My one o’clock consultation on Friday was with Jefferson Davis Bedford Forrest Epps III, a key member on the staff of Dean Heller, the junior US senator from Nevada. Entering my office, he quickly selected the chair to the immediate right of my desk, pulled it as close as possible toward me and leaned over in my face.
“Collins,” he barked, “this time, Harry Reid and the Democrats have gone too far!”
“Cheeseburger for lunch?” I inquired. “Cheddar, I presume. With Dijon mustard, dill pickles and slices of tomato and Bermuda onion?”
“Beef,” Epps proclaimed as he sat back in the chair, “happens to be the backbone of America!”
“There are folks on Capitol Hill who hail from the South,” I noted, “and I have heard them say the exactly same thing about pork barbecue.”
“Let the pig farmers argue with the chicken farmers,” he snorted. “Ranchers raise cattle, the finest meat on earth!”
“And apparently, your boss is very fond of ranchers,” I observed. “But not too fond of the US Bureau of Land Management.”
“If you lived out in God’s country,” Epps told me with an air of supreme confidence, “instead of here in Sodom and Gomorrah, and you made an honest living grazing your herds on His wide open prairies, instead of consorting with foreigners, spies, bureaucrats and eggheads all day long, I bet you wouldn’t be too fond of the BLM yourself.”
“Certainly, his buddy Cliven Bundy doesn’t think much of it,” I agreed.
“The Bundy family has been grazing herds in that part of Nevada,” he huffed, “since they homesteaded there in 1870, long before there even was a Bureau of Land Management. Out there in the West, we know what freedom means. It isn’t our fault if the petty tyrants in Washington DC have forgotten!”
“To Mr. Bundy,” I replied, “it seems that ‘freedom’ means feeling free to use public resources to enrich himself.”
“Cliven Bundy may be a lot of things,” Epps assured me, “but rich isn’t one of them.”
“Still,” I persisted, “while he may not be a member of the Infamous One Percent, he nevertheless somehow managed to run up a one point one million dollar bill with BLM for grazing fees – a bill he has repeatedly refused to pay.”
“That’s just exactly how I’d expect some Eastern elitist to see the situation,” Epps sneered. “First of all, by their own admission, there’s only four hundred and seventy-six thousand three hundred dollars of the BLM’s so-called ‘grazing fees’ in question. The rest of that money is late payment assessments and fines – all illegally levied against a hard working, rock-ribbed, steely-eyed authentic American cowboy!”
“Authentic American cowboys,” I pointed out, “were hired laborers who herded cattle from the range lands to the rail heads, not the ranchers who owned the livestock.”
“Spoken just like some… effete intellectual who grew up in Jew York City,” he snickered. “Believe me, tenderfoot, Cliven Bundy is just as authentic an American cowboy as anybody ever was!”
“But Senator Heller’s strategy of extolling him as a patriotic hero seems to have backfired,” I opined.
“Damn it,” Epps grimaced with obvious annoyance, “Sean Hannity said Bundy was okay! I saw him say so myself – on Fox! How was I – or my boss, for that matter – supposed to know that Sean Hannity, of all people, can be wrong?”
“And that,” I speculated, “is why you’re here today?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “It certainly isn’t because I enjoy your company. No offense, of course.”
“You were ordered to attend a consultation with me?” I asked.
“Uh-huh, that’s right,” he confessed. “Senator Heller himself told me to come here and get you to figure a way out of this mess.”
“Which mess, specificially?” I inquired.
“Well,” Epps began, “here’s old Cliven Bundy, getting in the news for standing up to the BLM over his God-given right to graze his cattle like his daddy and grand-daddy before him did… before the liberal welfare state took over America, that is.”
“By showing up on BLM’s federal government property with a posse of armed militia to retrieve four hundred head of cattle the BLM had confiscated because Bundy hadn’t paid grazing fees for over twenty years,” I observed.
“Yeah,” he shrugged, “what was Bundy supposed to do – let the jackbooted thugs from BLM take his private property without doing anything? Besides, he and his family before him, they all paid up on those grazing fees – until the BLM told him he had to keep his herd off the Gold Butte range four whole months of the year so BLM could protect some damned endangered turtles.”
“The desert tortoise, Gopherus agassizii,” I commented, “nests and lays its eggs in that area between April and July. Cattle aren’t native to Nevada, they’re an introduced European species. Consequently, the desert tortoise hasn’t evolved any adaptations to deal with herds of cattle trampling its nesting grounds. Grazing herds in desert tortoise nesting areas is one of the primary reasons the species is endangered to begin with.”
“Listen, buddy,” Epps admonished, “I’m a red-blooded American, and I’ve met plenty of other red-blooded Americans, and I know for a fact that not a single one of them would rather eat a nasty, tough, stringy old desert turtle than a nice thick, juicy beef steak! And they don’t want any snail darters, black-footed ferrets or spotted owls for dinner, either!”
“Point taken,” I conceded. “Endangered species are rarely attractive food items.”
“Right,” he continued, “And so, here’s Sean Hannity on Fox, telling everybody what hero a Bundy is for standing up to the BLM thugs, and Rand Paul defending Bundy’s property rights, and then here comes that damned son of the whores’ washerwoman, Harry Reid, calling Bundy a domestic terrorist! This is all happening in Nevada, and Reid’s the senior senator from Nevada, and my boss is the other senator from Nevada – Reid left him no choice! He had to come out for Bundy or the Tea Party was going to call him a coward!”
