The disgrace that America has become.

This disgusts me. The following is from the Daily Episcopalian blog. And it shows what a vile police state the Bush Theopublicans are creating in the United States. If I haven’t said for awhile Mr. Bush is pure evil. What is maddeningly frustrating is that he’s so stupid that he doesn’t even realize how evil he really is.

Here is the situation as described on the Daily Episcopalian by Joel Merchant. Mr. Merchant is taking an Amtrak train from New York City to Boston -- apparently he really does have faith. Across the aisle from him is an older man, a tourist visiting the United States, who doesn’t speak English. This is apparent to all but the brain dead.

The conductor, trained by the brownshirts at Homeland Security, sees that the tourist is doing what tourists do. As he rides the train, to see America, the man is taking photos of anything interesting along the way. But in Bush’s America everything is suspect and of concern to the state. So she begins lecturing him in English, which she already knows he doesn’t understand. “Sir, in the interest of national security, we do not allow pictures to be taken of or from this train.”

Personally I think that when you hear the phrase “in the interest of national security” you should run because chances are damn good you are talking to a Nazi of one sort of another. And only a real moron, meaning a state bureaucrat or Amtrak employee, could actually believe that tourists taking photos while riding on a train, one reason many tourists take trains in the first place, is threatening national security. Millions of Americans could be arrested for the same offense when visiting other countries.

Personally I would like to see these security assholes approached by armed individuals who say: “Sir, in the interests of Constitutional security we will have to ask you to go to North Korea where your type is appreciated. If you don’t go peacefully we will have to escort you there and dump you on the other side of the border -- preferably in the middle of some North Korean mine field.”

Of course the old man doesn’t understand her command. Like most morons she assumes that if she barks louder his ability to understand English will improve. Now she threatens to “confiscate” (a bureaucrat’s word for steal) his camera. The man is confused by this hostile petty official. He puts away his camera never quite understanding what has happened or why.

At the next stop this horrid woman had the police waiting to arrest this potential threat to national security. They board the train and begin lecturing him in English, apparently on the premise that the poor man suddenly learned English along the way. The cops tell him that they will be removing him from the train because he “breached security regulations.” They threaten him: “You will get off or we will remove you physically.” And still the moronic thugs hired to enforce Bush’s national security don’t quite comprehend that the tourist doesn’t speak English and doesn’t know what is happening to him. Not even English speakers can explain why it is happening.

One passenger says that the man doesn’t speak English. He is Japanese -- who ever heard of Japanese tourists with a camera -- clearly he was bin Laden in disguise.

A passenger is found who can speak Japanese and translates for the travel Gestapo. The man is told that because he ignored three orders to stop photographing, orders which he couldn’t understand, he will be removed from the train and interrogated. America has become one of those old, badly scripted Hollywood films about Nazis boarding trains and dragging off elderly passengers over the slightest transgression.

The confused man tells his interpreter that relatives will be meeting him in Boston and there is no way to reach them to warn them that he won’t be there. He says they will be worried when he doesn’t arrive. None of this matters to the travel Nazis. The interpreter passes that information on to the thugs. They don’t care, they never care, they are now important men saving national security. They tell the man: “Our task is to remove you from the train. If necessary, we will do so by force.” The frightened old man packs his belongings and is removed from the train.

Mr. Merchant, who witnessed this is disturbed. He writes:

The more I replay the scene, the more troublesome it is. It is the stuff of nightmares. Relations between people and countries lie at the heart of the issue. The abstract terms that inform political and social debate appear, as if in person, unexpectedly, near enough to hear, touch, feel. Taking no position is not an option. As an educator, I would prepare and deliver a lecture on how others perceive America in the world community, then seek an audience. I'll spare you. But -- I just watched armed police officers remove a visitor from the train for taking pictures. I don't understand this. I’m disturbed – no, shaken – to bear witness to these events. Other passengers react with surprise and anger. “Since when is it illegal to take pictures?” “Nobody’s ever bothered me about it.” “Is the only photography allowed from the space station and Google Earth? These people take pictures of everything, including my house, without my permission, and they’re instantly available on the internet.” An older traveler reflected, “I witnessed this personally in police states during the war in Europe.”

...Watching police escort a visitor off the train, I felt anger, not comfort. This action was beyond irritating. It is intolerable, unacceptable. If it bothered me, it paled in comparison to the way it inconvenienced, and will long trouble, this visitor to our country. We disrupted his travel plans and family reunion. Even greater than the psychological damage we inflicted is the harm we’ve done to ourselves. We missed an opportunity to show kindness, to be ambassadors of goodwill. The visitor will return home. He will indeed impress many people – not with pleasant memories and pictures of a quiet morning trip along the New England coast, but with a story of being removed and detained by American police for taking pictures. Do we imagine we’ve gained anything because a single visitor returns home with stories of mistreatment?

Around the world there are people angry enough to strap on explosives and blow themselves up. There are people who are angry enough to kill themselves by flying airplanes into buildings just to take thousands of Americans with them. And the police state that has been created is doing its level best to make even more people angry. U.S. government interventionism abroad has made a world filled with enemies -- even our friends no longer like us. Now the same imbeciles that concocted our disastrous foreign policy are treating visitors to the United States the way they treat the world.

The very people who most show friendship toward America, people willing to visit and meet Americans and spend their savings in our country, are the ones being treated like common criminals by the thugs and morons who have been given guns and uniforms “in the interest of national security.”

Just as the dim-witted simpleton in the White House has made the situation worse in Iraq and the Middle East he is making it worse in the United States. Bush has the Midas touch with one major flaw: everything he touches turns to shit. His actions are creating more and more angry people, not just overseas but within the United States as well. As he stupidly plods along he is creating conditions to breed the first domestically born suicide terrorist. And when that happens the political classes will demand more and more controls and regulations which will only make more people angry.

They will want more tourists arrested. They will scream at more visitors to the country. They will set up more check points and harass more citizens. Each day they will act more like the very regimes we were taught to hate in our childhood. They will be the new Castros, the new Stalins, and the new Maos of the world. And the anger will increase. And it scares me to think that eventually they could become the new Pol Pots as well.

It shames me that my own country is now on the road to serfdom and that the cancer that is eating away at her was imposed by some Bible-bleating dolt. When visitors to America are treated like this man on the train, or like the Finnish musicians, or like the countless millions of people treated like common criminals by Homeland Security, it shames me. No! It more than shames me.

The death of America is ugly to watch. I wonder how she can endure this sort of repressive police state without splintering into many pieces. And I fear for the world. The true danger lies in the fact that the US has massive military capabilities. And just as it is dangerous for North Korea and other tyrannies to have such power, the accumulation of power in the hands of the dotard from Crawford, Texas is a threat to the entire world. Unless the rest of the world stands up to the U.S. and demands it back down from its aggressive posturing and authoritarian tendencies the entire world will regret the existence of the American government. Most governments are primarily a threat to their own citizens. The United States government has become a threat to the entire world.