The Beginning of Wisdom...

 ...you'd think, would be you getting 18 years in the joint for sedition.

It's not. 

This fucking traitor learned nothing. He will do it again after President-again Trump pardons his traitor ass. He's said it. Believe him.

And I pause to remind you; I fucking warned you about that:

"As I said on Facebook today:

"If it was up to me, I would be at these traitors with the bayonet. A bullet is foolish and may go anywhere. The bayonet is wise and knows what must be done to end treason. Bill Sherman’s prescription remains the correct one; for traitors like this, fear is the beginning of wisdom."

If this is not crushed with brutal force we will rue this as the day we made these traitors our masters."

It wasn't, and we have. As their robed comrades gut things like the EPA and OSHA, as their plutocratic masters engineer the return to the Gilded Age, as Tubby howls and blabbers his way back to the White House, this cannon fodder of the Right, these modern sturmabteilungen, provide the force and fear the wingnuts need to drive the equivocating rabble of "liberal" Americans into the wilderness.

These people are traitors, are the domestic enemies my soldiers' oath demanded I defend the Constitution against.

When will we?

18 U.S. Code § 2384

Seditious conspiracy
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

They even carry the same fucking flag.

 

I warned you.

I fucking warned you what would happen if we let these traitorous sonsofbitches keep running their shit. Instead we coddled them and gave them a lollipop and now look at us.

They have sowed the wind.

They should reap the whirlwind.

They won't.

But they should.

As I said on Facebook today:

"If it was up to me, I would be at these traitors with the bayonet. A bullet is foolish and may go anywhere. The bayonet is wise and knows what must be done to end treason. Bill Sherman’s prescription remains the correct one; for traitors like this, fear is the beginning of wisdom."

If this is not crushed with brutal force we will rue this as the day we made these traitors our masters.

O tempora, o mores!

Bearing arms against the Republic, 1864:

The U.S. government's response, 1864:

Bearing arms against the Republic, 2020:

The U.S. government's response, 2020:

We live in sadly diminished times.

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.

Final Fantasy IV; Malheur Moron Mulisha Edition

This article talks about the Malheur Moron Metal Mulisha and how their cunning plan was to Free the Federal Lands! from the oppression of the Evil Empire of the BLM and then a thousand Make America Great Again flowers would bloom in Harney County.

(h/t to Nancy Nall who linked to it today)

There was only one teensy-tinsey little problem with that; geography and topography. Which is to say...reality.

Because Harney County – just like every other deserted shithole part of rural America – is WAY the hell out in the middle of nowhere; it’s almost perfectly equidistant from anywhere in the Northwest where people live and people want to live; the population centers of Oregon to the west, Nevada and Utah south, Idaho and Washington north and east. Shipping anything to market is punitive, given that wetter places (better for timber, grain, and livestock) are closer to those markets.

Badtux the Rural-travelin' Penguin encountered a similar sort of place out in the Mojave, of which he notes:

"These people are stranded, like so many other Americans, stranded in the desert of what was once the American Dream but now is just a hardscrabble existence in a harsh and brittle place. I haven’t looked around to see if I can see lots of red caps. But I bet I’ll find plenty of them there. Because where the American Dream has died, something evil this way comes."

Harney was homesteaded back in the 19th Century and an overwhelmingly large number of those operations failed. The distances were too large, the transportation grid too poor, and the water too scarce. The place is scenic as all hell…but not great for small farming or ranching without serious white-people welfare (a.k.a “farm subsidies” and below-market-low grazing fees).

What makes it even more fucked-up is that the collapse of places like Harney County wasn't a mistake or an accident. It was engineered by a combination of greed, stupidity, and unscrupulousness.

The “great plains” and the intermontane deserts of eastern Oregon were shrub- and grassland steppe for a reason and the Plains tribes and the high desert outfits like the Northern Paiute weren’t horse nomads because they were easily bored with the local scenery.

Without large-scale irrigation the bulk of the lands West of the Mississippi and east of the Sierras/Cascades are too arid to support tilth agriculture. Even pastoralism (for European cattle, anyway...) was fairly iffy in a lot of places.

