New York Times Secesher Op-Ed: "The Dubious Dream Lives On," Though "Not So Well"

Treated in today's New York Times for the roadkill Vermonters now know it to be (full piece here), the Second Vermont Republic gets the evisceration it has so long deserved from a mainstream media columnist, Alex Beam of the Boston Globe.

The normal treatment by the MSM has been driven by SVR's baas, Thomas Naylor or one of his lackeys, promoting some of their "aw, ain't we cute; we're gonna leave 'the Empire'" bits of nonsense that proves to be the perfect, soft news drivel that papers need to offset the daily barrage of "negative" stories, sports, obits and obligatory feature sections.

Once in a while, usually when they don't have to do the work themselves and they just rely on the crap that spews forth regulary from the Magnolia Vermonter's pen, you get pieces like last January's throwaway "feature" in Time about the Top 10 Aspiring Nations. It was an error laden paragraph based on an earlier piece by a secession hack who later admitted to doing free advertising for the Vermont seceshers in the pieces that he submitted for publication to several online sources. No mention was made in the Time junk of their candidate's dismal, barely three quarters of one percent showing in last year's gubernatorial run, though I think that it may be no coincidence that SVR came in dead last even on the Time list.

About our local losers, Beam writes in his New York Times Op-Ed piece:

"The dubious dream lives on..."

"For years I have been receiving mailings from the Second Vermont Republic, a secessionist movement that seems to operate out of the personal computer of Thomas Naylor, a former Duke University economics professor who now lives in Charlotte, Vermont. Encomia from deceased luminaries festoon his Web site: “I must assure you of my pleasure in and approval of ... the Second Vermont Republic,” wrote the Canadian-born John Kenneth Galbraith, who owned a lovely second home in bucolic Dorset, Vermont. “All power to Vermont in its effort to distinguish itself from the U.S.A. as a whole,” quoth the late diplomat George F. Kennan, whose famous “containment doctrine” apparently did not apply to the New England states."

"I touched base with Naylor to find out how his secession plans were faring. Not so well, he reported."

“Our mission was a lot easier when Bush was in power,” he explained. “In a left-wing state like Vermont, politics are basically grounded in anger and fear. Vermonters really disliked Bush, and when Bush went away, there was this notion that Obama walked on water.”

"His movement sponsored 10 candidates in last year’s state elections, and their most respectable showing was four percent of the vote. “That man’s name appeared first on the ballot,” is how Naylor explains that result."

"For the time being, it would appear that... Vermont will probably remain under the jurisdiction of what Naylor calls “the Empire” — “a global system of dominance and deceit in which ostensibly free individuals allow transnational megacompanies and big government to control their lives” and so on."

"And so on," indeed Mr. Beam. Thank you for doing your homework; now fuhgeddaboudem.

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Looking for Lincoln

Longtime Second Vermont Republic advisory board member and fellow Lincoln hater of SVR's baas, the Magnolia Vermonter, Thomas Naylor, and secesher propagandist and publisher of the usually uninteresting "Vermont Commons", Rob Williams, Thomas DiLorenzo, who, like Naylor and Williams, dabbles in Abraham Lincoln historical revisionism as an elemental part of the neo-Confederate journey that they would impose upon Vermont's future, gets ably deconstructed by Michael Lynch at the Abraham Lincoln Institute for the Study of Leadership and Public Policy at Lincoln Memorial University here.

Essentially, it puts the whole DiLorenzo "scholarship" thing on a par with this recently discovered Lincoln sighting:



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The Second Leg of the Vermont Secessionists 2012 Election Cycle's Two Legged Stool

In early July of this year the seceshers began their second attempt at a takeover of the Vermont Senate with the announcement on perennial electoral loser and the self-described "Very Foreign Minister" of the Second Vermont Republic's Denny Morriseau's, and up and coming loser Robert Wagner's, various websites, called grandiosely, The Vermont 30: The Unleashing, here and here.

After their less than successful independent entries for various state offices, where their electoral percentage showing was never greater than a low single digit or, as in the case of their gubernatorial candidate, Dennis Steele, barely more than three quarters on one percent, you'd think they'd want to find a way to suppress somewhat the nearly universal perception here in Vermont that these guys represent the extreme, delusion, irrelevant political fringe.

