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A Stopped Watch is Right Eventually (Charles Krauthammer on Bundy)

(I added a picture so it fits the guidelines – promoted by HappyinVT)

Ahhh, Cliven Bundy:  newest Conservative hero and, surprise! he’s a racist,too.

photo Fox-and-Foul-Friend_zps28e49879.jpg

I admit I haven’t paid much attention to the Bundy Ranch story.  Jan, IIRC, referenced it in a comment last week and there was a Twitter #bundyranch hashtag a few days ago but I’ve been busy with work and Spring and stuff so I have only a vague idea of thw whole story but what Krauthammer says about Bundy could be said about any number of people:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: … why conservatives, or some conservatives end up in bed with people who, you know, he makes an anti-government statement, he takes an anti-government stand, he wears a nice big hat and he rides a horse, and all of a sudden he is a champion of democracy. This is a man who said that he doesn’t recognize the authority of the United States of America. That makes him a patriot? I love this country, I love the Constitution, and it is the Constitution that established a government that all of us have to recognize. And for him to reject it was the beginning of all of this. And now what he said today is just the end of this.

And I think it is truly appalling that, as Chuck says, there are times when somehow simply because somebody takes an oppositionist stand, he becomes a conservative hero. You got to wait, you got to watch, you got to think about it. And look, do I have the right to go in to graze sheep in Central Park? I think not. You have to have some respect for the federal government, some respect for our system. And to say you don’t and you don’t recognize it and that makes you a conservative hero, to me, is completely contradictory, and rather appalling. And he has now proved it.  http://mediamatters.org/video/…

A thought similar to the bolded part came to me this morning as I was thinking about how Bundy grazing cattle on government land was patriotic but the Occupy folks were radical activists.  And while it scares me that I’m on the same page as Krauthammer he’s correct.  The Right is somehow anti-government and patriotic at the same time.  They live in fear but are tough on national security. There is this dichotomy of thought or belief that somehow makes sense to someone and doesn’t get challenged.  Is it because no one thinks that hard about it?  If you stand for law and order you cannot be a vigilante.  If you are pro-life you cannot support the death penalty.  If you are anti-government you cannot be patriotic.


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29 comments

  1. JanF

    I read an article by Brian Beutler in TNR that suggests that the conservatives, in their single minded focus on embracing anti-government pro-gun ranchers (he men!), forgot to do due dilligence. I was not surprised to hear that Bundy is a racist pig and stupid to boot (that may be redundant). Just like I was not surprised that the duck guy longed for the days when lynchin’ was allowed.

    A Tweet last night suggested that there are probably millions who think the same way.

    I don’t understand why we have to keep fighting the civil war.

  3. JanF

    Bundy saga reveals the risk of cozying up to extremists

    Bundy boosters are right to be appalled, but they should not be shocked.

    The anti-government strain of thought that Bundy advanced has been intertwined with racist and anti-Semitic views over several decades. Not all people who resist the authority of the federal government are motivated by race, of course, and not all racists are anti-government. But there is a long symbiosis between the two. […]

    In general terms, Bundy’s notion of state supremacy – “I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing” – is a variant of states’-rights claims that go back to the Civil War and were revived in the segregationists’ opposition to civil rights laws. Because the federal government has been the protector of minority rights, states’ rights have long been used to justify discrimination.

  4. HappyinVT

    Via Caty Enders at Pierce’s place:

    A militia member with the group Oath Keepers named Mark, who drove in from out of state by way of Zion National Park (“which was absolutely beautiful  –  you should go”), offers to explain to me the truth behind public land management.

    “The assumption is that the BLM is part of the federal government. But we need to check the facts on that one. The BLM doesn’t work for the government: they work for the United Nations. They might as well be wearing blue helmets. If we find out there’s money being exchanged between Harry Reid and the Chinese government, no one should be surprised.”

    A self-trained lawyer tells me the same. He adds that Bar-certified lawyers, like the ones who prosecuted Bundy, have sworn loyalty to the British government, whose statutes encourage sex with clients. “That’s what they do with all their clients.”

    But Bundy isn’t the only racist …

    It’s dizzying and hot at the camp, and a very friendly man named Roy, wearing an Obama t-shirt with a joker smile painted on, hands me a cold bottle. He’s from nearby Mesquite and has been a close friend and supporter of Bundy’s these last few years. When I tell him I’m from New Mexico, the former cop says he has a very good buddy who used to work as a sheriff in my area.