But “real estate developers”, manifest destiny floggers, and grifters – the 19th Century Trumps – conned tens of thousands of proto-Trumpeters into believing nonsense like “rain follows the plow” (the theory that tilling semiarid grasslands releases soil moisture that then returns as rain. Seriously; I shit you not people believed that stuff…). Plus the U.S. government wanted white farmers to replace the Dangerous Savages.

So what would happen is that every couple of decades North America would get a change in the ENSO (the “El Nino/La Nina” variation) and the Plains would have a couple of wet years or five...enough to get a bunch of sodbusters through the winter. And the homesteaders would proliferate; suddenly Harney County was Great Again!

Aaaaand…then the climate would return to the semiarid norm, crops would fail, cattle starve, the homesteaders go bust. The bank would foreclose, everybody would move on...until the next wet cycle.

Wash, rinse, repeat; this happened something like 3-4 times between 1865 and the beginning of widespread irrigation in the Fifties - a change that was hugely supported by those damn imperialists of the BLM and the U.S. government irrigation programs.

As P.T. Barnum would have said; there’s one born every minute…

IF the federal drylands were opened the only real claimants would be the big timber and big ag outfits, if them, simply because only those deep-pocketed corporate entities would have any hope of making a go in Harney County and that only because of their ability to cover bad years and their economy of scale.

Nope.

The fantasies nourished by Bundys across the West (the so-called “Sagebrush Rebellion”) and the people in these dying places are as invasive, useless, and destructive as the tumbleweed that we mistake for authentically Western but are, in fact, a pernicious Russian weed…much like our new President-elect...

The Law in its Impartial Majesty

Way back in January of this year I wrote:

"I can think of no better response, no better description of the response that is needed and should be applied to the treasonous bastards than those of the man who flayed the last rebellious treason in this country:

"My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom."

I had a blissful moment imagining a modern Bill Sherman staring at the gaggle of dirty, hangdog prisoners standing under guard as the old stone building burns behind them, removing the cigar from his mouth to spit;

"Shoot them, major? Shoot them? I think not."

He would pause for a moment before jerking the stogie towards the big trees standing nearby, and growling;

"Rebels taken in arms aren't honorably shot. Rebels, major, are hung like the criminals they are."

"See to it."

It was a good idea at the time that looks even better now.

And I also said at the time:

"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.

Sometimes I hate it when I'm fucking right.

Shut up and sit down

Seems to be what the Republican voters in the state of Nevada told their lunatic gun-licking teabagger Michele Fiore. She lost the House District 03 to someone named Tarkanian who, since he is a Republican, is reliably spineless on the whole business of well-regulating the fucking militia but is less full-blown, bull-goose looney about armed sedition.

One can hope.

Mind you, she came in a strong third, garnering nearly 20% of the GOP primary voters. Which pretty much confirms what I've always suspected; that there's about somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of U.S. "citizens" who have no real idea what constitutes a polity, have no concept of (or interest in) a civil compact with their fellow-citizens.

As I've mentioned here before, Fiore represents the very, very worst of the greedy, stupidly chuckleheaded notion that there IS no social contract, that "I built that", that the entire idea of collective responsibility or community is not just impractical but iniquitous.

Needless to say I'm pleased that even the Republican primary voters in Nevada were unwilling to go so far into that fever-swamp as Ms. Fiore wanted them to. While it is reprehensible that some of these jokers let her get as far as she did, apparently sending her to join the poop-flinging Freedom Caucus in D.C. was too much even for Republicans, even in Nevada.

Enjoy spending more time with the family, Michele. Don't forget to keep the ammo out of reach of the toddlers, now, hear..?

Calling it Treason

I note in passing - and with great pleasure - the ongoing incarceration and impending trial of the Malheur Moron Mulisha for their hijinks in Harney County but with some irritation that a passel of their enablers remain not just free of the sneezer but in position to do considerable damage to republican government:

"Harney County Judge Steve Grasty thanks the group for their concern, but asks them to stay away from the refuge. Grasty said the militants were showing signs of fatigue and defeat, and worried that a visit from lawmakers would reinvigorate Ammon Bundy and the rest of the occupiers.

