Tom, Dick and Harry
If you’re not old enough to have seen “The Great Escape” (from 1963) I suggest you see it. Based on a true story, it tells of Allied POWs who are all gathered into one German POW camp where the officers immediately proceeded, as was their sworn duty to do (an overlooked aspect of this story) to plan an escape.
This article is so titled because of the kind of advanced planning these men used in order to accomplish this, by tunneling out underneath the wire and into the woods. They decided on three tunnels, not one, and called them Tom, Dick and Harry.
The story of their ingenuity in carrying out every aspect of this operation under the noses of their German captors while living in such close quarters; from digging the tunnels, then dispersing/hiding the dirt, to turning uniforms into clothing suitable for the civilian world outside, forging documents, and setting up a system of dog-robbers, spies, lookouts and communication network, was clever and daring in every way. Lessons perhaps which need to be revisited.
But foremost in their planning was that there be three tunnels, so that, in case one was discovered or collapsed they could move onto Tunnel B or C. Into this mix I’ve thrown in Tunnel Z, or, Zimmerman, in order to illustrate a shortcoming in much of the “how do we fight back?” thinking aimed at this Administration, the Left, and the crushing power of government in general.
You see, most fight-back strategies are throwing all their energies into only one tunnel, and quite frankly, competing with one another for money and public support, not to mention making enemies of people who should be comrades in this overall ‘wahr against the Left. (In all endeavors, vanity peeps its ugly head.)
I can tell from both reading and listening many seem content to believe that their tunnel is the “one true tunnel” and will succeed if we will just execute the plan properly.
This needs to be rethought in one significant way.
Tom, Dick and Harry represent only three of many tunnels now on various drawing boards, not to mention millions of citizens’ minds. There are others although I’m not sure if there are any Zimmerman tunnels among them, except my own. But such a tunnel would ordinarily be planned well out of sight anyway.
Tom, the Ballot Box tunnel, would be the most conventional and popular tunnel, its design to simply drive the camp guards and commanders out of power. It’s not so much an escape plan as a plan to reform the camp, and hand it over to new and better management. Its target is the ballot box. Conservative financial support is mostly dedicated to this tunnel, which as I just mentioned, isn’t really a tunnel at all, since this metaphor doesn’t match the image most of the Tom designers have in mind, namely that the Republic is only under assault by an unfriendly philosophy, and not the object of a takeover, or being held captive, lodged behind some sort of unconstitutional barbed wire barricade.
Most people out here don’t quite agree, for a tyranny of the spirit is still a tyranny in the making. People out here don’t have to have their doors kicked in to know there are now people locally who would do this at the drop of a hat, if ordered to do so. We’ve seen much in five years, so “Tommy sees”.(Kipling)
Even so, most Americans wants to see this Tom tunnel succeed, for it is the one tunnel that upholds the normalcy of the constitutional process and one which can staunch this statist bleeding in a parliamentary way. I know I could die content if a Reagan-like president sat in the White House, surrounded by like-minded majorities in both Houses, even in the knowledge it would take a generation to set the tipped American applecart upright.
But this causes one to ask, just how many of the various tunnel planners even have the Republic’s survival at the top of their list of objectives? Said another way, how many believe we are in imminent danger? Are big dollar tunnel designers such as Freedom Works and ordinary people on the same page here?
In truth, I doubt if any of the House Class of ’94 envisioned their revolt as being survival-based. And really, not that many in the Class of ’10 did either, although Obamacare did send out serious alarms to that effect.
Then, there are the Dick and Harry tunnels which do see the threat more starkly, both designed as straight out, in your face, counter-punches, what the Left would perceive as “acts of war.”
Dick is the Article V Convention tunnel, being dug by people who have given up on trying to solve anything through this Congress and the insane culture in which it now resides, choosing instead to jump-start a fix of government back over to the States, circumventing Congress altogether and designing their own cocktail of constitutional solutions, from a balanced budget to term limits (to the moon and sixpence, should the wrong people get in charge of it). This does sound juicy, for I think Congress is almost a wall-to-wall criminal class, as Mark Twain once noted over a century ago, as are most of the executive branches, bureaucratism a known cancer that kills virtually all organisms, private and public, once it reaches a certain size and appetite. In this state, certain natural laws apply that are beyond the ability of the average general surgeon to fix. Major surgery is required.
