Why doesn’t it surprise me to learn that Donald Rumsfeld summers in an estate called Mount Misery and that it is the same estate where Frederick Douglass was beaten, before escaping?
The houses have names. Mr. Rumsfeld’s is Mount Misery and is just across Rolles Creek from a house called Mount Pleasant. On four acres, with four bathrooms, five bedrooms and five fireplaces, built in 1804, the Rumsfeld house is just barely visible at the end of a gravel drive…
…But there is some historical gravity to the name, too. By 1833, Mount Misery’s owner was Edward Covey, a farmer notorious for breaking unruly slaves for other farmers. One who wouldn’t be broken was Frederick Douglass, then 16 and later the abolitionist orator. Covey assaulted him, so Douglass beat him up and escaped.
That seems to fit Rumsfeld’s personality quite well. Cheney’s estate, which is about two miles from Rumsfeld’s, is called Ballintober. I’m not sure what to make of that name. It seems Tolkienesque. Or it has something to do with balls, toes, and potatoes. Or something. In any case, it’s evil. If you try to approach it large black creatures come at you from out of the woods.
“The last time I went up Fuller Road,” Katie Edmonds, an agent at Meredith Real Estate, said, “S.U.V.’s came out of the woods at me.”
Their neighbors seem to be generally happy to have the Patrons of Death in town. But Cassandra Harrison, “a mother of two who waits tables and cleans houses” is a bit more perceptive.
She is grateful that the air space above the Cheneys’ house is blocked. “It’s a no-fly zone, and that’s good,” she said. “But I’m not happy. I don’t think society’s liking them so much.” Ms. Harrison, 23, voted for the first time in 2004, she said, “just because I did not want him. I don’t think that they tell us the truth.”
They don’t tell the truth, but Ms. Harrison should watch out. There should soon be an influx of buzzards and vultures on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Actually the Eastern Shore of the great state of Maryland is very lovely. I have found the ppl there to be very friendly.
I am sure that will change now with their new residents, abiding there that will bring on the darkness of life to them all….unless you are a republican, that is…:o)
Gotta warn ya that this section of Maryland is one of the few which reliably supports the modern Republican party, so they shouldn’t find the dark cloud smouldering over their area a real problem. It is always surprising that those who brag about “protecting the nation” always demand that they be protected so assiduously. Are they afraid of everything? In the old days, heros were afraid of nothing. Could these fellows be anti-heros instead?
This area is CIA/NSA/Spook Central.
Believe iot.
AG
Snark or not, Brenda…
To Republicans…active, witting ones anyway…darkness IS life.
These people are evil.
Evil personified.
It is very simple.
No matter on what level of society you are born, once you make a solid, active commitment to the idea that you will do anything…ANYTHING…to get what you want, then you have become evil. You can mask it in slogans and ideas; you can claim to be killing and stealing for Christ or for your people; you can write Mein Kampf-like tomes about it, but there it is in all its glory.
You have gone to the dark side.
And here is the dark side’s slogan.
Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. (Supposedly first said by Hassan-i-Sabbah, also known as the Old Man of the Mountain and founder of the sect that came to be known as The Assassins. Assassin being a word derived from the hashish they smoked to get their shit together when they were headed out to murder.)
If you are born on the lower rungs of society, this decision…this tendency, because like everything else that forms a human being, it is to a great degree genetically predetermined…usually results in some form of overt criminality.
If on top of that you have a great deal of natural intelligence and vitality, you become some sort of crime boss or crooked businessman. If you LACK these talents, you just become a thug.
Now if you are born within reach of some real power…which in this country usually means white, culturally Western European/American, male and middle class or above…and also have talent, THEN you can do some REAL damage.
Enron-style damage.
Cheney/Bush I style damage.
High-level CIA type damage.
Kissinger kind of damage.
It is quite true that people of this sort are surrounded by a sort of darkness. That the very surroundings in which they live are altered, changed into something darker, more negative. Their negative energy is that strong. I have lived in the neighborhoods of crime bosses, and baby, you can FEEL the evil as you get near their block.
You can feel it.
I have sat on innumerable bandstands and watched the Trumps and Nixons and Bushes of this world cast a pall around their very presences. So strong that it is worth your life to eat the buffet food past which they have walked. You know those cartoons where an evil entity will go past flower beds or trees and the leaves of the plants will shrivel and fall off? Yeah. Like that.
