The Oregon Fiasco Is Not Over. They Have a Martyr Now.
Oregon standoff spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum was killed and other leaders of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation were arrested Tuesday after the FBI and state police stopped vehicles about 20 miles north of Burns. Authorities did not release the name of the person who died at the highway stop, but Finicum's daughter confirmed it was Finicum, 55, of Cane Beds, Arizona, one of the cowboy-hat wearing faces of the takeover.
I admit that this is the way I wanted this to go down-that the law would wait for these guys to get off the property they'd stolen and then pick them up. No storming the bird sanctuary. No battering rams and flash-bangs. These guys were on their way to a meeting 70 miles from the scene of their crimes. Of course, they got stopped. Of course, they got busted. And, alas, of course, at least one person on the scene went for the guns. And Leroy Finicum, last seen under a blue tarp, winds up dead after two weeks of giving interviews in which he was virtually predicting that very thing. I'm going to hold off on the circumstances of his death because the details are still sketchy, but, most recently, Finicum had been talking like a classic case of suicide-by-cop. A death by grandiosity. We shall have to see.
Things had been going very badly for the last couple of days. The bird sanctuary was becoming a magnet for every gun-toting nativist crackpot west of the Mississippi. This was something that no sensible government could possibly allow. Discretion has its limits. One of the problems now is that this particular phenomenon is likely to get worse before it gets better.
In the meantime, Operation Mutual Defense, a network of militias and patriot sympathizers, issued a call on its website for help at the refuge. The post was written by Gary Hunt, a board member from California who has expressed support for Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City and had ties to the patriot movement. "You have an obligation to proceed to the Harney County Resource Center (the wildlife refuge) immediately," Hunt wrote. "If you fail to arrive, you will demonstrate by your own actions that your previous statements to defend life, liberty, and property were false."
There's a martyr now around whom to rally. There are people in jail around whom to rally. There's a cause for the feeble-minded and the politically delusionary to embrace. There is a wildness in our politics, and the fringes are expanding almost by the day.
