Shadow Government

[Drew Danielson]

I am curious about the choice of the term 'shadow government' that has
used recently to refer to a skeleton US federal government hiding in
caves somewhere ready to pounce into action if Washington gets
attacked.

Searching Google on ["shadow government" -march -2002], to eliminate any
recent occurences of the term with an article dateline, turns up 5,470
hits.  The first 20 or so of these are almost all by conspiracists and
are in reference to some sort of US or worldwide secret cabal that calls
all the shots.

I have always associated this term with conspiracy theories, and when I
heard the news media talking about a 'shadow government' I thought at
first they had all gone crackpot till I learned what they meant by it.

There was one page about a Mongolian Shadow Government at the Mongolian
Liberal Democratic Party website, www.mldp.mn/shadowgov/shad_gov.htm,
which seems to reinforce 'shadow government' as used in the news
recently.  Unfortunately this page is 'under construction' and doesn't
say much.

I am wondering what are the experts' impressions of the definition of
this term, and its most current popular usage.