“If we’re getting close (to a resolution), and you embolden Bundy by your presence, and this runs on for weeks and months, it will be awful in this community,” Grasty said.

The FBI agent also asked the lawmakers not to visit the refuge.

Those pleas fell on deaf ears. And Grasty’s prediction came true.

COWS representatives visited the refuge, which was closed to the public. The lawmakers acknowledge they fed the militants information gathered from that meeting, and militant leaders talked openly about what they learned from those disclosures."

I've already said my piece on the idiot wingnut Fiore (who shouldn't be trusted with a Lucky Strike and a Mint Milano, IMO...) but the other seditious bastards have no more business continuing to hold elective office under the United States Constitution than does Kim Jung Un.

Two-gun Fiore continues to spout her treasonous defiance of her own government.

"Meanwhile, the arrest of the militants appears to be strengthening the Coalition of Western States, or at least helping its cause. Although she wouldn’t provide names, Fiore said the coalition has new members, including from the East Coast.

The GOP-controlled Congress is also considering legislation that would remove the Bureau of Land Management’s ability to enforce the law.

“We are not going away,” Fiore said. “We are dug in, and we will fight until this tyranny is defeated.”

Tyranny? Tyranny, you ignorant ass? Like armed seditionists seizing public property and standing off their fellow citizens at gunpoint?

Fear. Fear is the beginning of wisdom with the goddamn people. All's I'm saying.

Aftermarket parts

The prolonged silence around this joint is largely because I'm pretty much in the terminal segment of the descending branch of my appointment with the MOPAR guy; I'm getting a total hip replacement next Tuesday. My right side has gotten so bad that just moving is painful and small children point at me and scream when I hobble past. Yes, I look like The Hunchback, you little bastards. I know.

I won't pretend I'm thrilled. Yes, the result will be better than my present crippled mess. No, it's not "good". It's just better than what I have. I am still resentful and angry that I've been dealt a shitty hand and can't do anything but play it out. There are also the risks attendant on any large surgery AND the time and effort that go into a painful recovery. Like a Republican voter, I'm angry that I have to deal with the painful and difficult present to get to the promised better future that may or may not arrive.

Speaking of those fucking idiots...is there anyone who can pretend that something like 15-20% of the U.S. electorate hasn't lost its fucking mind? I mean, here's a guy who is just a ridiculous buffoon, a raw, infiltered Id-iot demagogue that has openly espoused torture, racism, aggressive war and domestic espionage. Closing houses of worship? Seriously? You'd think that even a mouth-breathing cousin-marriage-spawned Christopath would have been out the door on THAT one.

Speaking of which...this year's Republican primaries have done a great job of reminding me why political Christianity - at least, as it commonly appears in the "conservative" spectrum of U.S. politics - appeals to me about as much as a solid dose of the clap.

Fred Clarke notes that it's not a matter of some sort of individual choice on the part of the bible-bangers as much as it is a complete failure of the Christian Right to include any sort of genuinely Christian ethics in their catechism;

"...the Christian moral formation of these supposed Christians they have not been offered an adequate inoculation against this kind of politics. What they needed was instruction in a version of Christianity with ironclad commitments to civility, solidarity, justice, mercy, compassion, rule of law, and human rights, commitments so strong and so well-engrained in believers that to support someone like Trump would be unthinkable. But they have not received that inoculation."

This isn't just Trump. His closest rival, Ted Cruz, spouts similar noxious bullshit, and the Jesus-pesterers eat it up.

The full effect appears to be that the "vulgar talking yam", as Pierce likes to call him, is all over the GOP like stank on an old gym shoe. Barring a complete disaster he will be the candidate this fall, and I cannot imagine a worse indictment of the goddamn U.S. public. The GOP cannot help this nation in any way if it is the Party of Trumpism. There is nothing that can be said other than what I've said here again and again; Ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam.

