Here is an interesting report on militant American forces operating in Iraq and elsewhere:

The former New York Times Mideast Bureau chief warns that the radical Christian right is coming dangerously close to its goal of co-opting the country’s military and law enforcement.

The drive by the Christian right to take control of military chaplaincies, which now sees radical Christians holding roughly 50 percent of chaplaincy appointments in the armed services and service academies, is part of a much larger effort to politicize the military and law enforcement. This effort signals the final and perhaps most deadly stage in the long campaign by the radical Christian right to dismantle America’s open society and build a theocratic state. A successful politicization of the military would signal the end of our democracy.

The parallels with historic militarist movements are obvious:

“Contracting out security to groups like Blackwater undermines our constitutional democracy,â€? said Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Their actions may not be subject to constitutional limitations that apply to both federal and state officials and employees—including First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights to be free from illegal searches and seizures. Unlike police officers they are not trained in protecting constitutional rights and unlike police officers or the military they have no system of accountability whether within their organization or outside it. These kind of paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party brownshirts, functioning as an extrajudicial enforcement mechanism that can and does operate outside the law. The use of these paramilitary groups is an extremely dangerous threat to our rights.”

I was thinking more about the Taliban or the Spanish Civil War, but point taken. It’s no longer sufficient to understand what’s the matter with Kansas, it’s becoming necessary to observe moderate Christians being swept out of public office by militant, organized, rich and highly political radical fringe groups claiming to fight secular bogeyman, or terrorists, or Muslims, or whatever else they can stand on to justify their supremacy in a time of “need”. The clear irony is that fundamentalists always end up quietly moving towards a police-state on a platform that says they must intervene to prevent any movement towards a police-state.