What to do about those pesky liberals

It's 2006. Republicans sweep all major House and Senate races. Tampering with the electronic ballot boxes that count most of the nation's votes has become so obvious that nobody other than Republican stalwarts believe there was a fair vote. The left wing of the Democratic party is irate. Millions of outraged people swarm upon Washington D.C. and threaten to bring the government of the United States to a standstill. What to do, what to do?

Well, in a traditional banana republic, that's pretty obvious: Call out the goons. Send in the troops with live bullets and have them open fire. That solves the problem, yessiree! The problem is, often governments don't survive killing tens of thousands of their own citizens. Soldiers blanche at all that bloodshed of their fellow citizens, and often end up turning around, fragging their officers, and joining the protesters. Sorta like what happened to the Shah of Iran when he ordered his troops to open fire on university students espousing the formation of an Islamic Republic. The soldiers couldn't bear shooting down their fellow Iranians like that, and eventually ended up turning around and joining the revolution, causing the Shah to have to flee barely hours before his armed forces totally melted away.

But here in the newer, better banana republic north of the Rio Grande, our brave men (and token women) at the Pentagon have a new, better way to handle these protests. No longer will live bullets be needed to clear the streets. No longer will clouds of tear gas fail to dissuade detirmined protesters. No longer will our brave Director of the Ministry of Love, Mr. Negroponte, require death squads to exterminate enemies of the Party in order to dissuade dissent. Because today... we have the Active Denial System, which will render death squads, bullets and teargas obsolete when it comes to dissuading opponents of Party rule.

This weapon works basically as a giant directed microwave oven. Unlike the famed "exploding poodle", it won't make people explode. It'll just make part of their skin very, very hot, causing them to run in the direction where their skin is NOT hot, i.e., hopefully home. Definitely the kinder, gentler way to deal with that pesky "democracy" stuff that despite the best intentions of our rulers has a bad habit of turning up at the worst time. Despite the obvious moral issues, there are some practical ones too. For example, will it cause people's eyes to explode if they look at the trucks that have the microwave dishes mounted on them? But never fear, it will not be deployed until those issues are worked out. After all, our newer, high tech banana republic can't be allowed to resemble those old-fashioned kinds of brutal banana republics, because otherwise people could not continue to delude themselves that they live in a free nation!

And so it goes in the United States of Delusion, where the Party rules America... and nobody is willing to acknowledge it.

-- Badtux the Orwellian Penguin