By the way, an Article V convention doesn’t really fix any of these conditions. It fires or unseats no one. Not even a decent tar-and-feathering is involved. All it does is impose on government new rules that they did not themselves promulgate. So one needs to ask, if Congress and the President already won’t enforce existing laws, or protect existing constitutional constraints on power, why would the new amendments put forth by Article V tunnelers be expected to do anything other than compound an already existing pile of laws? As Stalin once asked about the Papacy, “Where are the States’ armies?” to enforce these new creations.
Moreover, the Dick tunnel has never been tried before, so, sort of like fracking, its excavations are fraught with danger, real and imagined, such as water catching fire, or causing peoples’ spines to curve. I won’t argue those here.
Then, along comes Harry, the Nullification tunnel, which gets the states involved directly without all that waiting around for delegates to convene around a conference table. It’s the “every man for himself” tunnel, in the hopes that one tunnel will spark twenty or thirty more, preferable adjacent to one another. Though not quite secession, Nullification is close.
While Tom looks toward a 30-year road back to sobriety for America, and Dick looks forward to maybe 2015, at least, before lobbing the first shock-therapy grenade at Big Government, Harry’s Nullification tunnel can be opened tomorrow. All it requires is a single state legislature, its governor, and hopefully a show of hands by most of the people in the state, to “just say No” (Nancy Reagan). I like Nullification, always have, but as a military strategy, not so much as a bluff. I like what it invites; a showdown, spitting across that line in the sand. It makes Washington show its hand before it wants to. It makes them play cards they hadn’t been prepared to play. It calls Washington’s bluff. Moreover, it forces them to scramble to plan on the run (which they are not very good at) since, with nullification there is no sitzkreig involved. It’s straight to the battlements the first day, and the possibility that other states may quickly join if Washington doesn’t do something quick. Or so Andrew Jackson feared.
But this Nullification tunnel also has all sorts of loose timbers in its roofing. In fact, it may have caved in already. A state can “just say No” tomorrow, but in truth I think the states like the threat more than the reality. They’ve already let good opportunities pass, when the people were at a high fever pitch about Obamacare. Instead, with the flipping of ex-staunch conservatives such as John Kasich in Ohio, the federal government holds many states in thrall via the purse, and the paychecks of a sizable number of their state employees. So, Nullification may already have been nullified itself, down at the bank. And now that Obamacare is now technically constitutional by some prestidigitation by John Roberts, its boat may have sailed.
Hitler proved this is 1936; that every time his opponents, including the Wehrmacht, rattled their sabres but only bluffed, he grew stronger, while having to do nothing. Then when he reoccupied the Rhineland and England and France only rattled their sabres as well, also doing nothing, his takeover of Germany was complete. So there is precedence for what opportunities lost can lead to.
There are other tunnels as well. The Cromwell tunnel is always a favorite, in which the Marines send squadrons straight in from Quantico, pushing right past all the Secret Service details, arresting that entire pit of vipers in the White House, while still other troops are rushing down the various congressional corridors, blocking Congress’ own underground tunnel retreats, in a dragnet that fetches almost all of the Democrat and Republican conspirators, then emptying the EPA complex. Yes, I know, be still my beating heart, but what happens on Day 2? Or Year 2. Or Decade 2? It took Cromwell that long.
There is even the Christ tunnel, where Jesus comes riding out of the sky, on a white steed, wielding a sword that lashes out like a thunderbolt. Here at least I don’t have to worry about what happens on Day 2. “In that Great Gettin’ Up Morning.”
But as we descend this list, these become more “hopes” than plans, which is why they are popular with the couch-conservative. They require no effort, not even critical thought. Just wishes.
Across the Rubicon?
And all of these solutions, except the Cromwell and Jesus ones, seem to proceed under the idea that if everything goes according to design America can all be saved, omitting one very important outcome-determinative question:
“What if the government won’t let you?”
You see, I am not here to argue, but rather to pose this simple question. In the end every plan depends on execution, without ever really asking, what might those in power do to thwart our plans?
They aren’t potted plants you know? And you haven’t exactly been sneaky about your designs. You’ve telegraphed just about everything you intend to do, again, almost as if this were a Little League baseball tournament; talent-versus-talent, Marquis of Queensberry Rules, execution, execution, execution, when that is likely not ever to be the case.
You already know they cheat. You’ve called them “lawless” and “illegal” yet think you can beat them in a fair fight? What makes you think you’d ever get one? They lie, but you won’t call them out as liars. They are lawless but you can’t call them out as criminals. Do you not think that maybe they have already crossed the Rubicon and have no earthly intention to allow you to take back through “legal process” what they stole though those same processes under your very noses? (This is an old Marxist “law” by the way, first told to me in 1969, by a Marxist lawyer.)
