The Most Ridiculous Story Of The Year?

There's a new file in my del.icio.us bookmark files: Ridiculous. Yes, I'm starting a little collection of work serious writers present in all seriousness that goes far, far beyond the sublime and settles heavily into the imbecilic.

The inspiration for this new collection came from a source that should surprise no one, since UK's leftist The Guardian is a regular repository of the ridiculous. But they outdid themselves with Naomi Wolf's "Fascist America in 10 easy steps."

Wolf, an American with utterly no comprehension of America, has this thesis:

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And ... George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.

Wolf has defined 10 steps that any good megalomaniac general would undertake to crush a democracy and seize power, and then she sees W hard at work behind all 10.

Here's the Readers' Indigestion of her piece:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy, in which W nefariously uses 9/11 and some pixie dust to dupe Congress into passing the Patriot Act.

And, even worse, Bush has gotten us into a war that has no clearly defined end. Unlike the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, all of which apparently always had clearly defined end-dates early on. The Dems should take a tip from Dennis Miller and stamp each new conflict with an expiration date.

2. Create a gulag, as mentioned earlier. Here's what Wolf has to say:

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

Just a couple days I wrote about the real torture of three missionaries in Turkey at the hand of some Islamofascists:

"He had scores of knife cuts on his thighs, his testicles, his rectum, and his back," Ugras said. "His fingers were sliced to the bone.

"It is obvious that these wounds had been inflicted to torture him," he said.

People like Wolf not only destroy all respect for pundits, they destroy perfectly good words like "torture." And speaking of words, it might help clarify her thinking if she looks up "prisoner of war" in her dictionary of choice. She will find that detention with an uncertain term, i.e., the uncertain term of all wars, is standard procedure.

3. Develop a thug caste. The Brownshirts! It's true! Didn't you know?

Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000.

And under Clinton, groups of angry old Democratic men and women, dressed in identical polyester, couldn't figure out butterfly ballots, throwing America into chaos. Hey, it's as likely to destroy America as some group of GOP kids -- or the Dem kids in Wisconsin who slashed GOP tires on election day. But they weren't wearing the same kind of shirts.

4. Set up an internal surveillance system. You know this one already. The NSA program to scan data -- not voices -- of international calls to or from terrorist locales. From this action, which unfortunately had to be stopped when the order came down, Wolf leaps to this:

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

Yep, that's America under Bush for you. I'm sure you've felt it too.

And it goes on through six others, including some hilarious laughers like "Control the press."

And who are the heroes standing between W and a totalitarian America? Why it's "a handful of patriots" like the Center for Constitutional Rights, which defends the bloodthirsty terrorists, incarcerated at Guantanamo ... er, the gulag ... and the ACLU. Oh, and the Europeans, whose help she feels we desperately need.

God save us.

Please forward any nominees for consideration.