Bundy & Trump: Clowns & racists

Law enforcement authorities nailed Nevada criminal rancher Cliven Bundy as he tried to place himself in the middle of the mess in Oregon.

Police arrested the 69-year-old Bundy at Portland International Airport late Wednesday night when he walked off a plane from Las Vegas.  He reportedly was on his way to stick his nose into the mess his now-jailed sons created at a federal wildlife refuge near Burns Oregon.

The FBI has charged him with felony conspiracy to impede a federal officer and weapons violations — charges not from the recent incident in Oregon but from Bundy’s illegal actions that included not paying grazing fees on federal lands and various other federal crimes.

Bundy, the patriarch of the “let’s resist the government and shoot ’em if need be” movement is the questionable “hero” of those who cheer armed and illegal resistance to the laws of this country.

Protests about his arrest popped on on area posts on Facebook and other social media.  In typical fashion, some of the comments led with obscene epithets.

Bundy is many things, but “hero” should never be one of the terms applied to him.  Racist is a more apt term.  Like so many who support criminal actions like his, Bunday’s supporters are bigots. Even many of the hard-core right wing shunned him after he uttered these comments in front of New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney:

I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro, and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.

Wrote Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post:

Cliven Bundy,  congratulations! You’ve provided the nation with its latest cringe-worthy moment in race.

Since 1993, the feds say the Nevada rancher has been illegally grazing his herd on federal land. So, acting on a court order, the Bureau of Land Management tried to seize some of Bundy’s herd. Next thing you know, he’s a Fox News-enabled hero of the put-upon right wing with a platform to pop off about government overreach and whatever else is rattling around upstairs. And when that happens to some conservative heroes, they always seem compelled to expound on the plight of the Negro.

Of course, such blatant racism falls right in line with the comments and actions of current leading GOP Presidential contender Donald Trump, the profane ego-maniacal billionaire who called opponents “pussies” and claims Democratic Presidential contender Hillary Clinton was “schlonged” by the country’s current African-American President, Barack Obama.

Reported The Huffington Post this week after Trump won the New Hampshire Presidential primary:

The businessman’s resounding victory amid a crowded field of more experienced and accomplished candidates is a stunning turn of events for a party that vowed just four years ago to be more inclusive to minorities after failing to unseat President Barack Obama in the bitter 2012 election. What the GOP got instead is a xenophobic demagogue who’s insulted pretty much everyone and even earned the endorsement of white supremacists.

Trump routinely tells people who disagree with him to “go f–k yourselfs” and sprinkles his campaign rhetoric with similar obscenities.

Editorialized The Washington Post Wednesday:

Mr. Trump is mocking the democratic process, not engaging in it. He feels no obligation to explain how he would implement his ideas, and he does not care whether his statements are true. Thousands of Muslims in New Jersey did not publicly celebrate the downing of the World Trade Center towers in 2001, but Mr. Trump is content simply to repeat the lie. And lies come easily to Mr. Trump because he does not believe in anything other than his own brilliance.

Speaking to those who support Trump as someone who speaks for them, the Post concludes:

In this they deceive themselves, and the evidence lies in the most essential difference between these two outsider campaigns: the utter ugliness of Mr. Trump’s. To further his ambition, he has gleefully demeaned Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, people with disabilities, blacks and anyone else he can present as the “other” as he proceeds to exploit the nation’s divisions. As president he would not be able to deliver on his promises, and it is fearful to contemplate the scapegoats he might find to distract from his failures.

A Virginia resident recently told me that “I support Trump. He says what a lot of us are thinking.”

That follower of a madman like Donald Trump is not thinking.  Neither are those who mass around Trump like crazed cultists.  The same could be said of those who worship the illegal actions and despicable comments of others of bitter old men like Cliven Bundy.

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