Names like Mount Misery and Ballintober (Ballintober sounds to me more like an estate that would be the daytime resting place of a Transylvanian vampire in one of the “Dracula goes to England” flicks.) and histories like the Douglass story just seem to gravitate towards these…I hesitate to call them “people” anymore, they are more like nexuses around which evil accumulates like iron filings around a magnet…around these entities.
And LIKE “evil” as defined in the I Ching, they will eventually consume themselves in their own negativity.
The only question here THIS time is…and this is what makes today’s dominant Evil different on a whole other level of magnitude from those of the past…will they fall before they manage to drop the Big One (In the forms of nuclear warfare and/or global environmental collapse) and turn the entire PLANET into a Ballintober?
We shall see.
Meanwhile…resist with whatever you’ve got.
Evil is real.
Bet on it.
AG
>>once you make a solid, active commitment to the idea that you will do anything…ANYTHING…to get what you want,<<
And theres where it all went wrong, in my book. When it became the prevailing belief in greedy mnds, that we have every RIGHT to get what we WANT..however we can get it..and to hell with principle or ethics or any sembleance of concern for the common good. Anything goes as long as I get what I “WANT”.
Like any alcoholic worth their salt, no matter how much I drank, it was never “enough”. The more I drank, the more I wanted. Eventually, I “wanted” so much booze so often, it replaced all concern for anyone or anything else. I became a world class expert at rationilizing absolutely anything I had to do to GET more, which made me into a first class liar with only one genuine concern: how can I get more booze?
Addiction to money and power works exactly the same way. The “darkness” of this lies in the power of self delusion, which makes peopler enveloped in it truly obivious to any needs or wants other than their own. Thus..truly, truly dangerous.
Have any of these lovelies been seen sneaking about the neighborhood?
Yes.
AG
Ballintober is the name of a villiage
in both counties Mayo and Rosscommon in
Ireland. It could be the name of where
his family or his wife’s family may have
come from in Ireland…or the name may have
already been on the house prior to buying it.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!! 🙂
It likely comes from an aristocratic Irish Catholic family who came to Maryland with the Calverts during the time leading up to the English Civil War. One Earl of Mayo is listed as having converted to Catholocism during the 1640s, which could easily have prompted them to establish an estate in the new colony of Maryland. Did I mention that his ancestors and family seem to have had a connection to naval matters under Elizabeth and James I too. All of that would indicate a family quite willing to sail away to the New World.
That was the reason the colony was founded in the first place, to provide a place of refuge for English Catholics trying to flee the Protestant repression. This only became worse once the Civil War started in earnest. Of course, Cromwell’s activities in Ireland would be branded war crimes today and they were.
Booman,
The wingnuts, such as Michelle Malkin and Powerline’s John Hinderaker, Red State and David Horowitz and others, are claiming that the NYT Travel Section wants to assassinate Cheney and Rumsfeld. Because the NYT ran the story about St. Michael’s and featured Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s weekend houses.
The homes are public knowledge and have been written about extensively by, among others, Newsmax in 2005, International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Salon, and General Aviation News. Just do a google search and you’ll find out that Rumsfeld’s house is called, Mount Misery, and that Frederick Douglass was once beaten by his slave owner there. [Mr. Torture Rumsfeld would buy a house with that name and history.] Or that Cheney’s house, which he bought about a week after Katrina hit, cost $2.9 million and is called Ballintober.
The wingnuts are posting the addresses, phone numbers and emails of NYT staff on their blogs and encouraging people to harass them, implicitly encouraging violence. Some of the blogs aren’t so implicit! The Secret Service protects Cheney and Rumsfeld, but who protects the NYT staff and their families.
Glenn Greenwald, a NYC litigator on the First Amendment, has a post that goes into this extensively, and includes links to the wingnuts’ blogs.
Isn’t this a form of cyber-stalking and terrorism? Isn’t there a law against this? If there isn’t, there ought to be. Because this is just the beginning of a right-wing witch-hunt, in terms of targeting the press and Democrats.
yeah, I was aware of that when I wrote this, and I didn’t mention it on purpose.
I don’t think there is any law against publishing someone’s address or phone number, but advocating that people “go deal with them” in the context of giving out that information is enough to warrant a stern warning, if not actual prosecution. It’s a gray area and most of the wingnuts are careful to keep it vague.
It’s also summertime and that causes nutty meta threads interblog fighting.