The GOP serves no real useful purpose at this point. And, worse, in its existing form it is destroying the political conventions that make U.S. governance possible. We’re rapidly approaching 1859, and for much the same reasons only instead of slavery the hothouse ideology “threatened” by change is some sort of hellbrew of racism, greed, and flopsweat panic fear of imaginary jihadi invasion.

And stupidity – if you’re voting for Republicans because you’re mad at the wealthy vulture capitalists shipping your job overseas you’re in the same position as a pig voting for Jimmy Dean. Racist, greedy, and stupid is no way to go through life, son, and yet it's pretty much the default Republican position on, well, everything.

Oh, yeah, and there's their take on the fucking Malheur Morons. Oddly, the only one of the clowns that hasn't openly embraced the Metal Mulisha is Trump. Probably because they lost, and losers lose; Trumps are winning winners that win! Christ on a fucking crutch.

Nuke it from space. Seriously. That’s the only fucking way to be sure.

Oh, one more thing since we've been talking about Il Douche; at least he gave someone the inspiration for this:

Gad, what a vile shitshow these people are.

Did I tell you that the Girl has taken up the ancient sport and combat skill of archery?

She and the Bride have been going to our local Trackers indoor range to shoot, and both of them have become damn proficient, the Amazons. Speaking of which, my inamorata - who is still abundantly endowed even after going through surgery to reduce the endowment - says that she has developed a whole ne appreciation for the old story about the women warriors being, um, monomammilary. She has to alter her stance fairly significantly to about getting slapped with the bowstring in a rather delicate place.

Sometimes I'm damn glad I'm not female. The discomfort setting seems pretty high.

Anyway, Trackers is pretty much made of awesome. We're talking a place where you can live-action roleplay, or learn to smithy a utility knife, or card wool and spin cloth, or find medicinal plants. I would have been all over Trackers if we'd had one whan I was a kid, and I love the Little Miss loves her some Trackers.

Here's a couple of snapshots of the two maenads firing away. Here's the Girl:

Mojo takes up a good kneeling unsupported firing position:

Contemplating the perforated foes:

Good shooting, ladies!

I've enjoyed all this Robin Hoody exercise, although my personal fantasy is as a Parthian horse-archer at Carrhae, and so as such I've tried to duplicate the tactic of starting with my back to the target, stringing, turning and firing.

Let's just say that the Parthians and I are lucky I was born 2,000 years too late.

But not late enough to have bionic hips. Dammit.

Worth a thousand words

This pretty much says it all.

Look at this fathead; standing on his beater-ass Dodge p-up on a road in eastern Oregon, all camo'ed up with what looks like his ballistic vest, boots and K-pot like he was going in to clean out Fallujah.

The American in me wants to take a piece of dimension lumber upside his helmet for being a dumbass seditionist supporting armed treason.

The drill sergeant in me wants to lock his friggin' heels.

"Sweetbabyjesussonofabitch what fucking dumpster did you dive in to get that outfit, precious? Did you wanna play Army like the big kids, or were they just our of warm clothes down at the Rescue Mission? And who taught you how to lace those boots, hero, your baby sister? Have you ever SEEN a can of boot-polish, slick, or was your plan always "Rub my boots in the dirt"? Or did you rub them on your ass, since you look as dark and dirty as a fuckin winter day?

Fasten that goddamn chinstrap, you sorry oxygen-thief, and what did you shave with, a cue-tip? Have you EVER shaved, or did your mommy teach you not to play with sharp objects? I've seen less hair on my dog's ass, sweetheart, and unless you feel like finding my boot in yours I suggest you get a goddamn shave, lace and polish those boots, and square that helmet away and all in about ten picoseconds or you are likely to have a fucking close encounter with a fucking cattle prod..."

Honestly. These people.

A cigarette and a cookie

Well.

The Malheur Moron Mulisha is finally all either in the sneezer, run away, or in one case biding safe in a ditch, food for worms.

The last of these heroes chieu-hoi'ed after asking for a coffin-nail and a cookie. From snacks to smokes, at least these jokers were true to their Constitutional cravings for cheap thrills and snack foods to the last.

