nothing is inevitably

"Police learn to use big guns, thanks to Homeland Security":

"Vermont is not the community it was 10 years ago," said Williston Police Detective Sgt. Bart Chamberlain. Several times a year officers need the big guns when they go on ever-more volatile drug raids. "Unfortunately, we are starting to use these more and more."

Well if it is inevitable...then I suppose you must!

The four-day training course was courtesy of the Federal Protective Service, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for law enforcement in 84 federal buildings in Vermont.

"We are training for a worst case scenario," said Inspector Paul McManus of the Federal Protective Service. "It's better to have the skills and not need it than need it and not have it."

Right, because this is a whole new kind of wargame here, where the worst imaginable excesses of the entirely predictable are reflexively dignified, encouraged, and all but insured as the entirely inevitable. Just as Iraq now being a hotbed of terrorist activity further justifies the US presence there, one supposes. Meanwhile, the compassionate destruction of Fallujah may have indeed just prevented anything resembling respectable elections from taking place (as the invaluable Juan Cole points out), Bin Laden has been granted official religious sanction to attack the U.S. with nuclear weapons by a Saudi sheik, and nukular-crazed neo-cons are claiming a "mandate" from God and vowing to spend "political capital" they have "earned" from "the people." Things could probably be going a little better in the shared world.

"This is a lot of fun," McManus said, outfitted in a black jumpsuit, magazines to his AR15 rifle strapped to his chest, and a black hood over his head.

But it's work they spent hours outside in the cold, firing shoulder to shoulder. More than one of the officers received minor burns from the hot shells that were ejected onto their necks from their neighbor's weapon.

My, how erotic.

"I have learned a lot," said Chamberlain, the Williston officer. "One of the benefits of when you are out here for two days is you can do the repetitions. It takes three (thousand) to five-thousand repetitions to embed it in your long-term memory, so you don't have to think about it."

Thinking? What's the purpose of thinking? Isn't that something comedians used to do?

n.b. No, he has not been reading Wonkette.