Can Cliven Bundy Rebrand Himself?

Sure, if the iron is hot enough.

I am being facetious, naturally. 

I just want to say something about the American racist, which is--seriously, bigots have got to drop comparing themselves to Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, Jr.  But also, they may not want to comment upon what people were or were not able to accomplish in their lives like this:

BUNDY: I took this boot off so I wouldn’t put my foot in my mouth with the boot on. Let me see if I can say something. Maybe I sinned and maybe I need to ask forgiveness and maybe I don’t know what I actually said. But you know, when you talk about prejudice, we’re talking about not being able to exercise what we think and our feelings. We don’t have freedom to say what we want. If I call — if I say negro or black boy or slave, I’m not — if those people cannot take those kind of words and not be offended, then Martin Luther King hasn’t got his job done then yet. They should be able to — I should be able to say those things and they shouldn’t offend anybody. I didn’t mean to offend them.

No. For one thing, as to what MLK was able to accomplish--well, his work was cut short you know.  But if Cliven Bundy has the right to say "negro or black boy or slave"--then people must have the right to feel some way about that, don't they? And sure enough--they may say so. Just like Cliven Bundy gets to pop off at his uneducated mouth, people with sense may notice that what he was saying was that his idea of the "negro" or possibly, if one wasn't frozen in a landslide circa 1950, black people, are, because of his experience of a ride-by in a neighborhood of ethnicity this one time--during which I am sure his car rolled through "Stop" signs, when he saw some old people (we call them retirees when they are white) and some young people (possibly just out of school--maybe even the grandkids of your retired black older persons) and thought to himself--"They are so idle, they must be doing all the bad things--is there not cotton for them to pick?", so get this--he thinks slavery is better than now.



No seriously.

I have no way to take his comments about race, which he freely offered and expounded upon at length and later clarified, as anything but a regurgitation of all the welfare-queen-social  safety net as hammock shit that he somehow managed to imbibe deeply of somewhere along his political awareness.  He is obviously not an historian, and can't possibly know that there are no laws that set the dogs on people who escape the projects and bid them return to face scourging and hard labor, or lynching as there were for slaves--or even free people of color caught up in the net of our American biases. Nor can he be said to be aware that anyone might like to work profitably, but that depends an awful lot on education and hiring practices, nor does he seem to be even remotely aware that the black family as a unit was never less stable than when members of it could be sold off like so many unwanted kittens.

A patriotic deadbeat who believes in the Constitution of a country he does not acknowledge, and needs to hold forth on the business of people about which he knows little to less than nothing--is a pretty poor hero, no?  He could stand to shut up and pay his dues, or run his mouth and pay his dues. But he can't use words and not have them convey his meaning to people to which they were intended without those people feeling some way about that, and he can't realistically expect to be treated as if he were above the law just because he got some media friends.

Also referencing MLK and Rosa Parks when you are just so much not oppressed--no. Just no. Flypaper tacky.