EXPOSED: The Source Of Cliven Bundy's Crackpot Constitutionalism

[ProSense]

EXPOSED: The Source Of Cliven Bundy's Crackpot Constitutionalism

by News Corpse

The unfolding drama in the Nevada desert over a deadbeat cattle rancher's refusal to pay customary grazing fees like every other rancher, continues to excite the Tea Party pseudo-patriots who believe that threatening a range war in defense of personal greed is a mark of virtue. However, Cliven Bundy's domestic terrorism serves nothing more than his own selfish financial interests, and the crusade he purports to lead is rooted in the worst sort of perversion of constitutional principles.

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Bundy has resisted paying to graze his cattle on federal land because he doesn't recognize the authority of the government to assess those fees. His argument has lost repeatedly in court, but he continues to ignore his responsibility and to defy the law. His malfeasance amounts to the theft of over a million dollars from the American people. Ironically, if his argument prevailed he would be subject to paying the state of Nevada for grazing rights at $15.50 per head of cattle, rather than the federal rate of $1.35. But simple math, like simple logic, is too complicated for these cretins. So instead, they take up arms against their fellow Americans and pretend to defend their twisted misinterpretation of the Constitution.

Now we have evidence of where Bundy may have picked up his constitutional delusions. In a recent media appearance, Bundy was proudly displaying a copy of the Constitution in his shirt pocket.



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? Skousen's warped ideology was 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.

The threatening hysteria and deception emanating from Bundy, and the armed militias that came to his defense, are emblematic of the apocalyptic doctrine of the NCCS. It is no accident that Bundy's Constitution was provided by a group whose teachings have been denounced by historians and constitutional scholars. But it does explain the extremism and advocacy of violence that Bundy et al have espoused. All of this makes it all the more inappropriate and irresponsible for Bundy to be hailed as hero by conservative media outlets like the National Review and Fox News who, just last week, compared Bundy to Gandhi in a feat of epic cognitive collapse.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/20/1293342/-EXPOSED-The-Source-Of-Cliven-Bundy-s-Crackpot-Constitutionalism

[ProSense]

1. Heller sees Bundy, allies as ‘patriots’

Heller sees Bundy, allies as ‘patriots’

By Steve Benen

Last Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) responded to the standoff at Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch in very forceful terms. “Those people who hold themselves out to be patriots are not,” Reid said. “They’re nothing more than domestic terrorists,”

A day later, Reid appeared alongside his fellow Nevada senator, Republican Dean Heller, for a joint appearance on Las Vegas’ NBC affiliate. They apparently don’t see eye to eye.

“What Sen. Reid may call domestic terrorists, I call patriots,” GOP Sen. Dean Heller said during the rare joint appearance on KSNV-TV. “We have a very different view on this.” <…>

“It’s a pretty broad brush,” Heller said Reid is using in making the “domestic terrorist” charge. “When you have boy scouts there, you have veterans at the event, you have grandparents at the event.”

I think it’s probably safe to say Reid, when raising the specter of domestic terrorism, was referring to well-armed militia activists who risked creating a violent incident at Bundy’s ranch, not boy scouts.

Heller added, “I take more issues with BLM coming in with a paramilitary army of people, individuals with snipers, and I’m talking to people and groups that were there at the event, and to have your own government with sniper lenses on you, it made a lot of people very uncomfortable.”

Note, when Heller complains about “a paramilitary army of people” and “snipers,” the Republican senator isn’t referring to the militia members; he’s talking about U.S. officials and those helping enforce federal law.

In general, Republicans have avoided this sort of rhetoric.

Last week, the RNC, NRCC, NRSC, and Tea Party Patriots were all given opportunities to comment on the Bundy controversy, and they all declined. There are a variety of prominent Republicans readying campaigns for national office and looking for ways to raise their visibility on the major issues of the day, but few have wanted to say a word about this rancher and his allies....While some pandering to extremists has become routine in GOP politics, it’s nevertheless a shame that more would-be leaders in the party aren’t willing to say that Americans should follow the law and federal court rulings should be honored.

But silence is still preferable to Heller’s public endorsement.

- more -

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/heller-sees-bundy-allies-patriots

[siligut]

6. GOP Sen. Dean Heller is also a Mormon

“It’s a pretty broad brush,” Heller said Reid is using in making the “domestic terrorist” charge. “When you have boy scouts there, you have veterans at the event, you have grandparents at the event.”

Yes, it 'twas a regular ol' church meeting. First they pray, then the shoot-out and then the potluck supper.