The bonus round, however, goes to the original armed seditionist and welfare moocher Cliven Bundy, who flew the Friendly Skies right into federal custody. Seems you ain't the sharpest barb on the wire, Cliven, ol' shoe. You may have thought you were done with the feds but they sure as hell ain't done with you.

And that's goddamn good.

Because the Stupid, it's still out there. It continues to live, free and wild, even as these sad bastards will hopefully begin meeting their new Aryan Brotherhood friends for their long occupation of a very different sort of federal facility.

It even continues to arrive here, in eastern Oregon, even now - the latest import of this nonsense coming in from Nevada in the form of one Michele Fiore, elected representative of Clark County and wanna-be U.S. Congresswoman. Michele's quite the piece of work, and here she is on the subject of our latest outbreak of armed sedition:

"Fiore promised that the cause for which they fought – defending citizen rights under the Constitution – would go on even if they were arrested."

Citizen rights, my sweet rosy-red ass.

If these damn traitors were "defending" anything other than their own goddamn greed and stupidity then I am the goddamn Dragon King of Bhutan.

This, this is the exact sort of thing that should be throttled in the throat of any seditious liar that utters it. This is the sort of thing the sows these Cadmus traitors, a sort of Cheeto-shaped mental eyetooth that awakens their hunger for power (and snacks, and maybe a Marlboro, but, hey..."defending citizen rights under the Constitution" can't be done on C-rations.

Wait. What?)

For all their irritating rhetoric and seditious treason these morons are just the cannon fodder. The meat waiting for a bullet so it can be finally put to a useful purpose to fill in the fosse. Only the (rather low-hanging) fruit of the poison tree.

Fiore. Fiore is the fucking tree.

It is her beliefs - the guns trump ballots, that traitors are "patriots", that the commons are for the taking of anyone armed enough and selfish enough and greedy enough to take it - and her spouting those beliefs, and the public post she has been given to spout those damn deadly treasonous beliefs that is the root and branch that bears this bitter (albeit perhaps smoky and Oreo-tasting) fruit of treason.

And government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall perish from the earth if We the People do not take the axe to her, to people like her, and cut them down at the ground, dynamite the fucking stumps, and salt the earth to ensure that no more like them will spring from it no matter how many American Spirits and Doritos and .45ACP rounds seditious bastards like Bundy and Finicum and, yes, like Fiore sow there.

"Just walk away, Cletus..."

Dear remaining traitors in arms.

No. Not just no, but fuck no.

The only place you get to be a heroic rebel and then use your awesome Jedi mind powers to force the Evil Stormtroopers that you're not the rebellious fucksticks they're looking for is in George Lucas' head.

So when you say:

"We are willing to leave peacefully...if the FBI will let us leave without arrest or forcing us through the checkpoint, we will all go home."

you're talking complete nonsense. It don't work that way, Cletus.

And CNN? When traitors in arms tell you that they will either walk away without facing the consequences of their armed sedition or they will make the earth and sky red with blood? That's not "saying they're ready to leave peacefully". That's demanding that they escape the consequences of their armed sedition and giving the rest of us peaceful citizens the big ol' rebel-in-arms finger.

Figure it out, goddamn.

But you...you're going to get a wonderful choice, my dear traitors.

You are going to get to surrender without being hung out of hand as has been the traditional fate of traitors in arms. You will get an expensive and public trial in which you are very likely to be given a ridiculously vast amount of privilege to spout your idiotic, treasonous nonsense and justify your greedy and selfish seizure of our public patrimony. And, even if you are convicted of the crimes you have so self-evidently committed, you will have careful and relatively benign jailers who will ensure that you are released unharmed to resume your deluded and delusional defiance of both republican government and common sense which I know you will because...well, you're you and can no more stop being you than a howler monkey can stop flinging its poop.

In short, you are some seriously lucky sonsofbitches and you need to accept that and go quietly to the lawmen and surrender.

Before your fellow traitors find out why the snacks were gone.

Because, looking at you?

