I would like to take a moment to thank that jury in Oregon for declaring public lands to be free fire zones for every moron in a camo cap. Per The Washington Post:

"Absolutely! That's the best thing in the world for [people] to do," Bundy said Monday in a telephone interview from an Oregon jail, where he is being held pending a February trial related to a separate armed standoff in 2014 with federal agents at his family's ranch. "Read the Declaration of Independence," he said. "It says right there that if the government becomes abusive, it's our right and our duty to abolish that government. If the government won't restrain itself, whatever happens is their own fault." The suggestion of a potential uprising underscores the extent to which two competing political movements — defiance of federal authority, and Obama's determination to permanently protect vast federal lands — could collide next in this arid patch of land 110 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

Bear in mind, as always, that we are being lectured on the Founding Fathers by a family full of criminal freeloaders.

For many generations, ranchers in Bunkerville have paid a fee to graze their cattle on the Gold Butte land, but nearly all of them allowed the Nature Conservancy and other groups to buy out their permits years ago. The Bundy family, which has fewer than 600 head of cattle, is the last full-time ranching family in the area. Their animals still graze for free, as they have for years, in defiance of federal courts twice ordering the Bundys to desist. The family has refused to pay more than $1 million in fees and fines.

This is terrific strategery—gussying up hopeless deadbeats in powdered wigs and knee-breeches.

"The government should be scared. They are in the wrong. The land does not belong to the government. The land belongs to the people of Clark County, not to the people of the United States," said Bundy, who spoke over the phone as his wife, Angie, sat nearby beneath a shady mesquite tree at the family's 160-acre ranch on the parched banks of the Virgin River. "The only peaceful resolution to all this is for them to obey the Constitution," he said. "Read it, understand it, abide by it. There doesn't have to be violence. None of that has to happen if they would just abide by the Constitution."

This may be my favorite part.

Republicans have opposed Obama's use of "unilateral" executive power to create national monuments. "The establishment of any new national monument in the State of Nevada, regardless of location, ought to be considered in the public Congressional process," Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) wrote in an April letter to the president. On the Bundy ranch, Angie Bundy said that "Harry Reid has no right to be saying those things."

Abiding by the Constitution.

Thanks again, Oregon jury.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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