Sometimes It’s All About the Stupid

Today we’re getting the fallout from Clive Bundy’s remarks on race. Possibly aware he put a foot wrong — even Sean Hannity called his remarks “beyond repugnant” — Bundy has clarified what he said by denying he is a racist. Of course not. Here is the “clarification.”

I’m wondering if they’re better off under a government subsidy and their young women are having the abortions and their young men are in jail and their older women and children are sitting out on the cement porch without nothing to do.

I’m wondering: Are they happier now under this government subsidy system than they were when they were when they were slaves and they was able to their family structure together and the chickens and the garden and the people have something to do?

So in my mind, are they better off being slaves in that sense or better off being slaves to the United States government in the sense of the subsidy? I’m wondering. The statement was right. I am wondering.

So of course he’s a racist, but he’s too ignorant to see it.

Bundy strikes me as a fellow who has been king of his own domain all his life by circumstance of birth. The 160-acre ranch he calls his property was purchased by his parents in 1948, and the title is held by family trusts, not Bundy personally. To recall a Republican rallying cry from the last presidential election, Cliven didn’t build that.

All available documentation says that the Bundy family didn’t begin to graze cattle on public land until 1954. Bundy’s vague claim that he is entitled to use the land because his family has been using it going way back is, um, hogwash.

He and his supporters pay lip service to the Constitution while denying the U.S. government exists. He says he supports the state constitution, but the state constitution explicitly says that Nevada makes no claims to the federal land within its borders. Basically, both state and federal law and constitutions say that Bundy is breaking the law. He doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on.

I’ve found little in the way of biography of Mr. Bundy, so I have no idea how far he got with his education, for example, or if he has some other accomplishments such as a talent for making creative bird houses out of old milk bottles. But it’s entirely possible he has no personal accomplishments or skills whatsoever beyond what he needed to know to run the cattle ranch that he inherited. We can safely assume from his remarks that his intellectual depth doesn’t go much beyond considering what he wants for supper, and that he is less self-aware than your standard toaster.

Sometimes, people are just stupid. Not noble, not patriotic, not principled. Just stupid.

By now any rightie with a measurable IQ probably has realized that getting into bed with Bundy was a mistake, and they’d like to slip quietly away and pretend it never happened. However, there are enough of them as clueless as Bundy who won’t let go of his “cause,” I’m sure. Because, sometimes, people are just stupid.