which has been delivered.

But this so-called Open Carry protest has a whole different quality.  The no-dick big-mouth gun nuts now strut into public,  family settings like National Parks and Starbucks, brazenly displaying their ability to target and kill us with a squeeze of the trigger.

Now they are marching on the Capitol, brandishing weapons?  Are these guys transforming into the Sinn Féin to the militia group’s IRA?

Seriously, it’s just a matter of time now before some wacko unloads on an elected leader or government official – or car bombs another Federal building.    Make no mistake, this is terror of the early Nazi brownshirt variety, and the target is you, me and the rule of law.

I already wrote last month about the initial Abu Ghraib scandal being propelled by the inevitable release of other photographic and video evidence.

Looks like it’s about to happen again. As Christopher Hitchens (of all people) writes in Slate:

It is going to get much worse. The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe (“I’m outraged more by the outrage”) have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not. There will probably be a slight difficulty about showing these scenes in prime time, but they will emerge, never fear. We may have to start using blunt words like murder and rape to describe what we see.

Hitchens has been a shameless apologist for the war, so if he’s throwing out warnings like this, the evidence must be both truly awful and just about to hit the airwaves.

I’d advise not reading his full article, though, unless you’d like too much information about Hitchens’ idle daydreams involving Osama bin Laden and pigs. (He does make a worthwhile point, though, about torture being a worthless interrogation technique, as demonstrated by the British experience with Irish Republican Army terrorists. Just, uh, skip over the Osama part.)