It's not that hard to guess where all the Cheetos went, genius, and no matter how slow your pals are they'll figure it out eventually and then who's gonna save you when they go all Second Amendment Solution on your porky ass?

Just sayin'.

18 U.S. Code § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy

It appears tonight that at least part of the armed seditionists and traitors in arms are dead or in federal custody.

Good.

Hopefully the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of the remainder will follow swiftly.

Because these people are not simply traitors. They are madmen and idiots who would invoke their insane concept of "common law" to destroy our republic for their own benefit. It is also worth noting that the shootout and arrests occurred as the traitors-in-arms were on the road to spread their treason to neighboring Grant County, Oregon, where the county sheriff is another whackadoodle seditionist and wanna-be sovereign-fucking-citizen.

My only regret is that they will not, as they should be, as their predecessor traitors typically were, speedily and publicly hung as a warning to those who are tempted to follow in their path; thus perish all traitors.

Because in order to not lose the Whiskey Rebellion, as Bill Sherman said; fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Joo keep using dat word...

From Sunday's edition of the World's Worst Newspaper:

So. Let's see. "Free federal lands" is Oregonianspeak for these douchenozzles' expressed intention; "take what public land we want, pay nothing for it, and we have guns, so, freedom!"

What a shock!

It turns out that a group of armed traitors to their government believes that their "...government has no constitutional authority to hold vast land tracts" and, instead, think that "freeing" these lands means that they should be able to take them for themselves and do with them what they want.

Free the lands!

Well, okay, free them until I can take them, fence them, and run my cattle all over them.

But oh, you whacky Oregonian editors and your "free"! Are you joshing me, you pranksters, or do you really think that "free" means what these goddamn traitors say it means? Next thing you know you'll be expecting me to believe that "free" means what the North American Man-Boy Love Association says it means; that men should be free to poke young lads up the backside!

Free!

What's infuriating about this - beyond confirming the overall spinelessness of the response to this fucking armed insurrection - is the World's Worst Newspaper being a willing accomplice to these traitors' vomiting their nonsense all over the public record.

The only remotely-nice thing about Oregon's Paper of Record bending over for the Bundy Bandidos like a debutante at a NAMBLA key-drop party is that it allowed my own personal favorite Oregonian Ursula LeGuin to come out swinging her Big Battle Axe of Fuck Your Stupid Bullshit and lop off the empty gourd that this idiot Payne uses to keep his cowboy hat off his shoulders:

Ammon Bundy and his bullyboys aren't trying to free federal lands, but to hold them hostage. I can't go to the Malheur refuge now, though as a citizen of the United States, I own it and have the freedom of it. That's what public land is: land that belongs to the public — me, you, every law-abiding American. The people it doesn't belong to and who don't belong there are those who grabbed it by force of arms, flaunting their contempt for the local citizens. Those citizens of Harney County have carefully hammered out agreements to manage the refuge in the best interest of landowners, scientists, visitors, tourists, livestock and wildlife. They're suffering more every day, economically and otherwise, from this invasion by outsiders. Instead of parroting the meaningless rants of a flock of Right-Winged Loonybirds infesting the refuge, why doesn't The Oregonian talk to the people who live there?

Get some, Ursula!

Erik Loomis over at Lawyers, Guns & Money has some more on this, but for Oregon's only daily newspaper to act as the butt-trumpet for these fetid droppings of the Right Wing fever swamps is unacceptable and beyond a mockery of journalism. But that's why it's the World's Worst Newspaper, after all.

Meanwhile, we're still fucking losing the fucking Whiskey Fucking Rebellion.

Dear wingnut...(an open letter to "conservatives" on the Malheur Morons)

I've been reading your responses to the outpouring of anger and vitriol that has greeted the news that a bunch of self-identified pals of yours had "occupied" the vacant headquarters building at Malheur NWR out in the lesser paved portions of my home state.

