Shit's Getting Real Out West

Charlie Pierce. with video.

It's really time for the Republican party, at the local, state, and party levels, to man up here, or else to say clearly that individual acts of seditious lawlessness are part of the party's basic philosophy of government. Maybe each Republican state committee can have an annual Calhoun-Davis Day Dinner.
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Lyman said the much-publicized ride on the northern section of the 11-mile trail is less about the canyon specifically and more about public access to trails in general. "This is not about Recapture. It is not about ATVs. It is not politics, it is not economics," he said. "It is part of who I am. It is part of Blanding, and it is our culture, too. We don't not want to see groups come in and say these trails did not exist ... it was a thoroughfare since the mid-1800s."

Which is about when a big-government program called the U.S. Cavalry came along and cleared out all the natives so that, one day, Phil Lyman could help people dodge taxes and act like a jackass on weekends.

(And, of course, the local Native Americans objected, too, but they haven't been relevant since "the mid-1800s.")

This is an elected official, not some racist wrinkle-bag like Cliven Bundy. If you vote for Phil Lyman, you are voting for sedition. If you are Fox News, and you celebrate him, you are celebrating sedition. It is long past time for the Republican party to fish or cut bait on this end of movement conservatism. Either support the seditious philosophy of local control, or oppose it. But they shouldn't be allowed any more to use its energy during election years and then walk away after the votes are cast.
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There far too much loose talk in respectable Republican circles about nullification, secession, and the crackpot theories of county government that used to be the exclusive ideological province of the Posse Comitatus movement. (There is also too much loose talk about impeachment, too, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of scrod.) Increasingly, there is no apparent fringe to conservative rhetoric, let alone any real limits. Somebody within that party has to step up and rein this lunacy in, or else embrace it publicly as the party's basic philosophy, or else euphemisms may not be the only things that die in those deserts.

I would be thrilled fucking shitless if it's the Repuglican't Party that dies in those deserts. Make their bleached bones a national monument to the death of right-wing stupidity.