Alt-history novelists have got nothing on Cliven Bundy

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Cliven Bundy, anti-government rancher and political theorist extraordinaire, has been releasing videos with even more information on his extremely “unique” view of American — and indeed Western — history and the American social contract. Buzzfeed collected some of the “best of” made-up facts from Bundy’s video.

My favorite is:

They [the Pilgrims] had a central government, which was Europe. Was the strongest army in the world. And they ruled with unlimited power. And there was a point that they decided they wasn’t going to live that way any more. And so they had a revolution.

 
This and others are so amazingly off-base I’m not sure I could have intentionally made up alternative history this great as a joke. (Long-time readers may recall my extensive alt-history-based satire, before this site or SBBS existed.)

To recap: This man — who is trying to argue based on an arcane and incorrect legal theory that the Federal government can’t make him pay to graze cattle on Federally-managed public lands — literally believes the 1620 Pilgrims had a revolution (in 1776? — unclear) and flat-earth-sailed to America, because they needed to escape a totalitarian government that ruled over all of Europe with a massive army. And somehow, despite a total lack of knowledge on the country’s actual history to the point of not knowing facts the rest of us learned in elementary school, he is a “patriot.”

Somewhere in the afterlife, Oliver Cromwell (England’s real-life dictator from 1653-1658, long after the Pilgrims had left and long before King George III reigned) is silently weeping at the thought of how much phenomenal power he would have had in the 17th century Bundiverse.

1651 Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan" on the English Civil War and the proper form of government.

1651 Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan” on the English Civil War and the proper form of government.

Thailand protests now target generic prime minister in abstract

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I’ve said it before but: Thailand keeps reminding me a lot of U.S. politics these days…

The opposition party leaders orchestrated protests for almost half a year specifically demanding that Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra be removed — supposedly because she was a front operation for her brother, the former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was himself removed by a military coup in 2006. Supposedly, these were sincere protests all about the two of them.

But the same week she was forced by the courts to resign on flimsy charges, they immediately start protesting for the removal of caretaker Prime Minister Fill-in-the-Blank. Basically didn’t even matter who it was.

As we’ve known all along the protest leaders were full of it. Their street members had always made clear to the media that this was never about the Shinawatras personally and was always about the fact they stay losing fair elections since 1992.

When you keep losing elections, it must be the democracy that’s broken, rather than your own mind-blowingly out-of-touch lack of mass appeal outside your own immediate base.

Maybe the opposition should stop constantly mocking, belittling, and denigrating the voters who make up 70% of the electorate and then saying the votes must have been bought because a majority of the voters won’t vote for you. Just a thought.

Oh well, time to remove the next poor fellow and continue blocking anyone from voting in new elections. People who don’t vote for conservatives who “know best” don’t deserve to vote anyway! It’s a privilege, not a right! And if conservatives don’t win every time (or, in Thailand’s case, ever), then no one should be allowed to vote at all.

You stay bitter, Bangkok.

France announces indefinite Sahel deployment

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France’s defense minister has just announced plans to create a semi-permanent force of 4,000 troops across the entire Sahel and Sahara in former French West Africa, as it redeploys most of its troops in Mali.

“There will be 1,000 soldiers that remain in Mali, and 3,000 in the Sahel-Sahara zone, the danger zone, the zone of all types of smuggling,” Mr Le Drian said, in a television interview.

“We will stay as long as necessary. There is no fixed date,” he added.

French forces will be based in four regional centres – Mali, Chad, Niger and Burkina Faso – Reuters news agency reports.

Smaller bases from which to launch strikes are being set up, with Ivory Coast as the mission’s logistical hub, it adds.

 
I find this development fairly troubling. France should too. Open-ended commitments are rarely a good idea.

However, it’s also not surprising, given the increasing re-involvement of France in the security affairs of its former African colonies in the past decade. A small, permanent force in several locations in or near the Sahel/Sahara is probably the only way (from a feasibility standpoint) that France can both avoid permanent and ineffective occupations (at much higher cost in lives and money) and respond quickly to rising threats, kidnappings, etc., which it feels it must do for its own security.

All the same, this open-ended, rapid-reaction wack-a-mole approach to counterterrorism — where they keep thousands of troops all over West Africa (and Central African Republic nearby) before periodically bursting into neighboring countries for a minute, guns blazing, like Operation Neptune Spear — makes France seem more than a bit neo-colonial.

French troops being airlifted to Mali. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Nathanael Callon)It also seems like an easy step down the path toward becoming completely mired in an unwinnable, transnational counterinsurgency operation in the Sahel — something others have warned against previously often.

As ever, the Sahel needs more of a Marshall Plan development aid strategy than troop deployments.

House GOP still valiantly chasing fictional IRS “scandal”

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It’s been about a year since the House Republicans made up a scandal from whole cloth, and even less time since it was revealed to have never actually happened (see below). And yet, somehow, this just happened anyway:

The House voted Wednesday to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress for her refusal to testify about the agency’s targeting of conservative groups.

The 231-187 vote attracted just six of the most politically vulnerable Democrats. It was quickly followed by a 250-168 vote calling on Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. to appoint a special prosecutor to take over the Justice Department’s investigation of the Internal Revenue Service scandal.

 
congress-200At least when they won’t shut up about Benghazi, there’s some room (but not much!) for mystery and debate. In stark contrast, this is a scandal where the precipitating event actually never happened.

I wonder how one goes about covering up something that didn’t happen in the first place?

I’m starting to feel like a broken record just copying & pasting the same post over and over every time news about this comes up:

Did someone forget to tell [insert any Republican here] that it turned out that the supposed IRS “scandal” was made up? Like, not even partially a thing that ever actually happened? Because, you know, the rest of us got that point cleared up quite a while back, last June. As I wrote then:

The so-called IRS scandal just fell apart completely as documents surfaced showing they were also scrutinizing applications for left/liberal/progressive code words, not just tea party code words. In other words, they were doing their jobs, not being partisan.

So why did it take so long for IRS documents showing targeting of progressives to show up after those showing tea party targeting? Oh, no reason, except that House Republicans specifically asked the IRS to audit ONLY its records on tea party groups. So NBD, they just 100% manufactured a fake scandal from thin air.

 
The IRS doing its job, and applying that equally to both conservative and liberal scofflaws, is not a scandal.

May 5, 2014 – Arsenal For Democracy 83

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Topics: Minimum Wage, Ukraine, Cosmo. People: Bill, Greg, and commentator Sarah.
AFD-logo-470

Talking Points:

– How high should the U.S. minimum wage be? Should cities raise their own?
– What is going on in Ukraine? Does Putin have any allies on this?
– Cosmo: 9 sexy but confusing ways to listen to community radio this spring. Why is the magazine finally devoting attention to reproductive freedom?

Part 1 – Minimum Wage:
Part 1 – Minimum Wage – AFD 83
Part 2 – Ukraine:
Part 2 – Ukraine – AFD 83
Part 3 – Cosmo with Sarah:
Part 3 – Cosmo – AFD 83

To get one file for the whole episode, we recommend using one of the subscribe links at the bottom of the post.

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Homs falls, end of Syria war near?

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The two-year siege of the rebel “capital” in Syria ends in government victory as the city of Homs falls, quietly. UN-escorted busloads of rebel fighters from several factions retreated northward safely with families, in exchange for lifting two rebel sieges on Shia cities in another part of the country.

This civil war definitely looks like it’s almost over, as has been increasingly frequently suggested in world media.