Yesterday’s rapid meltdown of the entire Bundy Ranch story has former supporters in the Republican Party and Fox News backpedaling fast. Rachel Maddow took a good look at the history of the Posse Comitatus and Sovereign Citizens movement last night and wondered how so many on the right apparently failed to see this disaster coming. Anyone paying any attention to the weird things coming out of Cliven Bundy’s mouth had to know that something was amiss, especially after BU and dozens of other websites spent the last two weeks telling everyone exactly what he was.

One thought on “Rachel Maddow: How Did GOP, Fox News Fail To Vet Cliven Bundy?”
  1. Bingo. And where do people like Cliven Bundy and his Tea Party supporters get their “views”… from Glenn Beck, who expended much energy peddling a violent Christian Identity White Supremacist author to tea partiers on his Fox “News” program:

    “Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s life” – W. Cleon Skousen:

    “The 5,000 Year Leap” is not the only Skousen title to find new life on the 912 circuit. The president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, Dr. Earl Taylor Jr., is currently touring the country offering daylong seminars to 912 chapters based on Skousen’s “Making of America.” For $25, participants will receive a bagged lunch and stories about America’s religious Founders and their happy slaves. An ad for Taylor’s “Making of America” seminar, currently featured on the Web site of the Tampa 912 Project, claims that Skousen’s book is “considered a great masterpiece to Constitutional students [and is] the ‘granddaddy’ of all books on the United States Constitution.”
    http://www.salon.com/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/

    “EXPOSED: The Source Of Cliven Bundy’s Crackpot Constitutionalism”

    After searching for the distinctive cover of the document in Bundy’s pocket, the publisher turned out to be the innocuously named National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS). However, the NCCS is not the commendable educational organization it purports to be. It began life as the Freemen Institute, a vehicle for the far-right, Mormon, anti-commie, history revisionist, W. Cleon Skousen. Skousen taught that the Constitution was inspired by a God who intended America to be a Christian nation. He also
    professed the canon of white supremicism that Anglo-Saxons are descended from a lost tribe of Israel. The Southern Poverty Law Center chronicled the NCCS curriculum based on Skousen’s philosophy saying that he…

    “…demonized the federal regulatory agencies, arguing for the abolition of everything from the Occupational Safety and Health
    Administration to the Environmental Protection Agency. He wanted to repeal the minimum wage, smash unions, nullify anti-discrimination laws,sell off public lands and national parks, end the direct election of senators, kill the income tax and the estate tax, knock down state-level walls separating church and state, and, of course, raze the Federal Reserve System.”

    Sound familiar? [Ahem: Ron Paul] Skousen’s warped ideology syncs up perfectly with the Tea Party and other purveyors of fringe fear mongering like politi-vangelist Glenn Beck, who literally begged his audience to read Skousen’s book, “The 5000 Year Leap,” which Beck said was “divinely inspired.” The conspiracy-obsessed NCCS shares with Beck and Bundy an animosity
    toward government that exceeds the boundaries of common sense. Along with Skousen’s books, the NCCS website features anti-UN screeds (“Confronting Agenda 21″), treatises on wingnut electoral reforms (“Repeal 17 Now!”), harbingers of one-world government (“The Rise of Global Governance”), and appeals for institutionalized theocracy (“America’s God & Country”).
    No wonder Bundy was sporting a version of the Constitution that was distributed by the NCCS, an organization that advances
    ultra-conservative conspiracy theories and promotes anti-government hostility.”
    http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=12655

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *