Recently (Sept. 22), Paul H. Bletz III wrote to alert readers to the imminent takeover of the U.S. by a civilian national security force being organized by President Barack Obama, which would be as strong and as well-funded as the U.S. Army.

Bletz allowed as how Hitler's Brownshirts got away with it in 1930s Germany, but it wouldn't succeed here. There must not be a skeptical bone in Bletz's body because otherwise he would have checked the authenticity of that tall tale before recirculating it via the Missoulian's letters page.

The story of how this whopper started, and what then-candidate Obama actually proposed in a speech delivered on July 2, 2008, in Colorado Springs, is available at www.FactCheck.org, a non-partisan project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Searching "civilian national security force," one learns that this military interpretation of a "civilian national security force" was launched by U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., in a post-election interview with the AP on Nov. 10, 2008, when he compared Obama's security force plan to the activities of Hitler and the Soviet dictatorship.

In fact, Obama was not referring to an armed security force with police powers but to an expansion of AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, the USA Freedom Corps (a volunteer initiative begun by the Bush administration after Sept. 11, 2001) and an increase in the number of State Department Foreign Service officers. The speech's four paragraphs in which he explains this, and that Broun apparently didn't read, are available in the results from the above-referenced search.

And then we have the "czar" stories. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first to appoint a czar as policy adviser and every president since has included them in his administration. Their appointments are open to public scrutiny and many are subject to Senate confirmation.

Lynn Ascher, Missoula