All hat, no head

His Fraudulency has pardoned the two arsonists, poachers, and thieves whose criminal careers were the ostensible cause for which the Malheur Moron Mulisha justified their treason in arms back in 2016. Undoubtedly because these "fine people" will vote for his ass (as will the others who love these skeevy bastards; the lunatic "sovereign citizens", Tenthers, ammosexuals, and "wise use" nutcrackers that seem to begin where the Clackamas County sidewalk ends).

This is unsurprising but still immensely irking. For one thing, both of these people are fairly worthless shitheels, welfare ranchers of the worst sort, whose careless stupidity makes it harder for other people who try to make a living out of the hard land in Harney County.

Here's what the Wikipedia entry says about them:

"Two months later, Hammond and his son Steven obstructed the completion of a refuge boundary fence intended to keep their cattle out of the refuge's protected marsh and wetland, prompting their arrest by federal agents. The fence was needed to stop the Hammonds' cattle from moving onto the refuge after the ranchers had repeatedly violated the terms of their special permit, which limited those times when they could move their cattle across refuge property. Officials also reported that Dwight had made death threats against refuge managers in 1986, 1988, 1991, and 1994; and that Steven Hammond also made incendiary remarks against them. In 1999 Steven started a fire, intending to burn off juniper trees and sagebrush, but the fire escaped onto BLM land. The agency reminded him of the required burn permit and that if the fires continued, there would be legal consequences.

Both Dwight and Steven Hammond later set more fires, one in 2001 and one in 2006, that would lead to eventual convictions of arson on federal land. The 2001 Hardie-Hammond fire began after hunters in the area witnessed the Hammonds illegally slaughtering a herd of deer. Less than two hours later, a fire erupted, forcing the hunters to leave the area but also intending to conceal evidence of the deer herd slaughter. Steven's nephew Dusty Hammond testified his uncle told him to "light the whole countryside on fire," and that he was "almost burned up in the fire," having to flee for his life. The 2006 Krumbo Butte fire started out as a wildfire, but several illegal backburns were set by the Hammonds with an intent of protecting their winter feed. The backfires were set under the cover of night, without warning the firefighters they knew were camped on the slopes above. The fires threatened to trap four BLM firefighters. One of those later confronted Dwight Hammond at the fire scene after he had moved his crews to avoid the danger. Two days later, Steven Hammond threatened to frame a BLM employee with arson if he didn't terminate the investigation."

Fine, fine people there.

The other is that this crap really needs to be crushed, because it harms all of us. The GOP encourages people like these idiots because it knows that they're worthless except as cannon fodder, the enfants perdus of the plutocrats' assault on the public lands. The rich men who own the GOP know perfectly well that these gomers and the people like them, like the Bundys, can and will threaten and bully everyone else off the lands that belong to all of us for their own greedy purposes. They will strut and preen, king shits in their own little turdhills...

...until the really big boys come along and take them out behind the barn and put two bullets in the back of their heads. There will be no public weal to care about, no government to push back. The big animals will just eat the little animals, chew up their sad little cow farms and shit out the residue, and then do whatever mining or drilling or whatever the hell they want. The Hammonds will have already taken the public lands for them; it will simply be big thieves taking from little thieves.

If these Hammond idiots are lucky they'll get jobs working as porta-potty suck-truck operators for the mining operation. Careful with the shitty end of that hose, there, boys.

When all the Malheur moronity went down two years ago I was furious because people like these Hammond scum, seditious bastards whose entire life is a massive poke in the public eye, would get off easy. Back in 2016 I wrote:

"I will make two predictions now, and remember them;

These people will pay no price for their treason, and

We, the rest of us, will rue that we did not crush this seditious villainy when it was but small and could be crushed.

The law should have been pressed on the Bundys and was not. The law will not be brought to bear on these swine. Instead they will walk away, boasting, and the poison they bear will spread.

And so it will."

And so it did.

This IS who we are.

No, we're not "better than this".

This is who we are now. This is the nation I served for 22 years. This is the country I swore to protect and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

This is the country that sends small children to "court".

If We the People do not hold the people who are doing this, and the people who want this, as the "domestic enemies" of this nation, then that IS who we all are.

Errata

I don't have much of anything to add or detract from my post of yesterday, except this:

THIS is Nitty Kitty sleeping on the deck. At the time I wrote the post I hadn't downloaded the correct cat photo, so I went with one I had, showing Drachma the Merkitty sprawled on the front steps the previous week. He stretched out there in the heat of the afternoon and just lay around for an hour or so until the shadows moved and he had to retreat from the sunshine. Never did go inside the air-conditioned house.

Goofy cat.

And, though I don't want to rant more about the loss of the America I thought I knew, I came across this piece today:

"Some immigrant U.S. Army reservists and recruits who enlisted in the military with a promised path to citizenship are being abruptly discharged, the Associated Press has learned.

The AP was unable to quantify how many men and women who enlisted through the special recruitment program have been booted from the Army, but immigration attorneys say they know of more than 40 who have been discharged or whose status has become questionable, jeopardizing their futures."

The Army I knew was always hurting for linguists. With a gajillion cabinet wars going on all over the global South as well as southwest and central Asia I can't imagine that things are any better.

So why this, now?

You know perfectly well why, and so do I.

What baffles me is this seemingly insane pursuit of "immigrants", from wanna-be recruits to legal residents with old infractions on the books. This isn't going after badass gangstas. This is exactly what I predicted the Trumpkins' henchpeople would do; pluck all the low-hanging immigrant fruit. Granny in the bodega. Achmed the janitor.

Melania the mail-order bride...no, wait...