    “He got in a bit of trouble,” he chuckles. “He pulled over a carload of illegals one night, didn’t have room to haul ’em all, so he put a chain around their neck and put a padlock through it, went to the next one, then he chained ’em to a tree!”

    He buckles with laughter as the story heats up. “Then he left ’em and went to town to get his pickup to haul ’em all back in. So, you might imagine, that didn’t play well – ha! You’re a young’un, but everything wasn’t against the law, way back when.”

    Yeah, that’s a real gut-buster right there.  Asshole.

  5. HappyinVT

    When political news is dominated by a fatheaded deadbeat whom your party embraced until he publicly and unsurprisingly showed himself as a fatheaded bigot, then you as a conservative commentator, if that be your cross to bear, must scramble to find something else to write about. Thematic embraces must be exchanged for trivial distractions. This, the Washington Examiner’s Byron York has done brilliantly, if not a bit too conspicuously, in “Why Elizabeth Warren should run for president.”  http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p…

    The reasons York gives are dumb, too.

  6. janicket

    from Jim Wright at Stonekettle Station — long, and the Bundy part of what he’s discussing doesn’t come till the latter half, but well worth reading:

    http://www.stonekettle.com/201…

    As for the Bundy brouhaha itself?  I too hadn’t paid much attention to the drearily predictable nonsense till the racial remarks erupted (picking cotton?  That’s what “The Negro” is good for?  Wodathunkit?), and then I just laughed and laughed as all the opportunistic cockroaches scurried for cover.

  7. JanF

    As their god Ronald Reagan would say “there you go again!”.

    Mike Pence Runs Up The Stars And Bars

    In downtown Indianapolis, there’s this massive monument to the people from Indiana who have died in our various wars, particularly the nearly 25,000 Hoosiers who died in the War of Southern Sedition. [Indiana Governor Mike Pence] edging right up to being on the wrong side of the dispute that cost so many Hoosiers their lives:

    “Despite what some may think in Washington, our state governments are not territorial outposts of the national government. The states are the wellspring of the American experiment. It will not be enough to cut federal spending; the next generation of leaders must permanently reduce the size and scope of the federal government by returning to the states the rights, resources, and responsibilities that are rightfully theirs!”

    […]

    This view of things was litigated at the Constitutional Convention. It failed. It was litigated over the tariff. It failed. It was litigated at Cemetery Ridge. It failed. It was litigated prior to the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. It failed. It was litigated at Central High in Little Rock. It failed. It was litigated on the campus at Ole Miss in 1962. It failed. It was litigated at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It failed. It is the connective tissue that binds modern conservativism inextricably to the remnants of American apartheid because this view of the nature of the nation always was the expression of threat that the slaveholder felt about his way of life. It camouflaged itself in a number of ways involving a number of different issues, but always it was about the fear that, sooner or later, the federal government was going to come and take away the chattel from which you derived your personal economy …

    I wish there was a way to fix this:

    States rights always was the constitutional camouflage for white supremacy, be that during the time of slavery or the time of Jim Crow. It has been the single greatest impediment to the intellectual and political progress of the American nation almost since that nation’s founding, and it always has been the last refuge of the truly retrograde.

  8. JanF

    Republicans Glued Themselves To Bundy And Now Hate That He Sticks

    Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy is a registered Republican, as the New York Times reported alongside his inflammatory remarks on slavery. Many prominent conservatives had voiced sympathy for his cause as Bundy battled the Bureau of Land Management.

    Potential 2016 presidential contenders Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) criticized the federal authorities opposing Bundy. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) drove up to the Bundy ranch to stand alongside him. Republican state lawmakers gave impassioned defenses of the armed militia that backed the 67-year-old rancher. Fox News personalities vigorously covered the proceedings and brought Bundy on their shows.

    But now that Bundy’s racial sentiments have been exposed, forcing the right to ostracize him as best they can, Republicans have re-directed their anger at those who might point out that the man who openly wondered if blacks had been “better off slaves” is one of their own.

    It was that awful Harry Reid!!! He demanded that Republicans denounce Cliven Bundy!!! He baited us!!!!!

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHA as Bubba would say.

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