[Faux pas]

2. Ignorance is only blissful

for the ignorant.

[UTUSN]

3. SKOUSEN is one of BecKKK's foundations, amazing BecKKK has kept away here n/t

[ProSense]

4. Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s life

Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s life

Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him

Alexander Zaitchik

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But more interesting than the contents of “The 5,000 Year Leap,” and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book’s author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen’s own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of “The 5,000 Year Leap.”

As Beck knows, to focus solely on “The 5,000 Year Leap” is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck’s bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.

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Willard Cleon Skousen was born in 1913 to American parents in a small Mormon frontier town in Alberta, Canada. When he was 10 his family moved to California, where he remained until he shipped off to England and Ireland for Mormon missionary work. In 1935, after graduating from a California junior college, the 23-year-old Skousen moved to Washington, where he worked briefly for a New Deal farm agency. He then began a 15-year career with the FBI, also earning a law degree from George Washington University in 1940. His posts at the FBI were largely administrative and clerical in nature, first in Washington and later in Kansas.

After retiring from the FBI in 1951, Skousen joined the faculty of Brigham Young University, the Latter-day Saints university in Utah. He then enjoyed a tumultuous four years as chief of police in Salt Lake City. During his tenure he gained a reputation for cutting crime and ruthlessly enforcing Mormon morals. But Skousen was too earnest by half. The city’s ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. “Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government,” Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. “The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man (and) one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government.”

- more -

http://www.salon.com/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/

Mitt Romney's Nutty Professor

Meet W. Cleon Skousen: conspiracy theorist, slavery apologist, tea party icon. Mitt Romney says you should read him.

—By Tim Murphy

To hear Mitt Romney tell it, President Barack Obama's three years at Harvard Law School helped turn him into an aloof, big-government-loving radical. "We have a president, who I think is a nice guy, but he spent too much time at Harvard, perhaps," Romney told an audience in Pennsylvania in April. But if the de facto GOP presidential nominee wants to make educational experiences a focal point of his candidacy, he could be playing with fire.

In an interview with an Iowa radio station five years ago, the former Massachusetts governor acknowledged the influence of a controversial figure from his own schoolboy past—W. Cleon Skousen, the late Mormon historian and tea party hero who taught Romney at Brigham Young University. A former FBI agent, Salt Lake City police chief, and professional conspiracy theorist, Skousen fashioned a narrative of American history that held a unique appeal to religious conservatives—all based on the notion that the Founding Fathers were members of a lost tribe of Israel. His work also sparked a fierce backlash over racist passages and baseless, bordering on conspiratorial, assertions that prompted the Mormon church to take steps to quash his influence.

Romney's embrace of Skousen came in an August 2007 interview appearance with Iowa talk radio host Jan Mickelson, a conservative talker Politico's Jonathan Martin calls "the Rush Limbaugh of Des Moines." The appearance grabbed headlines at the time due to Mickelson's goading questions on Mormonism, which caused Romney to lose his cool early on and abandon it altogether shortly after that. But it was Romney's comments about Skousen that were most revealing.

"You and I have a common affection for the late Cleon Skousen," Mickelson started. Romney, who appeared to be bracing from a confrontation from the beginning, nodded in affirmation: "Mmm, yeah." Mickelson pressed on, alluding to a previous conversation the two had, in which Romney had mentioned that he had studied under Skousen while in college at Brigham Young. "Exactly," Romney said.

When Mickelson brought up Skousen's most famous work, a civics textbook called The Making of America, Romney professed ignorance. "Isn't that something," Romney said. "That I have not read." But, he added, if it was about what Mickelson said it was—the original intent of the Founding Fathers—"that's worth reading."

- more -

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/04/mitt-romney-cleon-skousen-nutty-professor

[ProSense]

5. Beck and Romney

Glenn Beck's Biggest Regret: Giving A Gift To Mitt Romney

Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney apparently forgot his manners during the 2012 campaign.

Glenn Beck said Monday on his radio show that he gifted Romney his personal, first-edition copy of George Washington's farewell address during the last presidential election -- and never got so much as a thank-you in return.

“I’ve never regretted giving anybody anything more than I regretted my gift to Mitt Romney,” Beck said. “I’m still hung up on that.”

“They’re really rare and expensive, and I never even got a thank-you note,” he added. “Never even got a thank-you note. Pisses me off to this day.”

- more -

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/glenn-beck-regrets-romney-gift

[Cha]

7. K!

[freshwest]

8. More home runs out of the ballpark! Keep 'em coming, ProSense! n/t