"WE SURROUND THEM."

The saddest/funniest thing I heard from the Bundy gang holdouts' transmission from Oregon last night -- you can hear them screaming "Nazis!" at the FBI here -- was the guy crying, "Where's our 3-Percenters?... The Oath Keepers are all infiltrated with FBI agents."

Oath Keepers and 3-Percenters! Maybe they're all holed up at their wingnut separatist housing project in Idaho, telling each other how their old football injuries are all that's keeping them from goin' up to Malheur to kick statist ass.

But it's not like the true believers the Southern Poverty Law Center keep telling us about are the only ones who have misled the Oregon occupiers. No, these poor crackpots were conned by a regiment of ideological grifters who keep hinting that, if someone would just put his ass on the line, a grateful nation will rise to join them. I'm thinking of stuff like Glenn Beck's vaguely threatening "We Surround Them" shtick from 2009:

Do you read the headlines everyday and feel an empty pit in your stomach…as if you’re completely alone?  

If so, then you’ve fallen for the Wizard of Oz lie. While the voices you hear in the distance may sound intimidating, as if they surround us from all sides—the reality is very different.  

Once you pull the curtain away you realize that there are only a few people pressing the buttons, and their voices are weak. The truth is that they don’t surround us at all. 

We surround them.

Then there was all the "water the tree of liberty" talk from the Tea Party guys and the mainstream conservatives who egged them on, rubbing their hands as the Tea People told the "establishment" to fuck off and demanded candidates like Trey Gowdy and Ted Cruz, whose whole politics is about feeding the inchoate rage of their constitutents with hollow but aggressive gestures like Endless #Benghazi and Government Shutdown. These showpieces achieve nothing but at least the folks back home knew they were represented by fighters!

When scofflaw and patriot Cliven Bundy got up to his mischief in 2014, sending his minions to point guns at the feds who were trying to confiscate the government land he was using but not paying for, the brethren considered him a hero. Here's one of John Hinderaker's love poems at Power Line:

So let’s have some sympathy for Cliven Bundy and his family. They don’t have a chance on the law, because under the Endangered Species Act and many other federal statutes, the agencies are always in the right. And their way of life is one that, frankly, is on the outs. They don’t develop apps. They don’t ask for food stamps. It probably has never occurred to them to bribe a politician. They don’t subsist by virtue of government subsidies or regulations that hamstring competitors. They aren’t illegal immigrants. They have never even gone to law school. So what possible place is there for the Bundys in the Age of Obama?

That Bundy was stealing (and not because he was starving) and his soldiers were threatening law enforcement wasn't relevant to Hinderaker -- what was relevant was that Bundy was one of the oppressed white people who'd been hooting and hollering about taking their country back since the Kenyan Pretender occupied the White House, and he was making a stand.

Now Big Daddy Bundy is in jail and the FBI is forcing his gang's endgame. Let's just hope there aren't too many other dummies out there who took some of the same poison.