Wait: Cliven Bundy, the freedom fighter who captured conservative hearts and almost started the Second American Revolution with his gun-toting coterie, is a racist bigot? Say it ain't so!

Two weeks ago, the right-wing media championed the cause of patriot Bundy, the simple straw-hatted cattle rancher who wanted the federales to get off his land—I mean, off federal land—and to surrender their guns. He was the new face of American freedom. He was Gandhi! Thoreau, even! But, as Adam Nagourney discovered in a New York Times interview with the old Nevada cowpoke published last night, Bundy's just another unreconstructed peckerwood with a shitload of guns and a lot of love for that peculiar institution of our forefathers (emphasis added):

"I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro," he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, "and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn't have nothing to do. They didn't have nothing for their kids to do. They didn't have nothing for their young girls to do.

"And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?" he asked. "They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I've often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn't get no more freedom. They got less freedom."

Not that you're shocked. We already knew that Bundy was self-servingly deceitful, and a legal idiot to boot. But you're missing the point. He has the guns and the cattle. Which means he has the freedom. Not unlike Gandhi, who of course loved cows, too, and led his armed Indian militiamen to a devastating victory in open battle with the British after launching into his now-famous "Let me tell you what I know about the Chinaman" speech.

In the meantime, every dingleberry conservative patriot who hailed Bundy as the Second Coming of George Washington and Aqua Buddha has a credibility problem on their hands. Except Alex Jones, of course, whose Bundy love makes perfect sense. Black Nevadans on the dole are probably all secret Bilderbergers, anyway.

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