You were angry yourselves, and scornful, that the "libtards' heads were exploding" over this. You seemed incredulous that these scruffy seditionists had aroused such ire on the Left, apparently as much because it is the Left as the subject of that furor. After all, we're supposed to be all "tolerant" and "squishy" about taking stands, except when we nag you about your hatred for things like homos marrying and Muslims...well, being alive...as "intolerant" and "rigid". You don't get it. Why are we so fucking pissed off about a handful of patriots exercising the Constitutional Second Amendment right to protest gummint tyranny?

So let me try and explain why this particular incident got up our collective wick so quickly and so badly.

First, a lot of it is the cumulative hammering you've been doing since...well, it feels like forever but at least the fifteen years since 9/11. We got used to - not okay with, but used to - being called "traitors" and "cowards" and "pussies" because we questioned your excitement about bombing and/or shooting the shit out of the public enemy de jour. We grew to expect that you would call anything we supported, whether it was abortion or freedom from theocracy or using cunning (or economics, or diplomacy, or pretty much anything) instead of bullets, "foolish", "impractical", "cowardly", and "anti-American".

We got used to hearing you describe our belief that taxes are the price of civilization as "stealing" and our conviction that regulation of the commons helped prevent the sort of greed and selfishness that got these Hammond people in trouble as "tyranny".

We didn't like it. Oh, hells, no. But we pretty much gave up trying to unscrew your heads on that subject, figuring that this was just your default setting.

We also got used to the big media outlets giving your whackadoodle ideas equal time just like they were actual human thoughts. So when we tried to discuss things like heading off climate change or not going all Operation Wetback or treating women as women and not as life-support systems for wombs and you started shrieking "Liar!" and "Babykiller!" we just sighed. Forget it, Jake, it's Wingnuttown, we would mutter. It's not worth the aggravation.

We especially gave up trying to warn you, and the newspeople, about the fire you were fucking with your fondness for wild talk about "Second Amendment solutions" to "government is the problem". See, we kept saying, We the People ARE "the government"; that's the idea, anyway.

Right? Kinda baked into the pie back in 1789?

That the problem with "Second Amendment solutions" pretty much led to the sort of "solutions" proposed by the western Pennsylvania whisky distillers and Dan Shays and Jeff Davis. And that those "solutions" were the kind of solutions that led to "solutions" like burning down your kitchen to get the roaches out of the oatmeal bin; ugly and violent and not really "solutions" at all.

Because every time we'd bring that up you'd start shrieking about "gungrabbers!" and "tyranny!".

Sigh.

So. Here we are.

A bunch of your pals - or, at least, people who claim to be your pals - have taken their bullet launchers and their energy drinks (but not enough jerky or cheeze doodles, apparently...) and done, in effect, what Shays and Davis and the whisky rebels did; taken a patch of ground that the U.S. government claims and broken rules the U.S. government has made and are defying the U.S. government to come and make them behave.

And are you guys ashamed about this, this armed sedition? Are you angry that these stupid jamokes are saying the quiet parts of Tentherism and "Second Amendment solutions" out loud? Are you out there with a bullhorn telling these screwheads to knock it the fuck off?

Hells, no. Once again, we're left to remind you that part of "a republic, if you can keep it..." is not losing the fucking Whisky Rebellion.

And, once again, the news media is fucked up like a football bat about this and giving your screwhead pals all sorts of free airtime to blarb their nonsensical screeds and, once again, you're giving, and going to give, us nothing but shit about it.

And we're really, really, really fucking sick and tired of it.

But since we've long figured out that arguing with you about this stuff is like trying to teach German irregular verbs to a cat we're reduced to screaming at these HeeHawsbullah morons and at our federal government to quite treating them like they have a point other than on their fucking heads so's we don't lose the fucking Whisky Rebellion.

Will that work? Doubtful. It hasn't so far. Christ, you're on the verge of electing Donald Fucking Trump your presidential candidate, forcryinoutloud, and the feds have let these goddamn screwhead VanillaISIS teahadis off the hook before. It's not like we're really hoping to get you knuckleheads to try a taste of realism for once.

It's just that sometimes the bullshit gets to the point where a liberal's just gotta fucking vent.

