This would all be quite funny if it didn’t involve the
governor, Rand Paul and the undermining of the U.S. military. “What next?” one critic
asked. “Will (Gov.) Abbott call out the troops to protect us from alien
abduction, abominable snowmen and Bigfoot, or should I say an invasion of
Bigfeet?”
 

 
Texas being Texas, the Lone Star State seems ready to put
its National Guard into a shooting war, if necessary, to protect the populace from
an Obama-led military takeover.

The new governor, Greg Abbott, announced earlier this week that the Guard
will monitor a training exercise by the U.S. military in several Southwest states
just in case the president’s troops go overboard.

New reports indicate that these war games – labeled Jade
Helm 15 – are a training mission for Special Operations forces. In order to
duplicate covert operations in a battlefield overseas, some states were labeled “hostile” and “very
hostile.” That set off the aluminum foil antennae of the fringe groups – and the
governor – who began to panic.

Social media fueled the fire. The Druge Report offered
several ominous reports and offered links to Infowars, an infamous conspiracy
theory website, that warned “traditionally conservative areas may be a
simulated target for future domestic operations.”

According to The Daily Beast, another online post said
“military scholars” have started hypothesizing that such troops “would be used
to target political groups such as the Tea Party.”

This would all be silly and laughable if it did not
involve the governor, and Sen. Rand Paul and attempts to undermine the
military.

On Monday, Raw Story reported that an Army spokesman
appeared before a packed crowd at a county commission meeting in Texas to try
to try to quell the citizens’ anxieties.

“The Army spokesman assured participants that the United
Nations was not involved in the operations, but the crowd jeered when he told
them he was not familiar with Agenda 21,” Travis Gettys reported. (Agenda 21 is
linked to one of the most elaborate conspiracy theories embraced by the fear-mongering fringies.)

The next day, Abbott announced that he had directed Major
Gen. Gerald “Jake” Betty, commander of the Texas State Guard, to monitor Jade
Helm 15.

In a letter to Betty, the governor said he made
the move “[t]o address concerns of Texas citizens and to ensure that Texas
communities remain safe.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Rand Paul (who can’t seem to make up his
mind where he stands on the Defense Department or foreign policy) said recently on the presidential
campaign trail that he will “look
at” whether the Army exercises could be linked to domestic military aggression.

At the same time, The Daily Beast found that Abbott’s
decision to err on the side of paranoia has made him the butt of jokes from the
left.

“Abbott’s pandering to paranoid, secessionist fools would
be comical if it wasn’t so costly and frightening,” said Glenn Smith, the
director of the Progress Texas PAC. “Abbott has the state military confronting
the U.S. military because some nutcases fear, what, armed U.S. takeover of
Texas? Seriously? What next? Will Abbott call out the troops to protect us from
alien abduction, abominable snowmen and Bigfoot, or should I say an invasion of
Bigfeet?”

Jason Stanford, a longtime Democratic Texas consultant
and member of the Truman National Security Project, said Abbott’s move is great
news for conspiracy-mongers everywhere.

“A lot of people think he’s more sensible than this, but
he has yet to stop campaigning for a (2014) Republican primary that he won virtually
unopposed,” he said. “Most Texans aren’t like this.”