My only response to the standoff in Oregon has been that we could safely ignore the militiamen and that the best strategy for dealing with them was to “let them get bored and wander on home to gather their scattered cattle” because we don’t want to create martyrs or put our own law officers at risk, and they “can be identified and arrested later, at our leisure.”
Well, unfortunately, one man was killed. But it could have been much worse, especially if the Feds had shown impatience or listened to their critics who were accusing them of having one standard for dealing with minorities and another for dealing with gun-toting white folks.
Now they’ve arrested all of the major ring leaders and are negotiating the surrender of the last holdouts. They even managed to arrest the patriarch, Cliven Bundy, at the Portland airport last night.
Many people criticized the Feds for not finding a way to arrest Cliven Bundy back in 2014 and suggested that leniency then had only encouraged his sons to pull this stunt in Oregon. I hope people can see now the wisdom of playing the long game here.
I wish that law enforcement would show this kind of restraint and show this same concern for human life in their day-to-day efforts to maintain law and order in our cities. The lesson here is that it works. What tends not to work is to succumb to public pressure and make quick arrests or to go in guns blazing to deal with threats that may be manageable without lethal force if you’re willing to spend the time to see it through.
Listening to the live stream right now is almost surreal. In their own minds these people really occupy a completely different world.
Yes, the live stream last night was out of this world and all I could think was that the FBI really needs to get a raise for its agents in the budget. From the screams to prayer to the taunts to the FBI then the conversations with the whacko congresswoman and then the declaration that they had to have Franklin Graham at the site this morning facilitate their non surrender, was proof positive that they are totally unhinged.
This kid is scared shitless right now. They are trying to talk him down. He wants to die a martyr. Franklin Graham is trying to talk to him and get him to surrender. Damn, I hope this works. This kid doesn’t need to die in this place.
Give him what he wants.
Did you hear the part where he complained that the FBI would not let him have any marijuana?
Yes, indeed.
But it is their world.
You could say the same things about people who are trying desperately to find a way out of the establishment-enforced ghettoes in which they and many generations of their ancestors have been forced to live. The same thing about people who have immigrated here…often illegally, because they did not have any other real options…because in their world, they simply had no choice other than misery. The same thing about the refugees who are flocking to developed countries to escape wars that were not of that making.
Much of the rest of the world says the same thing about “American Dream” working and middle class people.
Yup.
That they do.
Where does this all end?
Here?
Here?
Here?
I hope not.
You world is not the only world.
It’s not even the “right” world.
Bet on it.
WTFU.
AG
$1M+ FROM ME (and you . . . and you . . . and you . . . and every American). We are, after all, the joint owners of the forage he stole and the ecological integrity of the public lands he and his cattle degraded in order to steal it.
Agree very much with your praise of the feds’ patient approach. Also with the falsity of the comparison to trigger-happy cops summarily executing unarmed citizens (especially, but not only, black males).
The problem with that quite real discrepancy isn’t what the feds did in this case (wisely avoiding another Ruby Ridge or Waco, even if they didn’t manage to avoid granting Finicum his apparent suicide-by-cop wish for self-martyrdom), it’s the trigger-happy cops who should be showing the same sort of restraint instead.
I think its indisputable that oregon happened because the feds were beaten at the Bundy ranch. Preventing this entire situation might have been an even better option.
And the remaining rebels have abbrogated their agreement, demanding Michelle Fiore and Franklin Graham escort them out personally. Hostages I wonder?
Agreed. The whole “we have to be really gentle and subtle” argument (and the overwhelming racial bias it highlights) never held up for me.
Obviously people who are going to find ways to “martyr” themselves (or die trying — ha ha) need to be stopped from doing so, but the whole line of argument troubles me. Law enforcement shouldn’t be about narrative frames. (Or, even when those frames are unavoidable, they shouldn’t be the overt goal determining what’s done.)
The remaining people who’d been occupying the wildlife refuge are surrendering right now (945 AM PST). It has been on the live stream from Oregon news sources.
However, Booman, I think you need to be careful about your line of reasoning. If you can only make a claim in retrospect, it doesn’t exactly count as a successful prediction, does it?
But that’s a detail. I’m glad this business has been concluded–or at least this phase of it–with no further loss of life.
Still stand by my comments in the previous Bundy coverage thread. IMO, it was well done on the part of the Feds and it was the beginning of the end for the stand-off. But drawing in and nabbing ole Cliven was super cool.
This David Fry kid is getting cold feet. The other three have surrendered and are in custody. He is ranting and wanting to air “grievances”. I’m afraid he is losing it. He’s demanding everyone back off. This is beginning to look a little concerning. Have wondered for a while if he might not just want to be martyr.
January 23, 2008, The Guardian — Obama cannot beat Republican attack machine, says Clinton
Are they counting on “better the second time around?”
Many people criticized the Feds for not finding a way to arrest Cliven Bundy back in 2014 and suggested that leniency then had only encouraged his sons to pull this stunt in Oregon. I hope people can see now the wisdom of playing the long game here.
What long game? Why did Cliven decide to go up to Portland for? Sounds like Cliven got arrested because he’s a dumb ass.
Cliven was on the phone with the last 4 on Wednesday and promised to come out to support them.
LOL!! Did he not think the Feds were listening in, or didn’t know?