But that not being the case, the Wagner/Morrisseau tag team followed up a week later with a blistering attack on the Vermont legislature that calls all of its members thieves and corrupt here and here:

"Here’s a quick education on how the corrupt politicians sitting in the Vermont Legislature are stealing from us."

What followed was a long attack on their Vermont neighbors, many of whom, unlike Wagner or Morrisseau, have contributed untold hours, days, weeks, months and years of selfless service to their community rather than spending virtually all of their time condemning the many contributions of their neighbors. (And no, Denny, offering to pay for one way tickets to rid Burlington of its homeless population doesn't strike most as public service, any more than your plan to cap assets, income and population for Vermont)

In his post, Wagner describes a "letter" he received from Matt Hawes in Virginia:

"Here’s a letter that I received from Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty, illustrating how Montpelier’s brand of sleazy politics has been adapted to Texas…"

The misleading use of word "letter," as well as a loosely correlated assessment of the similarities of the Texas and Vermont legislatures (not even remotely the same), for what was a blast email from an operative of a Tea Party group for whom Hawes serves as Vice President and Executive Director, Ron Paul's Tea Party organization, Campaign for Liberty, reveals Wagner's craving for importance and relevance. In truth, thousands of teabaggers like Wagner received this Tea Party spam.

Wagner's is a head shakingly sad attempt to fool Vermonters and inflate his importance to the national teabagger movement by saying he had received a letter email from the organization of a "flagrant racist," Ron Paul, the so-called "Godfather" of the Tea Party. If Wagner had spent just a few minutes looking into the Virginia teabaggers associated with Hawes' group, as I did, he'd have learned that they'd been involved in multiple acts of political intimidation and, some say, terrorism, when a VA blogger and Tea Party county capo doubled down on an incident tied to his release (mistakenly) of a Democratic party congressman's relative's address in March 0f 2010 by less than two months later calling the congressman "a target." Or maybe Wagner did check and found such rhetoric so compelling that it inspired his own inflammatory, broadsided attack on every legislator in Vermont.

It seems that the Wagner/Morrisseau campaigns are off to the start of another campaign that may prove to be just as disastrous as their last, where their underlying strategy seemed to be to insult and malign virtually every office holder in Vermont. Kinda like when Wagner went to an opening ceremony for the new bridge in Middlebury to piss all over a local, community effort that built a new, needed bridge and which created local jobs - not exactly a savvy, classy or particularly smart, vote getting move.

In closing, I was stunned yesterday to a see a huge, garish campaign sign for Wagner's 2012 campaign on a trailer parked in the state right-of-way in front of The Gathering Inn Hostel on Rte. 100 in the tiny hamlet of Hancock, VT, with the sign nearly protruding into the roadway. Readers of this blog will recall Wagner's announcement of his creation of a "provisional capital" for a secesher Vermont last fall. The innkeeper at The Gathering Inn, Kathleen Byrne, was reported by Wagner to have conducted a ribbon cutting of some sort for the "provisional capital" and/or "Center" or whatever last December here.

A huge campaign sign on a road traveled mostly by people who can't vote for Wagner certainly isn't the smartest campaign strategy but to do it more than 15 months before the election... Really???

Hopefully, despite it being one of the rules of "the Empire" that Wagner so despises, it is a campaign law none the less that he can abide by for the safety of all Vermonters and, so, "respect the rule of law" as he demands of our legislators as a part of our "government" that he so despises. (The Guide to Placement of Political Campaign Signs for Candidates is available for public viewing at the Vermont Secretary of State's website here.)

Oh, and no sign of the seceshers registering their legislature PAC yet.

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Second Vermont Republic Has Now Morphed Into a Political Action Committee

In late June the Magnolia Vermonter and baas of the Second Vermont Republic, Thomas Naylor, posted yet another of his tedious screeds lambasting "the Empire."

