9 thoughts on “The Ballad of Cliven Bundy

  1. Yeah, my mom and I will miss him too!

    For almost a decade, his was, imo, the bestestest show on TV!!!
    Stewart is great too, but Colbert’s biting style of satiric humor is much tougher to succeed at.

    I wish him nothing but the best, and I’ll try to watch him the first few nights – but it’ll be on WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY past my bedtime.

  2. When he broke out the hat and geeeeeahr, I thought sure he wasa gonna sing, “Home and Deranged.”

  3. That was a D-45!

    My right wing friends has been kind of silent on the Bundy front for the last few days. But, my guess is that they will double down when they sleep it off and recalibrate their internal noise machines. For me, this event has the feeling of the straw that broke the camel’s back. It has been an inescapable display of a broken system and the jaw dropping craziness that continues to gnaw at its carcass.

    I remember thinking of the quote by Einstein, that “infinity makes the improbable, the inevitable.” (I am probably misquoting him.) It was then I thought of something that I would read about later, stochastic terrorism. It was a pretty obvious idea given the call and response of wingnuttia and the barrage of propaganda.

    The basic idea of course is that if you saturate a group of people with fear and misinformation and if you provide them with a target, usually in the form of a political foe, as the group grows larger and more agitated, the odds that some members of the group will act against the target, grow. Out of a group of a thousand there may be no one, but out of a group of a million there may be several individuals, sufficiently unhinged to commit a violent act.

    L’affaire Bundy mobilized hundreds of whackos, eager to play soldier. In the end, I don’t think any of the particulars of this situation will matter. To the people who showed up locked and loaded it was sufficient that the federal government could be vilified and targeted, and that a bunch of like minded yahoos would be there with all kinds of cool guns. It was an irresistible opportunity to live out their fantasy.

    The facts, the rule of law, the American experiment in democracy, none of that matters in the least. There is no amount truth that will penetrate the rouse. Nothing can move the brutal mind to self reflection and reconsideration. They cannot be “born again.” They have been cast in the die and when the right wing hacks name their target, they show up with firepower.

    I’ve got to hit that Rosetta Stone again.

  4. L’affaire Bundy mobilized hundreds of whackos, eager to play soldier.

    Goatherd…Why are you being so critical? Where is it written that the desire to play soldier has to end a puberty?

  5. I guess you’re right Swami, now I can get that reproduction English Civil War pikeman’s outfit!

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