Stop Me Before I Vote Again

The other day I was arrested -- not literally, as we have to note these days, but metaphorically -- by a line from the faux-Barack backhand rebuke Father Smiff passed along to all us anti-hope croakers here on the pwog pond. It comes after a supple gesture toward the new enhanced donkey-senate consensualized surveillence powers of the imperial presidency; and it comes in passing, playfully:

"You may rest assured it is quite unlikely that I will need to exercise these powers for any purposes beyond my own personal amusement"

With that, the muggish look of the cold war's eminence-butch flashed inside my head -- attached, with Hume-ean swift succession, to a passage from a now culturally misplaced magnum opus: The American inquisition:1946-1960, by the late great and now almost memory-holed Cedric Belfrage:

"In his first 40 years [Hoover] paid the Communist Party his highest compliment by concentrating his forces upon it -- for if he knew little else, he understood that the threat lay where there were organization and strategic experience."

So long as the grand old red-headed party had hooks into both the brain and brawn of America, factories and colleges alike, iron-knuckled rough-traders like Hoover worked every switch in sight, day and night, to shock 'em senseless.

I wonder if, in his declining years, this darkest of dark crossdressers felt at peace with his homeland. He had his former shadow-faced frontman glowering back defiantly at the trendies, Scotch in hand, from the White House balcony; and there seemed to be enough hard hats ready to hit the streets and bash up the Joe College furry freak fuzzers -- or not?

Even after his great triumph over the likes of Bill Foster and Harry Bridges, was he still quivering atop his high heels -- quivering with foreboding and sclerotic rage at the rising spectre of... Noam Chomsky?