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Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. (photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA)
Republicans: Party of Sedition and Cop-Killing?
18 June 14
re you happy now, Wayne LaPierre? Are you happy now, Glenn Beck, and Alex Jones, and Dana Loesch, and everyone else who gins up thoughts of armed insurrection for the purposes of profits and ratings and their personal dreams of vicarious revolution? Are you happy now, all you Open Carry nitwits and weekend Robespierres and suburban Minuteman idiots who believe in the FEMA camps and the New World Order and all the other paranoid delights that have made those radio people into wealthy parasites and the rest of you into the most laughable suckers on the planet?
People working for the Bureau Of Land Management are getting shot. It has cascaded, as most forms of madness do, from the weaponized performance art of the Bundy Ranch to threats along the highways of Utah that were so severe that the BLM people took the insignia off their uniforms, to this guy, Brent Douglas Cole, who shot a BLM agent and a Nevada highway patrolman, and who apparently is something of a lifer at the gun-crazy crackpot business.
Cole, according to The Union in Nevada City, has had numerous run-ins with law enforcement, including several other weapons-related incidents. The most recent of these occurred on Jan. 26, when he was arrested by Nevada County sheriff's deputies and charged with carrying a concealed weapon. Cole also has a history of indulging in far-right conspiracies on the Internet. At one site, he described himself as a "sovereign American Citizen attempting to thwart the obvious conspiracy and subterfuges of powers inimical to the United States." On his Facebook page, he has posted a number of conspiracy-related stories, including pieces describing the so-called "Bilderburger conspiracy" to control the world and various "Federal Reserve" conspiracy pieces. Likewise, his Twitter account is full of posts with a similar conspiracist bent.
Can't imagine where he picked up all those notions.
The conservative movement in this country has spent the last two decades empowering the polite corridors of Bedlam while winking suggestively at all the denizens of the Chronic ward. This flirtation becomes more vigorous every time a Democratic president gets elected and it's been positively lascivious since the inauguration of this particular Democratic president in 2009. (Ooh, I know why! Call on me!) Just yesterday, we had a report about a conference co-sponsored by the Heritage Foundation at which all manner of conspiratorial lunacy was let fly, and all of it was no more or less nutty than what Mr. Cole there spouted onto social media. It is time (again) for the Republican party, and for anyone who pretends to be a respectable conservative, to run these people and their ideas out of American conservatism. It took only a couple of wingnut senators shouting "Boo!" to get Democratic politicians to sell out ACORN or Move On. It is time for the political elite in the country to force the choice, once and for all. It is time for the people who care about this country to shun these people, and the politicians who empower them, and the media superstars who pander to their worst instincts, and to the political ideas that have proven themselves to be, over and over again, the most dangerous in the country's history. It's time for Boehner, and Priebus, and entire Republican political apparatus publicly to renounce secessionism, and nullification, and the idea that we are now -- or are dangerously on the brink of—tyranny, if the word has any meaning at all. That means reading the people who promote this stuff out of your party, whether they are members of Congress or state legislators, or members of the state and national committees. That means depriving of your presence any media member who trafficks in this perilous foolishness, and punishing those Republicans who decline to do the same.
Or you can be the party of sedition and cop-killing.
Your choice.
Clock's ticking.
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