Another week, another "sovereign citizen" Campfire Commando shooting police officers:
A self-described “sovereign citizen” camping out in the woods of northern California was arrested following an armed confrontation with two law enforcement officers this weekend. All three men were wounded in the ensuing shootout.Fortunately, neither of the officers was seriously wounded. The crackpot, 60-year-old Brent Douglas Cole, has a history with right-wing conspiracy theories, as the Southern Poverty Law Center link above details.
You can't beat Charles P. Pierce's take on this, so we quote now at length :
Are you happy now, Wayne LaPierre? Are you happy now, Glenn Beck, and Alex Jones, and Dana Loesch, and everyone else who gins up thoughts of armed insurrection for the purposes of profits and ratings and their personal dreams of vicarious revolution? Are you happy now, all you Open Carry nitwits and weekend Robespierres and suburban Minuteman idiots who believe in the FEMA camps and the New World Order and all the other paranoid delights that have made those radio people into wealthy parasites and the rest of you into the most laughable suckers on the planet?
Are you all happy now?
People working for the Bureau Of Land Management are getting shot. It has cascaded, as most forms of madness do, from the weaponized performance art of the Bundy Ranch to threats along the highways of Utah that were so severe that the BLM people took the insignia off their uniforms, to this guy, Brent Douglas Cole, who shot a BLM agent and a Nevada highway patrolman, and who apparently is something of a lifer at the gun-crazy crackpot business. [snip]
It is time for the political elite in the country to force the choice, once and for all. It is time for the people who care about this country to shun these people, and the politicians who empower them, and the media superstars who pander to their worst instincts, and to the political ideas that have proven themselves to be, over and over again, the most dangerous in the country's history. It's time for Boehner, and Priebus, and entire Republican political apparatus publicly to renounce secessionism, and nullification, and the idea that we are now -- or are dangerously on the brink of—tyranny, if the word has any meaning at all. That means reading the people who promote this stuff out of your party, whether they are members of Congress or state legislators, or members of the state and national committees. That means depriving of your presence any media member who trafficks in this perilous foolishness, and punishing those Republicans who decline to do the same.
Or you can be the party of sedition and cop-killing.Our guess is that the despicable Republican political apparatus, all the Boehners and Priebuses of the right, will continue to stand for being the party of sedition and cop-killing -- as long as there's a Democrat in the White House, and as long as it benefits them in holding onto their jobs. They'll merely pass it off as a deranged person committing an isolated, heinous act. Pattern? What pattern?! Now move along, nothing to see here.
The only remaining puzzlement is when and how those same right-wing "media superstars" will try to make Cole into a "leftist."
