"Let's walk down and get 'em all."

 The headline of this entry is the punchline to a joke you may already know. In it, a young bull says to an older bull, "Look at all those cows down there in the pasture! Let's run down and each get us one!" The older bull answers, "Let's walk down and get 'em all."

Ha ha, right? It's about getting laid. It's also not so subtly predatory in its depiction of male-female relations, but that's not today's focus. Today we look at its aspect of low-key patience.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that the current regime in the White House needs to, "recalibrate and maybe work from a different direction to ensure they get back to get what they wanted to begin with -- and that is to remove people from the country."

It's a chillingly broad statement. Stephen Miller wants to remove more than half -- way more than half -- of the total population to get to the sparsely settled white homeland he has been pushing the regime to build for him. Steve Bannon regularly promotes the "great replacement theory" that views the immigration of non-white people into Europe and North America as a planned long game to outnumber and eventually overcome the white variant of human coloration. Abbott did not specify the number of people to remove. He merely suggested that a more methodical approach without the theatrics of military strikes on apartment buildings and street executions by short-tempered federal employees would yield a better result and not threaten Republican electoral chances as much.

The Republican campaign to purge people of a darker hue began with shock and awe demonstrations like the abduction of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and others, to get a lot of immigrants, illegal and otherwise, to pack up and leave on their own, saving the regime money and enhancing their prestige as irresistible power. They have stuck with it, escalated, and poured money into it, long past the time when it was obviously generating resistance more than surrender.

A methodical, quiet campaign might seem to take longer than running in with flash-bangs, tear gas, pepper spray, and the occasional head shot, but it's their only chance. And the goal of sending 100 million people away is just ridiculous. However, they probably hope that a high aspiration will pull their actual results higher than if they truly concentrated on the worst of the worst and sifted only for violent criminals and non-white fraudsters. The shock and awe campaign gave a quick shot of deportations -- many of them completely improper and indefensible -- but it's losing traction now. A quieter approach below the threshold of public notice might have sent fewer people away initially, but could keep on disappearing individuals without arousing the massive public backlash that the atrocities in Minnesota have finally inspired.

There was pushback from the start, but the street executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti pushed it over the top. Particularly the murder of Pretti highlighted that the regime has no use for either of the first two amendments that make up the Bill of Rights. They'd already taken a big steaming dump on the fourth and fifth. They could snarkily claim that a federal agent making a snap decision to shoot someone dead in the street constitutes a very speedy and public trial as promised in the sixth, but a whole lot of other due process elements are missing. When the goons disarmed a legally permitted gun owner and then shot him, they kicked the biggest hornet's nest in American society.

It may be too late to spin this shit tornado down to a mere swirl of dust in a vacant lot. The damage is done. The current regime aspires to absolute tyranny. The stupid Supreme Court and their stupid "unitary executive theory" guaranteed that any president could become a dictator. They knew that the candidate under their banner had said that he wanted to be a dictator. No one should have been surprised when he immediately set out to be one. Forget "day one."

Even as allies of the dictator fall away, take note that they don't fall far. They used the current occupant of the Oval Office to get their brand of authoritarianism into power. They still want to rule rather than represent, because they know better than you do. Freedom does not come from God or any natural order. Freedom comes from them as they see fit to dole it out to you.

Any libertarian or outright anarchist will chime in at this point to say that the same principle applies to any rules or laws from a government with the power to field law enforcement agencies. Don't tell me I can't dump my waste oil right on the ground. The soil is sandy and soaks it right up! No problem! We have to walk a careful balance between letting people make their own decisions on the basis of their intelligence and morals, and limiting the damage caused by the multitude who have neither one. All are equal before the law, but that doesn't mean that the law should be powerless. Violators should be prosecuted.

Our elected legislators make the laws. We have to pay close attention to how those laws are worded and applied. Citizen government makes us all part of it. Big government? I'll say. Even if you demolish the formal structure, we are all governing each other in the aftermath, without a referee. Government is inescapable. Small government is far more dangerous than a full-size, every-adult-included representative democracy.

We'd all love to set it and forget it and devote ourselves to daily gratification of our impulses, but that is -- sadly -- completely impossible. It's like putting your SUV on cruise control and then hopping into the middle row seats to watch a video.