Bundy bar-b-que blather
by digby
I happened to catch this exchange between a Nevada Republican officeholder named Michelle Fiore and Chris Hayes Friday night and almost had to admire the combination of arrogance and aggressive ignorance the woman shows in the interview. She is clearly very impressed with herself.
First she insists that the government never sends in men with guns to collect an "unpaid bill." That's ridiculous. Men with guns come and arrest people all the time for failing to pay their taxes and their property is often confiscated. Suspected drug offenders often don't even get a day in court --- the government just seizes their property, auctions it off and keeps the money, regardless of the outcome of an arrest. People are removed from their homes by armed police every single day for failing to pay their mortgage or their rent.
What does she thinks backs up every law in this country? Men with guns who can come to your house, arrest you and seize your property if you don't abide by them. If she's an anarchist who doesn't believe in this system, she ought to admit it.
Now I happen to agree (as does Chris) that this particular approach by the BLM was over the top. The truth is that they could have done this with garnishments on the sale of the cows rather than trying to take the cows themselves. They were making a point and it backfired. But the underlying power of any law is the government's ability to use force to compel a citizen to observe it. I realize that's a bit abstract for this woman's obviously self-serving ideology, but she's an elected official and somebody needs to clue her in.
And self-serving it is. She's all for the government using force in other cases --- such as the border, which she repeatedly mentioned as a legitimate place for the government to get trigger-happy. And her pals in the Tea Party were anything but sympathetic to Occupy protesters:
“They seem to be more in favor of anarchy than they are in favor of working out problems through the Constitution,” Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, said about the Occupy forces.
“We have worked very hard to be respectful of the laws,” she said in an interview. “We protest and complain, but we’re also trying to work within the system. It’s frustrating to watch people who have an utter lack of respect for our form of government.”
Yeah. Frustrating.
Chris patiently tried to discuss the issue logically and the women talked over him with the usual non-stop irrelevant gibberish. But he did manage to finally ask her if she would similarly stand with a person who called together a thousand armed supporters to resist the DHS deporting a loved one after all the legal avenues had been tried. Her reply? It's so infuriatingly absurd you don't know whether to laugh, cry or scream:
Fiore: Are we talking about cows or illegal immigration? Because I'm talking about cows, Chris
Hayes: I'm talking about human beings, which seem to me to be even more important
Fiore:...human beings, thank God that did not get slaughtered, but cows did get slaughtered out here.
It went downhill from there.
I know you're supposed to say that we have to listen and we have to understand and we have to be compassionate and yadda,yadda, yadda. But seriously, you'd have better luck talking to the cows than trying to have a real conversation with these self-serving jerks. You can't make common cause with people whose "principles" only apply to themselves.
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