DVaut,

I have a couple of theories, none of which are in tension with anything that you just wrote.

First, the GOP is more effective as a ruling party than an opposition party. The fringe of the party seems to acquire a bigger bullhorn in the party when a Democrat is in the White House, and they are the ones who usually are the first to champion the Bundys of the world.

Second, the old winning coalition is becoming far less viable, which makes it even less politically tenable for the party to excommunicate the overt racists most likely to embarrass the party.

Third, over the last 30 years, the amount of information that is easily accessible has increased 100 fold, and dissemination of this information is nearly instantaneous. The GOP has adapted poorly to this world. It's like 3/4 of the party doesn't know how to use the internet properly. It was much easier to hide the overt racists in the party during the time of Reagan than it is now.

Yeah to echo DVaut I don't think even liberal pundits crowing about this realize that this is like by far the best available ending to the story for the right. This lets Hannity drop him, lets Heller and Paul and Perry stop supporting him, and it lets them do that without having to admit that endorsing the "nonpayment of government fees is OK if you threaten violence" principle was ****ing insane.

It casts the right as being codgy old racists, sure, but everything they do casts them that way, because that's who they are. But Hannity and Drudge were ****ing playing with fire when they starting recruiting militia-types to go resist the BLM. Without this, how does that story end? Does he just eventually pay?

Getting away from this with egg on their face instead of blood on their hands is an AMAZING stroke of good fortune.

This thread has been the source of like 70% of my happiness today, so there's that.

DVaut,
Thank you for existing

I am ashamed to admit how excited I get when I open a thread and see a DeeVout essay. The subsequent few minutes are almost guaranteed to be the best of my day. It is an absolute crime that the dude doesn't have a blog/website/whatever.

Has anybody ever broken the code so blatantly? Ya know, like the eerie resemblance to negro and inner city if exchanged in the context of describing the republican theory of incentivization.

The racist's ability to displace mistrust of their enemy, the federal government, just by turning into a slur. It's like the special emotional power move they got that's weak, but hard to deflect. If you can pound on somebody defenseless enough, it might kill em.

Republicans need lots of racism education imo.

Guess how many times, according to BuzzFeed, FoxNews has mentioned Bundy today?

My first thought was to say, "wow this is exactly right," but maybe it's not. If Bundy had shot a couple of government officials instead of saying a bunch of racist nonsense, I'm pretty sure that Sean Hannity et al would have blamed the government and portrayed him as some kind of martyr.

omg, Hannity mentioned Benghazi when talking about Bundy and the NYT.

something somthing NYT lied about the Benghazi coverup

you can't make this **** up

Oh, this isn't direct on point, but check out what Lew Rockwell was writing about treatment of lawbreakers in the early 1990s:
http://www.theagitator.com/2008/02/0...-the-la-times/

Scarborough beat me to the Zimmerman analogy!!!
Damn I'm slippin

When does Cliven Bundy start having boxing matches with washed-up rappers

Fox news makes it out as the BLM gains thousands of acres a year by taking land.

https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42346.pdf


Bundy needs to sell his land to the homeless in Las Vegas and he needs to move to the south to tell them to give him some of their land.

As a result of acquisitions and disposals, federal land
ownership by the five agencies has declined by more than 18 million acres, from 647 million
acres to 629 million acres, since 1990. Much of the decline is attributable to BLM land disposals
in Alaska.

People need to read up on the sovereign citizen movement. It's something federal courts have had to adopt some policies to deal with. When i heard 'sovereign citizen' I knew things would get good. Maddow did a segment tonight discussing it.

I don't know if lack of discipline is the primary suspect here. Sure, discipline would cure a lot of this but that doesn't mean they necessarily lost discipline to get this way. There are a few possible contributing factors I can think of:

- Increased cultural sensitivity. No young Strom Thurmond gets elected today. But racial attitude deconstruction has perhaps lagged behind the intolerance for them.

- Changing voting base dynamic. Keep in mind that all time high numbers in militia membership also mean all time high numbers in those sympathetic to but not actual militia members- tip of the iceberg theory. There was a time when rallying around notorious gun nuts didn't seem like a unification strategy.

- Cameras are everywhere and information travels fast. This was not a good development for the GOP. George Allen might have been president ffs. Anyone can say "ooh he said the N word" and it really doesn't mean much. It's another matter when it's on video. And then emails. I know we could have gotten Clarence Thomas if he came up now instead of then.

-The whole system shifted right and their uglies have always been a lot uglier. Their fools gold turned poisonous while that of liberals seems to have changed to a benign variety. Liberals don't really care about the extreme left. It seems like we won't even let someone open their mouth unless they've like taught at Harvard. But now the repubs have to pander to those uglies even more while trying to hide their racist ghoul side from the middle. Hijinks ensue. It's hard to imagine there would be as much right wing outrage today about Elian Gonzalez in the midst of the republican immigration fervor. But try to **** with a man's constitutional right to gun down a black kid or federal thugs? Oh heck nah we got your back shooter.

Simpliicitus, long time no see. Hope all has been well.

Yeah, maybe, I mean circumstances could determine how such a story played out, but still, like the GOP placed their bets this guy:



...wouldn't do it. If he did, the political imagery is like so easy to sell even ******ed Democrats could do it: Rand Paul, Sean Hannity, FNC, et al are standing 5 feet behind this guy egging him on.