“And he did,” I japed. “Senator Heller jumped right on the bandwagon and hailed Cliven Bundy as a hero, a patriot and a profile in courage for standing up to blatant federal government overreach and bullying. All of which was just fine for Senator Heller, Senator Paul and Sean Hannity until Mr. Bundy got a chance to shoot his mouth off to a television reporter. The video went viral on the Internet and his remarks appeared the next day in the New York Times. Mr. Bundy said, in part, quote, ‘I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro… 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? 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.’ And at that point, the situation became considerably less advantageous for Senator Heller, did it not?”
“That’s one way to put it,” Epps acknowledged.
“Because,” I reminded him, “the Republicans have a big problem with minorities and the race question. It’s political Kryptonite, because, despite the fact that they don’t want to admit it, a considerable portion of the Republican base consists of racists.”
“Oh, hell, not that again,” Epps complained. “What the hell are we supposed to do, tell all those ignorant peckerwood rednecks, ‘If you’re a racist, don’t vote Republican,’ and give up all those votes? All that would do would be to encourage white supremacist candidates to run for office and siphon off that critical ten percent of the votes Republicans need to win against Democrats in federal elections. Oh, no, we’re not falling for that ploy, believe me! The Democrats think making the perfect the enemy of the good is a clever way of throwing the Republicans a sucker punch below the belt, that’s all. Look, Collins, racists need somebody to vote for, too, okay? And it might as well be a Republican, that’s what we figure.”
“No point in arguing with that reasoning,” I told him. “So Senator Heller did an immediate one-eighty and denounced Bundy’s racism, but he, Rand Paul and most of all, Sean Hannity have quite a bit of egg on their faces, nonetheless. Hannity’s become a complete laughingstock, and I’ve noted quite a few chuckles and guffaws around Washington directed and your boss and Senator Paul this week.”
“When people call you names,” Epps muttered ruefully, “that’s no biggie. But if they start laughing at you, that can be pure poison.”
“As Lincoln complained,” I noted, “the comic depictions of him in political cartoons were much harder to stomach than even the most vituperative condemnations made in ernest instead of jest.”
“So what do I tell my boss,” Epps beseeched, “about how to get through this barnyard of cow pies without stepping his new snakeskin boots in one right up past the ankle?”
“Change the subject as quickly as possible,” I suggested. “One positive thing about this entire donnybrook is that the public is now at least aware that Senator Dean Heller exists; and as we know, even bad publicity is better than no publicity at all. Now that he has he public’s attention, and has demonstrated that he deplores racism, even as he extolls patriotic opposition to federal government oppression, he needs to find a new hobby horse to ride – and quickly!”
“What would you suggest?” Epps implored.
“Almost anything will do,” I assured him. “Just make a list of Tea Party issues: taxes, Obamacare, environmental regulation, minimum wages, gun control, all the usual suspects. Print out the list, cut it into little paper strips with a popular Tea Party issue on each one, and put them in brown paper bag. Then have Senator Heller reach in and take out five of them, one by one. Then he should start making pronouncements on those five issues to the press, and constantly deflect any questions about the Bundy imbroglio by steadfastly reiterating how outraged he was by Bundy’s remarks regarding Negroes.”
“That actually sounds like it should work,” Epss agreed. “Take advantage of the the sudden notoriety and use it to leverage more. Keep Senator Heller’s name in the news, but with a positive, consistent Tea Party oriented message. Excellent. Okay, so, the other thing my boss wants to know is, how do we avoid having something like this happen again?”
“Simple,” I advised. “Before Senator Heller decides to declare that somebody like Cliven Bundy is a patriot, hero and exemplar of courage in the face of tyranny, he – or at least somebody on his staff, maybe you, for instance – should Google that particular chump’s name and find out in advance just what kind of bastard the good Senator might, in fact, be dealing with.”
Epps paused before replying, blushed a deep red, and at last asked, “Um… how do you Google a person’s name?”
“First, make sure you know the correct spelling,” I informed him. “Then go to Google on the Web. You do know how to do that, don’t you?”
“I guess I’ll need to… uh… research it,” he murmured.
“Got any kids?” I dryly queried.
“Ah, yeah,” he replied, “three of them – eight, twelve and fifteen.”
“Ask them,” I recommended.
“Uh… okay, will do,” he vouched.
“Okay, then,” I explained, “when you get to the Google Web site, enter a double quote mark, then type the person’s name, then enter another double quote mark. Then click on Search.”
“Then… click… on search,” Epps repeated as he anxiously scribbled my remarks in a leather bound notebook with a Mont Blanc fountain pen.
“Search,” I clarified, “is that little blue box with the picture of a magnifying glass in it.”
“Picture… of a… magnifying glass,” Epps whispered to himself as he wrote. “Got it. Anything else?”
“The Google search engine,” I concluded, “will return a list of hyperlinks. Click on those to learn more about the person whom Senator Heller is about to risk his political reputation by publicly endorsing as some sort of Great American.”
Epps looked up from this leather bound notebook, Mont Blanc poised in his hand. “Hyperlinks?”
“Ask your children,” I sighed.