I was puzzled this morning while listening to the radio news. That moral beacon for our time, Janet Napolitano, was issuing a statement concerning the recent outbreak of the new swine flu strain. What puzzled me is why the Department of Homeland Security would be issuing statements concerning disease outbreaks. Don’t we have a Federal Department of Health & Human Services, and under it’s auspices the Centers for Disease Control? Call me silly but if there is going to be a government statement about a disease outbreak wouldn’t it come from the CDC? Without doing any checking the whole thing seemed a bit strange to me.
So I decided to visit the Department of Homeland Security website and try to find an explanation. This led me to a link called “National Strategy for Homeland Security”. All well and good. I find that there is overlap between CDC and Homeland Security, which I suppose makes sense in case of a biological or chemical attack (though I don’t think that is the case with swine flu). What I found was more than an explanation about disease. What I found was rather chilling, in fact. At the bottom of the document was this statement:
In this spirit, it is important to acknowledge that this Strategic Plan is a living document and will be revised as needed to guide a dynamic Department and its ever-changing requirements.
I think I know what the government means when they call something a “living document”. It means the government can interpret it to be anything they want it to be, anytime they want. (Similar applications have been used by members of the judiciary to find things in the Constitution that don’t exist.)
This certainly explains Napolitano’s statement about the swine flu. It also explains her statement about “Right-Wing Extremists”. But I must admit I get a chill when I see the Department of Homeland Security also has a hand in immigration (wait.. don’t we have a Department of Immigration & Naturalization?). Given this administrations propensity toward centralized governmental control, (read as “tyranny”) is it unreasonable to think the Department of Homeland Security might simply declare amnesty for all illegal aliens claiming it would make it safer and easier to reduce potential illegal activity by members of the immigrant community? That would certainly avoid those pesky votes required to pass amnesty legislation. And I get a bigger chill when I read about these 70 new data collection centers known as Fusion Centers going up in every state, (do we have terrorist cells in every state?). It is, after all, just one small step to go from collecting data on potential terrorists to collecting data on dissenters, (or right-wing extremists – see my previous post).
Couple this with Obama’s almost entirely ignored campaign comment about a “civilian national security force” and I begin to understand a little more about how people become conspiracy theorists.
I admit I may still be suffering from a lingering case of post-election frustration. Or do I see the framework of an Orwellian Big Brother system in the making that rivals anything the Soviet Union ever had?
Someone please tell me I’m paranoid and delusional! (You don’t have to tell me I’m an extremist – Napolitano already took care of that!)
