Hey! This Doesn't Look Like The Brochure!

A while back, our dear van.mojo went on a one of our irregularly scheduled— but frequent— naval gazing exercises with his "Are We There Yet?" meme, i.e. has America finally crossed the line from democratic republic into authoritarian national security police state, and if not, how can we gauge the distance yet to go?

Today, I bring you the related kvetching of an old friend of ours from our salad days, the American Caliban, who is having a bit of a negative reaction to a somewhat scary news story about mystery men in bunny suits frogmarching people from their homes in broad daylight.

Pete gave me the update on that crazy "let's simulate a pandemic including all the creepy quarantine arrests" story. The best paragraph in the new story:

Walsh said the drill didn’t apparently alarm area residents because county officials didn’t receive any calls, but she added that the investigators reported that small groups of curious people gathered to watch the actors be cuffed with plastic handcuffs and taken away in unmarked cars.

Oh hey great. When they take me to Camp Halliburton, there will be a small group of curious people watching.

<http://www.thedailystar.com/news/stories/2006/05/24/drill1.html>

The subject line on American Caliban's post says it all:

This is how it will look, folks.

I couldn't say it better myself.