JOHN WALSH AND THE SCAM

I have to add this quickly (less than a day after my previous Post) because it relates clearly to what I raised in that Post.

Following the President’s (alas, frak, and oy gevalt) appearance on his cable TV show, John Walsh, former hotel worker and now unofficial Sex Offense Czar, made a claim so patently clear in its frakkulous manipulation of truth and reality that it has to be widely disseminated to the SO community.

I had mentioned in a prior Post this oft-asserted number of “100,000” “missing” sex offenders allegedly patrolling the highways, byways, and residential streets of the country. It immediately brings back memories of the alleged hundreds of thousands of “missing, abused, kidnapped children” who back in the 1970s became the justification for all the “missing children” on milk cartons and so forth.

It turned out upon rational examination (that’s how long ago it was) that this number was derived by including children taken by a parent or grandparent, or older kids who hadn’t come home on time on a weekend night, or older teens who for whatever reason had simply left home.

AND THEN that number was ‘extrapolated’ on the assumption that only 10% of this sort of thing is ever reported, so the official – so to speak – numbers were then simply multiplied by 10.
It was also conceivable that every unsolved ‘missing child’ report going back decades was also tossed into the pot to ‘build up the numbers’.

Mr. Walsh has often used the number, though he is hardly the only one. It became a number quoted by legislators looking to show that there was indeed ‘an emergency’ and that anybody who wanted to stop and think in the middle of such ‘an emergency’ was either ‘insensitive’, ‘unresponsive’, or perhaps a child-napper himself.

THEN we saw in the Adam Walsh Act ‘justifications’ that there are also 100,000 ‘unregistered sex offenders’ roaming across state lines – thus of course the feds, through Congressional legislation, had to get involved since the ‘poor’ States just didn’t have the resources or authority to clean up Dodge.

The Megan’s Law advocacy group that was recently seen trying to get Sen. Schumer and Rep. King (both of NY) to get them millions in federal funds (and NCIC-access authorization) in order to do their own hunting also used the “100,000” number.

The line between ‘advocacy’ and ‘enforcement’ seems to be blurring substantially.

NOW, however, Mr. Walsh has taken the game to a new level. As demonstrated in an article (and video clip) on the Sex Offender Research site for Monday, March 29th, 2010 entitled “’100,000 Missing Sex Offenders’ has been the call to arms for years now”, Mr. Walsh – no doubt fortified by the President’s frakkulent pat on the head – is now claiming that there are “100,000 TIER III” (that AWA classification for the ‘worst of the worst’) sex offenders missing.

Apparently the President’s rah-rah push has emboldened the advocates-and-wanna-be –enforcers to ratchet up the ‘emergency’ – which may also be necessary as more and more police agencies realize that a) they don’t have the money and manpower to do all this hunting and/or b) the sex-offender laws don’t really work and aren’t worth the diversion of resources.

I want to build on a comment I made a couple of Posts ago: while a government at the height of its power retains by its very nature the tendency to intrude into the lives of its Citizens and into the vast realm of the national life in which the Framers precisely did not want such an untamed (and untamable) animal to roam free in – which is why they built the Constitutional cage for it – yet it is even more true that a failing government will resort to controlling its Citizens.

This is built-into the nature of the government dynamic and has been since the dawn of human civilization (as the Framers clearly realized). First, no government yields its powers (even illicit ones) willingly, and as its power weakens, it will lash out with what authority remains in order to preserve its turf (even from its own people or – in the American setting – The People who own it).

Second, as it becomes clear that the Emperor has no clothes, the government will have to resort to force and control in order to compensate for the now-dissolving ‘soft’ power of hiding behind the happy-face illusions by which tooooo many folks assure themselves that ‘the government’s OK and I can trust it’.

And since the government had to resort to ‘soft’ power of ‘illusion’ and the manipulation of ‘framing’ and ‘attitude’ in America’s long-established (but eroding) democracy, then it had to don the sheep’s clothing of Victim-Rescuer, Victim-Protector, and general Mommy-Nanny presiding over a table full of Citizen-Victims in order to mask the engorgement of its intrusive police power.

