Yeah, you are just sooooo hardcore.

Get a freaking grip.

Why don’t you fill us in on your straight-edge “Freedom Fighter” credentials.

Egerton

Dear Mr. Horton:

Mr. Hornberger with his FFF organization has always impressed this reader as wanting to be something he will never be, and that is a Fighter for Freedom in the most daring and ennobling sense. Like most would be freedom fighting pundits he suffers from lock jaw or …locked pen… as did the freedom fighting pundits, for example, necessarily did in Nazi Germany. (Be sure I am certain that Mr. Hornberger does not suffer from a locked conscience.) Mr. Hornberger ‘s vanilla version of freedom fighting in the final, is understandable, as Mr. Hornberger is like many of the rest of us, idealistic but practical. Hell…no one wants to be seriously impaled by the mighty in our society.

The great ongoing freedom mocking atrocity of our age, is without doubt, our society’s hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars pumped to or expended on behalf of self-righteous gangsters to enable them to build their religious society on the land and the resistant bodies of others. Our national pride in this endeavor, decade after decade, clearly defines the nature of the group of human beings that we have become. I smiled when Mr. Hornberger offered in your interview, (I paraphrase,) something about our unwavering support of Israel being problematic.

Elsewhere, Mr. Hornberger’s more formal reference to our support of the genocide and dispersal of a defenseless people basically runs something lawyerly like … our founding fathers, (a favorite Hornberger imagery,) would disapprove of our undue entanglements in foreign intrigues. And then Mr. Hornberger would cite quotes….always spiffy and on point.

If Mr. Hornberger for a moment would say for just once…the hell with what the ‘founding fathers ‘ said or did not say…. and do what true freedom fighters , (again in the rarefied sense), do, by beginning to trust and cite from the grist of his own belly. Perhaps Mr. Hornberger could then speak of the great ooze of inhumanity surfacing the world from his and my country’s shores. Then the “loss of honor and integrity of civil liberties” that Mr. Hornberger speaks of on your radio interview, may be ascertained as in fact being the vapors of this ooze.

When Mr. Hornberger cites in his compendium of American wars in a recent article, he could not bring his pen to include our high tech war against a primitive Palestine now expected to extend into the millennia. Mr. Hornberger however can and does, woo woo, safely wax on and on about our attack of Iraq. Safe, Safe, Safe.

Therefore and by review of your interview and (Mr. Hornberger’s his other tap dance writings aside,) Mr. Hornberger, invariably impresses this reader as a forever wannabe ‘Freedom Fighter’ or play it safe ‘Freedom Fighter’. In the absence of true Freedom Fighters, our atrocities in the middle east will linger more odious then the Nazis’ atrocities in Europe, in the sense that the former is given a western religious ‘righteous pass’ and the liberal’s ‘we understand atrocities in this case pass’, that the Nazis were never quite able to finagle.

My big knock against Mr. Hornberger, which has been reignited, after listing to your podcast feed is that he seems to cherry pick his issues which are always safe (albeit presented astutely,) such as the U.S. Supreme Court hearing of the Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri case, and the Padilla Case, the silent tortures etc. , while always safely avoiding the over arching atrocity that our blasé society has committed for over half a century and is committing, and which otherwise, I think, will define our age, if a just world is in the offing. The body of Mr. Hornberger’s writings and interviews and that of other libertarian thinkers of his ilk will be summarized, I think in any future just world, as part of the great silence, long after he (they) and this reader have passed from the scene.

The Best to you and Mr. Hornberger,

Dustin

Perhaps you suffer from OWS (Obama Whiplash Syndrome). http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2009/02/17/tomo/index.html