Far Right Swamp Fever On Display

The lunacy of the far right seems to fester more with every passing day.  Indeed, there are times when I watch the news I ponder how the hell some of the far right "heroes" and "freedom fighters" got so batshit crazy.  It's as if they have suffered some blunt force head trauma or extreme mental illness.  A case in point? Cliven Bundy and those rallying to his defense and claiming that Bundy is standing up for freedom.   Lawlessness might be a better description of Bundy's arrogant refusal to pay for grazing rights on federal lands.  Like most on the far right - especially the Christofascists - Bundy believes that he is above the law.  It would be easy to dismiss Bundy as a lone nutcase, but amazingly, he has had armed supporters rally to his defense and threaten violence.  A column in the New York Times looks at the batshitery that is now all too common on the far right.  Here are excerpts:

Imagine a vendor on the National Mall, selling burgers and dogs, who hasn’t paid his rent in 20 years. He refuses to recognize his landlord, the National Park Service, as a legitimate authority. Every court has ruled against him, and fines have piled up. What’s more, the effluents from his food cart are having a detrimental effect on the spring grass in the capital.

Would an armed posse come to his defense, aiming their guns at the park police? Would the lawbreaker get prime airtime on Fox News, breathless updates in the Drudge Report, a sympathetic ear from Tea Party Republicans? No, of course not.

So what’s the difference between the fictional loser and Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada who owes the government about $1 million and has been grazing his cattle on public land for more than 20 years? Near as I can tell, one wears a cowboy hat. Easterners, especially clueless ones in politics and the press, have always had a soft spot for a defiant white dude in a Stetson.

This phony event has brought out the worst of the gun-waving far right, and the national politicians who are barely one degree of separation from them. Hundreds of heavily armed, camouflaged supporters of the scofflaw turned out Saturday in Nevada, training their rifles on public employees who were trying to do their job. The outsiders looked like snipers ready to shoot the police. If you changed that picture to Black Panthers surrounding a lawful eviction in the inner city, do you think right-wing media would be there cheering the outlaws?

With their assault rifles and threats, the thugs in the desert forced federal officials with the Bureau of Land Management to back down from a court-ordered confiscation of Bundy’s cattle. One of the rancher’s supporters, Richard Mack, a Tea Party leader who is in the National Rifle Association’s Hall of Fame, said he planned to use women as human shields in a violent showdown with law enforcement.

“We were actually strategizing to put all the women up front,” Mack said in a radio interview. “If they were going to start shooting, it’s going to be women that are going to be televised all across the world getting shot.”

That’s who Fox and friends are playing with these days — militia extremists who would sacrifice their wives to make some larger point about a runaway federal government. And what’s more, the Fox host Sean Hannity has all but encouraged a violent confrontation.

You would think that kind of anarchist would draw a raised eyebrow from the Tea Party establishment that provides Bundy his media oxygen. . . .  But instead, people like Senator Rand Paul have only fanned the flames, warning of a Waco-style assault. Paul, who wants to be president, further showed himself to be stunningly ignorant of the public lands legacy created by forward-thinking Republicans a century ago.

Senator, the renegade rancher has no more right to 96,000 acres of Nevada public range than a hot dog vendor has to perpetual space on the Mall. Both places belong to the American people. Bundy runs his cattle on our land — that is, turf owned by every citizen. 

You can understand why the Nevada Cattlemen’s Association wants no part of Bundy.  These kinds of showdowns are rare because most ranchers play by the rules, and quietly go about their business. They are heroes, in one sense, preserving a way of life that has an honorable place in American history. The good ones would never wave a gun in the face of a public servant, and likely never draw a camera from Fox.

Sadly, Bundy and his supporters are now a key element of the GOP base where the rule of law and intellect and logic are now scorned and outright insanity and lawlessness are deemed to be virtues.  My Republican ancestors must be rolling over in their graves.