And this has led to the Regulatory-Preventive State, especially over the past 40 frakkulous years.

Add to this that – like their government enablers – ‘advocacies’ need to ‘keep up the numbers’ in order to maintain their operations (and get tax dollars as well as contributions, and even get access to assorted ‘police’ powers, like accessing the NCIC). So if a successful advocacy is going to trumpet its allegedly justifying ‘numbers’, a failing advocacy is going to have to do even more such trumpeting and manipulation.

But this does not mean to imply that their numbers – or their ‘emergencies’ – were ever honestly presented to begin with.

There are awful things done every day in any human grouping. And in a grouping of 300 million that has been cast loose from its moral and ethical moorings by 40 years of government-supported ‘deconstruction’ this risk is certainly intensified. (Although, actually, the violent crime rates are declining, as they have been since before the 1990s were underway.)*

But to exaggerate the numbers or effects of such sinful (to use the ‘old term’) actions is equally immoral. The actions, for example, instigated by such manipulative and frankly untruthful advocacy – actions taken by government and courts and police agencies at all levels – have hugely warped and weakened the Constitutional ethos of the country, unbalancing the careful calibration of the Framers’ construction.

Frankly, I tend to trust ‘advocacy’ numbers about as much as I used to trust the Five O’Clock Follies numbers released by Pentagon flacks in Saigon every weekday afternoon. Which is to say, Not Much.

The job of every good Citizen is to Kick Tire, especially government tire; not to be one of a huge herd of extras in some staged stampede. What are we – cattle? I wouldn’t even want to be a Texas Longhorn, if it meant relinquishing the dignity of discharging the duties of a Citizen.

This is a non-gender specific assertion. While there’s nothing wrong with attending a show or watching a sporting event, folks whose main sense of Meaning and Purpose and Consolation in life is to be a bobby-soxer (I’m dating myself) or a Sports-Fan (with capitals) need to wake up and smell the national coffee. The same goes for weed-whacked rock concert goers (dating myself again) and most surely goes for the current generations of youth for whom all sorts of hand-held electronic gadgets now provide not simply an escape from the real world’s challenges but an illusory ‘citizenship’ in a virtual world of profound illusion.

But to ‘advocates’ I will say this: it’s not enough to ‘advocate’, even in a good cause (and who – let’s face it – ever thinks they’re advocating in a baaaad cause?). Truth with a capital T has to ‘judge’ every advocacy action and every advocacy statement, and every advocate is responsible to provide his/her fellow/sister Citizens accurate information.

Otherwise, advocacies become just another huckster show along the honky-tonk midway at the national Fair, another sleazy carny act, and wind up causing as much damage as those crew-cut paragons who stood up in those air-conditioned tents in Saigon, with the flag behind them, and rattled off all the evidence and statistics that proved we were winning and it wouldn’t be long now if we just went a little bit further along the path.

This is, famously, what happens in 'war': Truth is always the first casualty. Fair enough - when you're in a declared and actual 'war'. But the great danger to American civizilization and culture and democracy has been to declare yourself (or your Identity or your sibling-sufferers) in a metaphorical 'war' while at the same time most really and actually damaging Truth.

And if the old wisdom be true, then to screw up Truth is to screw-up Reality, since the two are somehow connected.

Whether you might have a soft spot for Ike, JFK, LBJ, or Nixon – you can’t escape the humbling reality that Truth was taken to an undisclosed location and held in custody (even though no charges could be found to prefer against It) indefinitely.

Which, it turns out, means ‘even unto now’.

NOTES

*And I am leaving out those actions which are of questionable morality: into which category some might put abortion or starting and continuing several invasive and preventive wars and getting hundreds of thousands killed and millions maimed – among whom are lots of ‘children’, although maybe they don’t count because they’re not ‘ours’ and anyway, they’re dying in the cause of ‘liberation’ one way or another. Of course, in the matter of abortion, they are not – some would say – ‘children’ at all, so morality doesn’t enter into it. Interesting times indeed.