Now I believe this to be the case; they have crossed the Rubicon. But you don’t have to agree. What you do have to agree is is possibility, and a high enough one to be measured as a probability, 30%, 50%, 70%, etc. My second question then, is have you entered this calculation into your current Tom, Dick and Harry tunnel plans? And do you have a contingency plan?
What if Tom is dug all the way out into the trees, only to find steel plates laid over the ground to prevent your punching out an exit hole? That might have happened in 2012, only who knew?
Across the spectrum of “fight-back” planners in America, I’m sure there is not even close to a consensus as to “what are the Left’s real ambitions?” If you all don’t sit down and make your cases to one another, face-to-face, with evidence, logic, reason (and collegiality) all your plans may have been for naught. And we are lost.
The Left is not without its contingency plans, and being paranoid by nature, they have bundles of them, A thru Z at least. There is no tunnel I have described here, except Jesus (Lucifer won’t return their calls) they don’t have some counter-plan for. I have only mentioned here what you would consider to be nuclear options, i.e., when they must declare themselves openly, which they would rather not do if at all possible. I have advocated forcing them to do this for years, and in truth, they’ve obliged us in tiny steps many times. We just can’t get anyone on our side to acknowledge this out loud, and with a real sense of urgency. If Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, sixty members of the House, Charles Krauthammer, Rush Limbaugh, all say these people are acting “lawlessly” or “criminally” why can’t (or won’t) they then connect that last obvious dot and make it public that they, in their “official” capacity, demand something be done about it, legally and forcefully? I’m sure such “official defiance” would be well received out here on the hustings.
In any case, the government establishment has very good reasons for wishing Americans to remain calm, and continue putting all their energy into tunnels that have already been blocked at the other end.
The Zimmerman Tunnel
My view is that the Left has crossed the Rubicon, only each constituent member of the Left views his/her position, and their options in protecting their position, differently. None can afford to retreat, but Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack Obama, that Jarrett woman, and Congressman Muckenfuss from the 3rd District in Wilmington, all will defend their turf and themselves on their own terms…but only once separated.
I have my own Zimmerman tunnel and have been quietly pushing it for years. But that’s because I’m an analyst, and have insights and a history with the Left going back into the old Soviet days. I’m not trying to offer you my tunnel, but am merely suggesting you develop one for yourselves, or better, together.
Fact: Tom, Dick and harry are all well known, and may fail with some degree of probability, if in fact, the Left refuses to hand over power it has gained. It has no intentions of going back into the basements, or giving up its control of the academy, or most government agencies. Will it hand over the Congress and the Whiter House quietly?
Your design of a Zimmerman Tunnel is not predicated on this outcome as fact, but rather its possibility. It’s like the mental plan you make when you see the fire escape plan in your hotel room then wonder if the designated stairwell may be blocked by fire. The prudent hotel guest usually comes up with alternates in less than a minute or so. The fire itself is unthinkable. Yet they happen. So you do have to “think” it nonetheless.
By the time you get to the Zimmerman plan, you are no longer thinking reform but escape, and then resistance, just like the original film, above. That is why you need to plan for it now. At least if you are serious about fighting these creeps. Think of the Norwegian resistance in WWII; small-ball, village-ball, low-tech resistance and citizens at home, the same sort of self-organizing actions a community would employ when isolated. To work, planning must be carried out by stealth, away from prying eyes and ears. Beginning now. With many of your war chests, you can afford to set aside a few dollars to begin this planning and insert them into your training seminars.. With the people I work with, out here on the hustings, it is more difficult.
People have been fighting against bad people in public office since they were serfs. History never records their few and tiny successes, or their many, many successful acts of “wrecking,” as Stalin called it. Stalin went to his grave never knowing whether these were the acts of provocateurs or spontaneous. That’s the sort of things that can arise from a Zimmerman Tunnel.
Give Fear a Chance
The Founders, in their constitutional design, inferred the power of the people to be centered around fear, that elected officials would be afraid of the people’s wrath should they veer from the straight and narrow.
At the heart of the Zimmerman design must be to re-instill fear in government, so that its agents cannot safely operate outside the law with any sense of invulnerability and immunity. These all represent local Rubicons state agents today feel they can cross at anytime, but which can easily be driven back with Zimmerman. To do this does not require personal injury or property damage. Dispensing fear is easy and free. Planning and training costs a little.
So give fear a chance. At some point it may be the only tool you’ll have.
