Those were the days, my friend...

"The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered-not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective-a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate."

~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1910.

Try. Just try and imagine Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or Ann Coulter or Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump saying that today.

You can't, can you?

The "true conservative" of today is the radical reactionary of 1910, the Gilded Age plutocrat to whom the very idea of taxing unearned inherited wealth is horrific, and to even suggest to the unwashed masses that they should be the "master" of property and "control the mighty commercial forces" is worse than the worst collusion with hostile foreign powers.

Just your daily reminder that these people are your enemies. They are not "fellow citizens", they are not "Americans" in the sense that the ideals of this nation define citizenship. They are the ci-devant aristos, the allies and minions of the malefactors of great wealth. They see you as their cattle, their prey, and will gleefully use your stupidity, venality, racism, and more than anything else, your fear, to prey on you.

For the promise of this nation to be realized the GOP must be destroyed.

It's really that simple

Update 1/30: Paul Waldeman of the WaPo does a good job of explaining this:

"The real contested ground is the upper left or populist quadrant (29 percent of the electorate), where social conservatism meets economic liberalism...where there are persuadable voters — those who might choose either candidate — that’s where they’re mostly located. The battle for those votes will likely shape the race.

Democrats will go after them by arguing that Trump pulled a con on them in 2016, an argument that has the benefit of being perfectly true. Trump has been more eager to do the bidding of the wealthy and corporations than any president in modern times, and has run a spectacularly corrupt administration.

Trump’s strategy to hold on to them will be simple: race and immigration. He ran a campaign of xenophobia and hatred in 2016, tried unsuccessfully to do the same thing to save Republicans in 2018, and he’s going to do the same thing in 2020."

Here's the thing; that racism, xenophobia, and hate is a hell of a drug. The fascist parties of Europe have been using it to slam the economically populist parties successfully over the past decade.

A LOT of Americans are racist shitheels. The Trumpkins are counting on that, and I'm not convinced they're wrong.

Destroying the modern GOP is essential to the American Dream.

Doing it is going to be somewhere between "damned difficult" to "virtually impossible".

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.

Live Free or Die

Well, there you have it.

All I can say at this point is that if all those idiots who bayed about "Second Amendment Solutions" aren't storming Capitol Hill right now then they can just STFU forever after.

In a true democracy this would result in pitchforks and torches and the Swiss Guard dead at the gates of the Tuileries.

Which is another way of saying that we must destroy the GOP or bow before our New Plutocratic Masters.