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.

12 thoughts on “Sometimes It’s All About the Stupid

  1. “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?”

    Yes, well, it a well known fact that Plantation owners in Slave States never, ever – NOT NEVAH EVAH, NOT EVEN ONCE – broke-up a family by selling off one of the parents, or some of the kids!

    NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    They were ALWAYS ALL ABOUT keeping the slaves family structure together!

    And after hundreds of years of separating black families – either through slavery, or, for 100 years after the Civil War, charging the men with BS crimes so that have to go to jail and provide free (slave) labor – there’s no way that modern Conservative white people have ANY responsibility at all for today’s separated black families!
    NONE!!!
    And the fact that our prisons are disproportionately full of minorities in no way if the fault of racism, the fault, instead, lies in the prisoners themselves, and the “nature” of their particular minority.

    And to mention that, means that YOU, and black people, ARE THE REAL RACISTS!!!!

    Maha,
    There’s stupid – and then there’s EPICALLY “TEH STOOOOOOOOOPID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Bundy may even have set a new category.
    I’ll leave it up to others to name that new category of stupid.

  2. Top Comment: “So a guy that is mooching off public land and not paying his grazing fees, is calling out others for dependence on welfare…..um, ok.”

  3. And you guys thought Texas had most of the out-there folk!

    I’d say we more than hold our own amongst the craziest of the states, especially considering our small population and purple status!

  4. Cliven Bundy Accidentally Explained What’s Wrong With the Republican Party:

    ..The Washington Post obtained video of his remarks and it quotes him: “Where is our colored brother? Where is our Mexican brother? Where is our Chinese? Where are they? They’re just as much American as we are, and they’re not with us. If they’re not with us, they’re going to be against us.”

    Mr. Bundy, weirdly, is onto something here. The rush to stand with Mr. Bundy against the Bureau of Land Management is the latest incarnation of conservative antigovernment messaging. And nonwhites are not interested, because a gut-level aversion to the government is almost exclusively a white phenomenon..

  5. LOL, moonbat!

    Maybe he should have asked his neighboring minority ranchers, who’d inherited their property like he did, and had their ranches in the family for a few generation, to join him?

    My suspicion is that, even if he could find some Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Afro-American, Somali, Kenyan, Mexican, Dominican, etc., neighbors, they wouldn’t have joined him – because, if they existed, they’d have GLADLY PAID for the privilege of having their cattle on Federal property.

    Bundy’s a cheap-sh*t ranchers, who’s figured out his own “Welfare Scam!!!!!!!”

  6. Stupid is what stupid does..
    http://oathkeepers.org/oath/?p=18459&cp=3#comment-281216

    Remember the guy who got the Romney for President campaign tattoo on his face and it made you wonder how some people perceive life? Well, getting a Bundy ranch brand tattoo in support of Bundy triggers that same sense of bewilderment in my mind. I ask myself.. what kind of a nutjob would do something so stupid? It’s like permanent and this Bundy incident doesn’t even measure up to being a flash in the pan.!

  7. Not many sensible people are likely to have a problem with the fact of a hardworking Republican or a hardworking Democrat whether that person works for someone else or owns a business. But right wing Republicans have a knack of believing they know a great deal more than their own business and a great deal more than everybody else. I have no doubt that Bundy knows ranching. But he certainly appears not to know much else.

    I put Bundy in the same category as Joe the Plumber, who began his TV career on premises that were not entirely true.

  8. Pingback: Links 4/30/14 | Mike the Mad Biologist

  9. It’s not about Bundy being right it’s about the government being wrong.
    Bundy’s not mean he’s just ignorant. The BLM started this by body slamming a female cancer victim from behind, setting a dog on a pregnant woman and tasering Ammon Bundy over and over.
    Where they screwed up is doing it on camera.
    That’s when people started showing up. The BLM had 200 soldiers…SOLDIERS!
    The BLM killing cattle and slash and burning the infrastructure the Bundys had set up?
    It’s never Ok to destroy a water well in the desert. Much less to destroy as many as you possibly can. What the hell is that poor little tortoise supposed to drink?
    The protesters pointed their weapons at no one. The sniper on the overpass was a plant. Eric Parker from central Idaho doesn’t exist except as a spook. If people would take a closer look at the pics of him would notice he’s not aimed at the Feds, he’s aimed at the protesters. He’s dressed to look as much like a dufus as possible. Wearing his equipment wrong, no scope. He didn’t need a scope at that distance with that crowd.
    It is the height of arrogance for any federal agency to say this particular law on cattle grazing should be enforced at the point of a gun, while at the same time our immigration laws are set aside and the Border Patrol is told to stand down.
    The law states that federal agencies that handle public lands MUST use the local law enforcement authorities.
    THE FOLLOWING STATUTE IS WHY ALL OF THE “INVASION FORCE” WAS THERE WITHOUT ANY AUTHORITY AND IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW:
    43 U.S.C. Section 1733, Subsection C :

    “When the Secretary (of Interior) determines that assistance is necessary in enforcing Federal laws and regulations relating to the public lands or their resources he shall offer a contract to appropriate local officials having law enforcement authority within their respective jurisdictions with the view of achieving maximum feasible reliance upon local law enforcement officials in enforcing such laws and regulations.”

    • Justin — even if as much as half of what you say is true, which I doubt, it still doesn’t excuse armed goons setting up checkpoints to stop citizens going about their own business.

      And sometimes local law officials are worse than the feds. I’d take the BLM over the NYPD any day.

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