This time, instead of condemning virtually all of Vermont's voters and statewide elected officials, all of the Vermont General Assembly, Vermont's clergy, public institutions, UVM (where a close family member works), as well as pretty much every other educational body, all of Vermont's congressional delegation (Patrick Leahy, who Naylor calls "a world-class prostitute," Peter Welch and, of course, Bernie Sanders, who Naylor got really pissed at for not resigning from Congress to run as Naylor's anointed gubernatorial candidate - Naylor, in language shockingly similar to that used in the Sovereign Citizens Movement, labels all three as "enemies of the state"), and, naturally, Democrats, Republicans and Progressives, Naylor isn't going to hold anything back - he's now compared all Americans to the citizens of Nazi Germany:

"Albert Camus’s insightful description of life in Nazi Germany, which appeared in the clandestine Resistance newspaper Combat a few weeks after the Liberation of Paris, could just as well have been written about life in the United States today. Not unlike the people of Nazi Germany, the American people are also asleep."

Oh, really? When Camus wrote that, the German people were getting their asses handed to them day and night with massive bombings from the East and the West that were leaving them little time for sleep. The comparison probably appealed to Naylor. who at this point hasn't much left in his bag of increasingly ineffectual tricks. You'd think that as a former "academic" he'd have heard of Godwin's Law. Perhaps he has and is subliminally throwing in the secesher towel:

"It is generally perceived that falling foul of Godwin's law tends to end up causing the individual making the comparison to lose their argument and/or credibility."

After having been the primary bankroller for Dennis Steele's embarrassing and utterly failed 2010 gubernatorial bid (normally I'd link to Steele's Wikipedia article but it seems that Wikipedians don't believe that he's so notable as to deserve his own article, so it's gone now - poof!) Naylor has come up with a new plan to separate Vermonters from their money - at $100 dollars a pop.

Here's the deal: send him the bread he's looking for on behalf of secesher legislative candidates, who he doesn't name, to his home mailing address and you get one of his awful books.

Support Us

Please help us save Vermont, America, and the rest of the world from the American Empire by helping tiny Vermont lead the nation into disunion. If SVR is to move to the next level, electing members of the state legislature who are open secessionists, we need your financial support. Those who contribute $100 or more receive a complimentary copy of Thomas H. Naylor’s provocative, 100-page, unpublished monograph Rebél, a philosophy of peaceful rebellion against the human condition and the American Empire.

Complete this form and return it with your check to The Second Vermont Republic, P.O. Box 544, Charlotte, VT 05445.

Source

Frankly, I'd prefer a button, a bumper sticker or maybe a CD of Naylor singing "Dixie."

Although his solicitation has all of the appeal of one of those Nigerian email scams, there's more to it than that. He's not clear about who the "us" is that he refers to in his appeal for "financial support" to "(elect) members of the state legislature who are open secessionists." And we're suppose to believe that after 8 years of accomplishing nothing much in Vermont beyond attracting fringe-ish losers who dabble in Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, racism, wild-eyed conspiracy theories and homophobia, Naylor's now going to pick himself up, dust himself off and save Vermont. All we need to do is send him a C-note.

Ri-i-ght!

These are the facts: Naylor's Second Vermont Republic is a registered trade name since June of 2003 for a "civic club" according to the Vermont Secretary of State's search database (just enter Second Vermont Republic in the search box). SVR's registration won't expire until after the 2012 statewide election cycle.

According to the most recent information available at the VT Sec'y of State's website (searchable PDF file) it's likely that this recent step by Naylor - a solicitation for funds/contributions to finance legislative campaigns to elect seceshers - will trigger his need to register a PAC and make declarations having to do with receipt and expenses of more than $500.

Registration Requirements/Bank Designation & Treasurer Form. (17 V.S.A. §2831)

Each political committee and political party that has accepted contributions and made expenditures of $500.00 or more must register with the Secretary of State within ten days of reaching the $500.00 threshold stating its name and address, treasurer’s name, and the bank in which it maintains its campaign checking account. Any political committee or party that has filed a Bank Designation form in a previous election cycle does not need to file another one, UNLESS the committee/party is changing information on the form. You may also file this form before the $500 threshold has been reached.

Given their aversion to transparency and making the required campaign filings in a timely fashion in the last campaign, I'm not expecting the seceshers to be in a rush to make the legally required declarations and registration. After all, these are the requirements of "the Empire."

Let's see how they do this time around.

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