> you really believe you can beat the US government in an armed conflict.

The Iraqi insurgents weren't doing a bad job, I thought. Its irrelevant though - a government fighting its own people is like a company fighting its customers. If you can provoke enough brutality by a government to cause enough people to become disaffected - they don't have to join your side, they just have to stop actively supporting the government - then you can deprive the beast of sustenance.

> Historically speaking, when a ragtag band topples a government or monarchy or whatever, things turn pretty funky soon after.

I agree completely, as did our Founding Fathers. Its spelled out perfectly in the Declaration of Indepence, quoted for your benefit:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government"