The right wing threading the needle here would be just like incredibly difficult. If this dude (figuratively speaking, if any of the dudes) opened fired and mowed down some people, that's like it, a bunch of desert clowns just turned the GOP into the party that supports scofflaws led by a guy violating the law for two decades flat out taking their automatic weapons and opening fire on the federal government, probably hundreds of millions of dollars of political brand building and time and money and energy in the last couple of years flushed right down the toilet. I mean who can really know, but you could probably just flat out immediately flip a generic Congressional poll like 5-10% in the other direction and hand Democrats both houses of Congress this fall.

And no one brought Sean Hannity and Rand Paul and the rest unwillingly to these guys. They stumbled all over themselves trying to get there.

They got lucky this deescalated and the worst you can say about Bundy today is a racist criminal creep and not a legit murderer. There have to be, have to be some adults in the room on the right that are like actually angry this is the spot the GOP put themselves in, basically with their party logo bouncing like 5 feet behind this dude in the picture. It's funny to be cynical, like oh yeah Sean Hannity will just blame Obama, but I mean if this dude went for it and started shooting people, the huge favorite is like 'GOP has blood all over their hands and hordes of dead people to explain,' all that risk for the glory of like a few more donations from the Alex Jones crowd and some slightly more agitated angry old white people. What a gamble, collective-right-wing avoided a really bad two outer that completely destroys the party, all for a really small pot.

People get cynical and jaded about PR people and political professionals like Karl Rove but they serve a purpose, so tons of money and time invested in political outcomes and winning elections aren't gambled on morons.

Things been good, just busy. Trying to make my way through Piketty's Capital book.

"The true believers" wouldn't see it for what it was though. Fox News and the GOP would condemn it, retreat from it, and not mention it again. However, yes, the rest of the news media would play it into the ground. However, it is only April, and there's many months until November, so while a small/medium sized electoral shift is possible, it probably wouldn't make a difference come November.

You need a September/October surprise ala the 2008 stock market crash to effect the election (although Obama was going to win regardless, I believe the stock market crash allowed him to win NC, IN and win the rest of the country running away)

Yeah DVaut, I disagree that such an incident would have any meaningful impact on the fall elections. You underestimate the lengths to which the gun nuts will go to defend their guns and the hatred they have for Democrats. Not to mention the time passage, as stated above. GOPers can and do hand wave all sorts of horrible ****--this wouldn't be very different, unfortunately.

They always put a label on everything. I am probably part of this movement. The reality is we all grew up in liberal cities and don't want to give our money to government anymore. We want to go back to the 1% sale tax and no income tax days where the businessmen and workers ruled the country as opposed to the tyranny of the blue government and the red neocons. Where you can't do anything without the blessing of a government permit. You want to install $10,000 in solar panels on your roof, you have to pay $60,000 to a government approved contractor.

I hate to break it to you, but this never actually happened.

Yes it did, all you have to do is look at the tax rates. I looked up an 1960 World Book encyclopedia and was hoping to find the amount of federal land in Nevada, however what I did find was that Nevada had a 2% sales tax in 1960. The first time Jerry Brown was governor the sales tax was 6%. In the old days there were no sales taxes or income taxes. Most building codes did not start until 1900. I say after a home burns down 3 times, people will start to use other materials.

Rachel Maddow belongs to a long list of what I call "economic terrorists". They claim they want to help the poor when in reality is all they want is everyone around them to pay for schools, health care, and they receive credit by forcing them to do so. We need to give her some of her own medicine tax her to $20,000 per year.

The Zimmerman case didn't seem to do too much damage to the GOP, granted the circumstances are much different. You had an unstable ******* running around with a gun harassing and intimidating young black people. One of them finally feels threatened to the point where he lashes out, gets murdered and then he's instantly villified by the entire right wing and Zimmerman is portrayed as a martyr for the second amendment, etc. I don't think one has to be that cynical to think that despite all the horrible facts and court orders going against Cliven Bundy and his band of racist "patriots" that in the event that that showdown turned into a bloodbath it would sell better to Conservatives than BLM backs down and Cliven Bundy outs himself as a virulent racist some days later.

I could see you as part of that movement given it's history and your idols.

No DVaut1 is right. The people that are like household names that everyone identifies as and I mean everyone identifies as the leaders of the GOP, Rand Paul and Sean Hannity, would/will have a huge impact on the fall elections. Sean Hannity interviewing an obvious idiot like Bundy every day to hype the incident had everything to do with promoting the GOP brand and nothing to do at all with increasing his ratings. Even though Hannity's interviews with Bundy revealed that he was a fool that made no sense, that couldn't articulate a logical political position long before he made his comments about Afro-Americans being destined to pick cotton, didn't matter. It didn't matter because the Hannity and Paul led GOP supporters are a bunch of idiots that can't articulate a political position either. So naturally the GOP minions not only identified with Bundy but embraced him. So you are right about the GOP being just gun nuts that won't change their views. What you are missing is independents. All those independents realize that the GOP gets it's marching orders from Hannity and Paul. So now they are going to swing over and vote Democrat even though other issues like health care, the economy and even the limits of federal govt authority might seem vastly more important they really aren't. They have taken a back seat to Cliven Bundy's view of your typical African-American.