But all those little, harmless people would go first. Why risk your ass shooting it out with Hector the Vato when you can just walk up to Nonna Sissi and huck her in the back of the truck and she counts just the same?

If there was some sort of genuine, real, scary social problem here I could almost get it.

Almost; the way Orange Foolius and his mouthpieces are yakking this up as OMFG Alien Carnage!!! is still some seriously fucked-up neo-Nazi shit right there.

But this is a complete nothingburger. There's no "immigrant crisis". Immigration, legal and otherwise, doesn't produce any quantifiable "problems". No crime, no poverty, no threat of insurrection, nothing.

This is government-by-the-fucked-up-things-old-white-people-get-off-FOX.

That's ridiculous, but that's the way my country works right now.

So, just some cute cat pictures and your daily reminder;

Ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam.

Can you see..?

The morning of the 242nd Independence Day is cool and cloudy in Portland. The little house is quiet; everyone, including Nitty Kitty curled on the hard planks of the deck outside, is still asleep. I'm at the table in the front room with my coffee and my work laptop, listening to the muted sounds of the summer morning and wondering about my country.

Or, to a great extent, how much there is of "my country" that remains this day in the New Gilded Age.

Almost two years ago now I wrote about my anger and fear of the terrible course my country had embarked us all on.

"I am now too old to really hope or fear for my country. But I have hope, and fear, for my children's country. And if, having listened to the foolish ranting of this president-elect, having seen the parade of grifters, unhinged racist loons, incompetents, and Bush-era retreads he has threatened to employ, you are "happy" about that, Jim, then I'm afraid I will have to sadly lower my opinion of the pre-VOLAR SF officer selection process.

Had I lived in 1896 or 1916 I would hope that I would have been attacking the Pinkertons or the troops suppressing the striking workers. I hope I would have been writing flaming rants in the pages of the Socialist press, and excoriating the bosses and the corrupt politicians like Trump who suckle off them. I hope I would have been unhappy - hell, I hope I would have been furious! - that millions lived and died in poverty and misery so that a handful enjoyed luxury in the "land of the free".

And in 2016 I see that we have been handed over to those who would love to return to those Gilded Age days. I am unhappy and furious about that, and if it shows through the screen from this place, well...then I have done good work here."

Since that time I have seen everything I hated and feared about the unmitigated rule of the GOP come to pass. Just this past Saturday Nazis - actual Nazis! - fought street battles in my home city, not much different than the brawls the Spartakists and the Freikorps fought in the Weimar cities.

The fuck..? I have fucking freikorps in my home?

All of this leads back to the other evening when I went to a Portland Thorns match against the NWSL team from New Jersey. I got there a little late because I had work that ran long, and I was in the line for a beer when I heard the tannoy announce the entrance of the teams and the preparation for the Patriotic Ritual that We the People have - to my mind freakishly - decided with which to begin every meaningless sporting event.

And my weary thought was, well, fuck. I'm glad I don't have to stand for that and pretend to be a Hearty Patriot.

Because my nation sure doesn't feel much like the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave to me right now.

And, worse, because there seems to me to be nothing but disastrous choices open to fight the "conservative" scum whose ideal is a return to the ways and times of 1929, or 1899. I am too old and fragile - and too central to my family's security - to fight, actually fight, the Nazis in the street. My vote, coming as it does from distant blue Oregon, seems a frail reed, flattened in the storm of plutocratic, racist nativism my enemies are bringing to the battle. All I have is my words on this page, and those seem now like shouting into the empty air, unheeded and useless.

All this past month I've been reading Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, her popular history of the pre-WW1 Western world. In it I'm reminded of why the New Dealers did the New Deal. The original Gilded Age and it's comet-tail that lasted until 1932 was an unspeakable horror for people like me, people without money and power, people who would have been forced to beg and scrape for a living knowing that once we were too old, or too damaged, or simply unlucky we were ensured a slow death from poverty and immiseration.

That's why the first Gilded Age was full of violent rage. Presidents, kings, ministers of state were murdered by "anarchists" who were, largely, simply men who were furious at the knowledge of that coming slow death and chose, instead, to visit quick and violent death on others they felt were responsible.

The lives and homes of most people like me were in the ever-present shadow of sickness from foul air and filthy water, from disease and injury for which they could not afford treatment. The great and the good would glide past them in effortless majesty, sleek, replete, shining and happy - at least, from afar - and healthy while all the then-me could have done was shake with impotent fury that they should be born to unearned happiness and I to relentless toil.

A friend of a Facebook friend had a snarky comment the other day about how people like me weren't "willing to give President Trump's policies time to work..." and my immediate response was "Because we don't have to give them time because we've already seen how they work, you fucking stupid Trump-humper!"

"Unlike you goddamn FOX-addicted morons we've read the histories of where the Trumpkins of the GOP want to take us. We already know what's gonna happen, how this shit ends, because We the People have done it before. Trade wars, nativism, racist immigrant-bashing, plutocracy, authoritarianism? Fucking "duh", you nitwit, where the hell else are we going when Orange Foolius and his GOP's "policies...work"?"

I feel this day much as many another generation of Americans must have felt in the 1850s, watching as a cabal of greedy, foolish, venal, ignorant, and, yes, evil neighbors drove their nation into bloody war.

And I wonder. Can this nation endure, half-FOX and half free? Or are we, this day headed where they were, where, in the words of the man who was perhaps most strongly charged with steering the nation through the ruinous result:

"All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came."

All I can say is; I do not know.

But the prospect makes me sick at heart, and leaves me with nothing by a mournful longing for the past, and the foolish innocence of my younger days, on this Independence Day.