Call Out The Air Corps!
Drop The Atom Bomb!
Sometimes real life today resembles nothing so much as a cheap 1950s movie. Y’know, the kind where giants grasshoppers threaten the big city or beady-eyed commies are plotting to infiltrate our high schools.
Giant Bugs Crawl Up The Wrigley Building
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No matter what the threat was, some square-jawed sonuvabitch always knew how to handle it. If it was the grasshoppers, why, just drop The Bomb on the besieged big city. If commies, well then, we’ll send in some real he-men to reason with them utilizing rock-hard fists.
Bloomington faces neither giant grasshoppers nor commies these days, yet some squared-jawed “thinkers” in these parts figure we need the The Bomb-lite for some as yet unnamed peril.
One of those square-jawed “thinkers,” apparently, is Bloomington police chief Mike Diekhoff. Acc’d’g to documents obtained by Mother Jones mag via the Freedom of Information Act, the Bloomington PD was one of several hundred from around this holy land to request a nice little Armored Tactical Vehicle from the Pentagon’s surplus motor pool.
Diekhoff’s Request
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The specific vehicle Diekhoff wanted was a mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) fortress on wheels. The feds, you see, had 625 such MRAPs in their used car lot, the vehicles having been driven only by grandmas on Sunday afternoons for spins around Mosul in Iraq or the Helmand Province in Afghanistan during our excellent adventures in those locales. The Pentagon has a program making these tanks and other weapons of war available to municipal, county, and state law enforcement agencies for use against marauding mobs, heavily-armed drug cartels, lone snipers on the roofs of tall buildings, bomb-throwing anarchists, and other bad guys lurking around every corner even in our most bucolic villages. Reports Mother Jones:
In 2012, the program began making MRAPs available. The vehicles weigh around 14 tons, and feature armored hulls and tiny, blast-proof windows. “Nothing short of a rocket-propelled grenade will trouble this powerhouse,” one manufacturer boasted.
Terrific. I know I’m getting a little sick and tired of dodging flung explosives and taking cover whenever I hear the tom-tom beat of an AK-47 on Walnut Street.
A Navistar MRAP On Display
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Young adult writer Julia Karr (she’s not a young adult herself — she writes novels for that bunch) pointed out recently that Bloomington’s request still is pending. This even though President Barack Obama, caving in to pressure from his Kenyan Muslim gay abortionist overlords, has curtailed the Pentagon program.
Obviously, he wants the commies, anarchists, marauding mobs, and giant grasshoppers to win.
Now, I understand this great nation currently is suffering from a collective nervous breakdown — witness the popularity of presidential candidate Donald Trump — but, golly gee, can’t we feign at least a bit of sanity here in Bloomington?
The very existence of an armored, camouflage-painted MRAP in the BPD parking lot suggests our cops view the rest of us as enemy soldiers to be blown to kingdom come should we cross a certain as-yet unwritten boundary.
Let’s put some pressure on Diekhoff to withdraw this request. It’d be a nice gesture on the part of the gang upon whom we bestow badges and guns to keep the peace to actually view our city as something other than a war zone.
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