As Friends of The Blog know, I am a long-time advocate of secession.  I don't see the problem with it, really.  Nation States are always marriages of convenience, often arranged by a third party, and when they don't work out the way you want them to, there's always divorce. 

There comes a time when you have to ask yourself why you're staying together. 



I think a lot of folks thought, before the election of Barack Obama, that all we needed was a leader who was willing to mend fences.  Unfortunately we got one who prefers to sit on them.  I still like the guy, and I've got to say I'm proud of the America he represents.  But even if Jesus Christ himself came back and handed out hundred dollar bills, the screamers out there pitching tantrums at town halls and the whackjobs stalking around with assault rifles at Presidential speeches would not be placated.

Nothing but violence can sate them.  That's what they jerk off to before going to bed and what they dream of all night.  And the Newt Gingriches and Sarah Palins of the world haven't got sense or scruples enough to know they're playing with fire.  I mean, when does a heavily armed man (with live ammo)in a crowd outside a forum where the President is speaking who says "In America people have the right to fight back — to resist" cross the line from exercising his First and Second Amendment rights to insighting violence?

Basically what we've got here is the George Sodini fringe.  There's a reason thirty million women steered clear of that psycho.  We should all do the same.

I say, if you can keep the crazies out, you'd be crazy not to.  For example: Texas wants to secede?  Let 'em.  Just move that wall a few hundred miles to the north and have done with it.  Give the wingnuts a homeland, but before you do, just roll up those federally-funded roads and take 'em when you go, and make sure you tactfully remove the weapons of mass destruction, too. 

Now I know that not everyone in Texas is a wingnut, and not all wingnuts are from Texas, but what I'm talking about here is some place the wingnut diaspora can call a homeland.  Reasonable people will be resettled somewhere in the civilized world, and crazies looking to live out their Wild West fantasies can pick up their new passports at the border, on their way out. 

If they want to live like that let them.  And there should be somewhere they can find others like them — others, in other words, who will shoot first, for whom public debate consists of fits and threats of violence, who live in anger, paranoia, and fear, who demand tolerance while denying it to others.  Give them a homeland.  Where they can establish their own wingnutocracy.

OK, I'll admit that I'm being a little selfish here.  I just don't want to go through a Sarah Palin run for the White House in 2012.  I thought we couldn't do worse than Bush.  But we can.  We can.  And we will.  We will.  And it will continue to tear us apart at the seams, when the solution is simple: a great divorce (followed by an international restraining order, of course). 

That way, we, at least, could get on with our lives.