Promise Keepers

Does anybody else remember when Geraldo Rivera invited a group of skinheads to be guests on his show back in 1988? It didn't take too long before one of the other invited guests, chairman of the Congress On Racial Equality, was up out of his seat and ready to duke it out with his moral and political opposites. The resulting melee became the stuff of syndicated television legend. Twenty-seven years later, Geraldo is still working some of those same angles, most recently in the streets of Baltimore, as riots and unrest provided night after night of TV designed to frighten and incite. There aren't many who are better at generating scenes roughly akin to putting a porcupine in charge of a balloon factory.
It would be my guess that the brain trust behind the "Oath Keepers" are big fans of Geraldo's work. They are serious about their oath, the one about defending the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. How do you protect a bunch of ideas written on a piece of parchment that is itself under constant heavy guard? Send some guys with guns out into the streets to make sure that nobody messes with the ideals set forth by those proponents of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. On the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, the Oath Keepers were there, according to those who spoke to reporters, to protect a media organization. Which media organization? That wasn't immediately clear, but for the members of local Missouri law enforcement, their presence was "unnecessary and inflammatory."
Seriously? Heavily armed men showing up on the streets at a moment of heightened emotion and stress will have a calming effect? If they are really there to protect our freedom of the press or the right to bear arms or maybe that trial by jury thing, which it turns out is a pretty good deal when you get in trouble for messing with somebody's Constitutional Rights. The Oath Keepers promise not to disarm the American people. This would be kind of a problem if there was an American threatening a journalist from some media organization with a gun. What a dilemma.
Turns out the media organization in question was Infowars.com, the web site that insists that the shuttle disaster was caused by criminal negligence. And other things. Which makes me wonder what sort of conspiratorial forces must have been at work when someone emptied Al Capone's vault before the real secret could be revealed. If only Oath Keepers had been there to protect the Constitution. And the broken bottles and bad ideas inside.