Dare call it treason

I was genuinely surprised yesterday at the incandescence of my anger when I read about the rebel militia seizing the Malheur NWR headquarters building.

Partly, I suspect, because that lonely stone structure has many fond memories associated with it. It is a "desert oasis", disproportionately attractive to the passerine migrant through the deserts of Malheur County. The notion of a passel of gunlicking Tenther rebels lolling about the place where I whiled many happy hours birding was infuriating, to be sure.

But the most part is the degree to which none seem to dare call these treasonous bastards what they are.

Traitors.

Worse; traitors in arms. They fulfill perfectly the definition of the enemies I swore to defend the Constitution of my nation from, foreign and domestic; defying the laws and regulations of the duly-elected government of the United States and bearing arms against the officers of the same.

For a mad moment I wanted - wanted so badly that it made my throat tighten - to take up my old rifle and rise on my bad leg and hobble down to the federal courthouse in Portland city and volunteer to follow the colors out to the sagebrush wastes south of Burns to shoot down the traitorous enemies of my country. Suddenly I understood how so many other men stood up in 1861 to do the same. The hatred and loathing of these rebel traitors burns within me still, banked but glowing like a balefire in the night.

The news agencies, the current crop of candidates, Oregon politicians...they need to call this what it is. It is black, dirty treason; rebellion in arms against our nation, and I can think of no better response, no better description of the response that is needed and should be applied to the treasonous bastards than those of the man who flayed the last rebellious treason in this country:

"My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom."

I had a blissful moment imagining a modern Bill Sherman staring at the gaggle of dirty, hangdog prisoners standing under guard as the old stone building burns behind them, removing the cigar from his mouth to spit;

"Shoot them, major? Shoot them? I think not."

He would pause for a moment before jerking the stogie towards the big trees standing nearby, and growling;

"Rebels taken in arms aren't honorably shot. Rebels, major, are hung like the criminals they are."

"See to it."

Losing the Whisky Rebellion

One of the more irritating ammosexual traits is their man-crush on fucking Tenthers and "sovereign citizens" and the other assorted douchenozzles that populate the far-right wing of the anti-government crowd.

The last time we saw this was when welfare rancher Cliven Bundy got all rampant about not paying his fucking debts and a crowd of Second Amendment jihadis showed up at his moochateria to face down the Feds.

The really fucking irking part about that was that it worked. Bundy's young welfare-buck ass stayed out of the sneezer and the Federal claws stayed out of his wallet and the guntards walked away with a swagger and the win.

And now they're at it again, out in the lesser-paved part of my own state.

Largely because, in my biased opinion, the Feds punked out at the Bundy crib. Here's one of the fucking rebels in arms talking about how their jihad would have succeeded had the Feds tried to enforce the law:

"We had counter-sniper positions on their sniper positions. We had at least one guy—sometimes two guys—per BLM agent in there," Payne told a Montana weekly, the Independent. "If they made one wrong move, every single BLM agent in that camp would've died."

Nice. You do that in a black ski mask, Abdul, and Donald Trump is gonna carpet bomb your and your whole family's asses. But do it with a "Don't Tread On Me" flag and you're a GOP Congressman.

What a goddamn mess.

Anyway, the point is that, while irritating, this is nothing new. It's happened before, back in the early days of the Republic. And the then-leader of the Federal government knew precisely how to deal with this sort of fucking idiot:

"Washington organized a militia force of 12,950 men and led them towards Western Pennsylvania, warning locals "not to abet, aid, or comfort the Insurgents aforesaid, as they will answer the contrary at their peril."

Now THAT's the way you deal with fucking Bundys.

That's how the Feds should have dealt with the last one. And how they should deal with these newest Oregon ones, too.

So far no Federal agencies have done anything about the Oregon rebels, and I have no idea whether, or how, they plan to deal with them. But I can at the very least give them one little bit of helpful advice.

The First Rule of Keeping a Republic: Don't Lose the Fucking Whisky Rebellion.

The Second Rule?

If You Want To Be A Good Citizen, Don't Start The Fucking Whisky Rebellion.

Honestly. These fucking people...