–John Prine
Oh he knew, it was all over his FB, was part of the open youtube line. From what I hear the FBI were only too happy to nab him with charges stemming from the ’14 occupation, as his Portland adventure gave them the chance to get him off the ranch. Kudos to FBI. Too bad that the Koch bros can’t be charged as well now that their involvement, via Think Progress, in funding these loons has been exposed.
The really long long game of Cliven Bundy not having to pay his fees for decades for despoiling federal lands that should belong to all of us is part of my frustration. Why did it take so long to “figure out” what to do? Unfortunately encouraged the Bundy gang to head up to Oregon to despoil more federal property in their vainglorious attempt to prove that THEY, not the rest of us, should somehow have special and specific rights to that wildlife refuge. If I understand it correctly, the land actually belongs to one of the Indian tribes (Paiutes?) who have made some arrangement with the fed govt to protect it.
Now some white dudes, who think their big bad old sovereign cowboys, ride in demanding it for themselves.
Just great. And many of them seem mentally ill.
Yes, I’m glad the stand off has been mostly peaceful. Sorry that Finnicum lost his life, but he appeared to want suicide by cop and frankly with 11 kids behaved irresponsibly to go there in the first place.
And now this last group, encouraged by Michelle Fiore no less, has made all sorts of ridiculous “demands.”
Hope the Fibbies and others have taken notes and are coming up with game plans to deal with more of the same going forward. My concern is that letting Cliven Bundy get away with not paying his fair and legal fees for so long – plus letting him get away with his stand off with NO consequences (until now) – just encourages these yay-hoos in their delusional beliefs.
Glad they nabbed old Cliven. About time!
It’s a good outcome. I’m particularly pleased that Clive Bundy has been arrested. I certainly hope that he will be charged with grand theft.
Note that in the one part where active weapon use occurred, that idiot was killed. The cops treated him the same as anyone else – if you don’t stand down, obey the officer, and make suspicious moves, you have a chance to go home in a box. So he got no better treatment than anyone else who makes a sudden movement in the presence of a bunch of cops who already don’t trust you.
David Frey is in custody. No shots fired. When he complained that he was cold inside the agents responded that it was warm in the FBI cars…he had a cigarette, surrendered and the FBI gave him a cookie.
Wouldja look at that?
Three babes-in-arms defenseless, completely unarmed!
What are they supposed to do when an “active shooter” invades their preschool???
(Oh, right, I almost forgot: rush him in hopes they don’t ALL die, per the gun nuts!)
And these people call themselves 2nd Amendment defenders!
(Michele Fiore, the NV legislator/nutjob is the blonde behind front-row kid, holding what looks like a pistol-grip sawed-off shotgun, which I had thought illegal most places, but whadoiknow? Perhaps more to the point, why would she care about such a triviality?)
h/t digby for the photo
The total, overwhelming incoherence of these people is just stunning to me.
I’ve had this problem from the beginning: I don’t know how to contend with the child-like, upside-down thinking these people do.
I mean, a “nonviolent protest”…with guns (because of course the guns can’t be taken away)…with the implicit idea that they want to be killed…while they “re-take” the public lands that “should belong to the people”…it’s all such incredible nonsense; it’s not even internally consistent, and it all comes down to an infant’s “I should be allowed to do what I want” tantrum, draped in mis-applied patriotic rhetoric. The guy’s reading the Declaration of Independence out loud over YouTube during the standoff, like there’s any trace of a connection between the two things…
I mean how do we, as a society, remove this cancer of idiocy that’s metastasized through the white right-wing public? (The same people who condemn Black Lives Matter as “a terrorist group.”)
Booman writes:
Yeah.
Right.
Like the restraint that they and the various federal departments that are supposed to guard against big-time economic misconduct have shown regarding the prosecution and arrest of the people who are truly at fault in creating this economic mess in which we find ourselves?
Code-speak for “Find a kinder, gentler way to force the victims of several hundred years of segregation and its concomitant evil, segregated schools…right up to this present day… to passively accept their lot.”
I’m sorry, man..I really am. The American people from the most oppressed of us right on up through the middle class and everywhere in between are about finished with this “kinder, gentler” bullshit. Like a Nobel Peace Prize given tor a serial killer, it’s all just glitz and hype. That’s what the riots in Baltimore and Ferguson were about; that’s what the surges towards both Trump and Sanders are about and that’s really what the whole militia thing is about. Ask people to passively give up their rights on any number of levels and eventually they’ll say “HELL no!!!” And then the gloves come off. On both sides.
From now through November there’s going to be some nasty shit popping off. From all sides of the quadratic equation.
Watch.
AG
Aside from the air of “let’s do nothing” on this topic — which I know you weren’t fully saying on one of the threads, but it sure as hell came out that way — I’ve been in basic agreement with you on this. Idk why this position of asking our LEO’s to exercise restraint — under ALL circumstances — is so damn radical.
It’s like the crab bucket theory of economics plastered onto law and order issues.
When will the sort of courtesy extended the so-called militias be extended to the rest of US citizens? The collaboration of many western sheriffs with the militias who elect them is one of the interesting things that came to light in the occupation of Malheur Wildlife Refuge.
The occupier’s livestrem was spouting the notion that the FBI was going to kill them to the very end. And they were spouting the message that public land does not deserve to continue to be held as collective social property but should be given over to them and folks like the Kochs at cut-rate prices to privatize the West and lower taxes for poor people like them.
This is the metastasizing of the so-called sagebrush rebellion ginned up to fight environmental regulations.