The recent hullabaloo over Tareq and Michaele Salahi’s “crashing” of a White House “state dinner” is very instructive as to the true nature of government, and how skewed most Americans’ perceptions are in relation to it. To get a really good idea of what I’m talking about, just get a good load of this rubbish from CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer:
“’I don’t think it’s a tempest in a teapot,’ Schieffer said of the brouhaha over Michaele and Tareq Salahi, who crashed security at a White House state dinner, claiming they were invited. [One invitation they chose to ignore was to a Capitol Hill event, yesterday’s House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the matter.]
“’I think the government ought to prosecute these people. If that means sending them to jail, so be it. This is not only a security issue — people being able to get into the White House and get up close to the president, and who knows where that kind of thing goes — but this is also sort of an insult to the American people.’
“’State dinners are part of the symbols of our democracy, like the White House itself, like the pledge of allegiance and the national anthem. And when people are making fun of those things, when they’re doing what these people did, that’s an insult to awful all of us. And if these people go to jail, that will be just fine with me.’”
Personally, I don’t feel at all insulted by the Salahis’ presence at that dinner – as a matter of fact, I could care less about it. And I don’t see how their walking in under the auspices of being invited smears any kind of mud on those ridiculously hallowed (and entirely hollow) rituals like the Pledge or the Anthem. I also don’t think the Salahis walked into that tax-financed obscenity (elites dining and drinking off of the blood and sweat of working Americans) in order to make fun of anything or anyone. I think they just wanted to see what they could get away with – just like politicians and bureaucrats do all the time. For that matter, the White House itself is financed by taxation. Anyone forced to pay taxes at gunpoint should be able to waltz right in, unlike a private residence paid for by the production of useful goods and services or by wise investing. But Schieffer, in classic authoritarian arrogance, wants to see this couple kidnapped, railroaded in a star chamber, and then placed in cages for years of their lives – and to have the whole process paid for by money taken from society at large under threat of violent retribution. And yet government agents can smash down doors and shoot people in their own homes virtually at will, because they fail to pay said taxes, or own weapons that make government people nervous (unless they’re the only ones in possession of them), or happen to have a supply of the wrong kind of vegetation.
It should be easy to see that the mindset of people like Schieffer – and there are unfortunately many of them – is scatalogical, indulgent in idolatry of false and frangible concepts, and extremely dangerous. It is endemic of the very institution and concept of government itself. And because of this, it must be eradicated as quickly and uncompromisingly as possible.
