A Look Back at Yet Another Year of Misses, Missteps and the Mistakes of Vermont's Foundering Secession Movement

Two years ago today the screwballs of the Vermont secessionist clowncar announced their opening salvo of a Takeover Vermont movement - they were "amassing" candidates to occupy the entire Senate of the Vermont Statehouse, step into the governor's and lieutenant governor's office, along with a fistful of House seats. History will note that none of their candidate's came even remotely close to anything more than a piddling showing in any race. Perhaps that was because two months before the 2012 election I'd exposed their super-secret listserv where they waxed poet about their love for antiSemitic, misogynistic, racist and homophobic tropes, as well as their contempt for Vermonters who they believed to be gullible. Fortunately, those same Vermonters didn't fall for the crap that the seceshers were passing out. So I thought that today might be a good day to look back at the year that followed the 2012 debacle, 2013.

Last year at this time Vermonters throughout the state were breathing a collective sigh of relief that the decade long attempt to establish a dictatorship of the seceshatariat and associated argle-bargle had come to an abrupt end with the passing of the Magnolia Vermonter, Thomas H. Naylor, who was by any reasonable estimate a racist and Jew hater. Gone too is his dream for a do-over on women's reproductive rights and marriage equality. My criminy, if only he'd lived long enough to troll Duck Dynasty rednecks who're into making duck sounds on dick-like instruments with other duck dudes while disparaging gays, blacks and other non-Christopsychos, who knows how much he might have seceded, er, succeeded into making this a world more appreciable of other neo-Confederate "scholars" like his longtime butt-buddy Kirkpatrick Sale. We can all remember when Second Vermont Republic co-founder Sale said of the state Israel that it could be "unmade." Nothing could speak to the delusions of these secesher clowns more than that kind of looney ideation about the end of the Jews once and for all... a final solution proposed by the very core of the leadership of the SVR.

In 2013 the hoopleheads at the hate website Vermont Commons still ground out misinformation and the latest anti-Semitic, conspiracist garbage but not at anywhere near the same rate as they had in the past. The promise to have a new print junk journal resuscitated for 2013 turned out to be more pure secesher bullshit. Rob Williams, who presides as the top mouth breather at the VTCommons hate blog, idiotsplains to everyone who doesn't see him coming but realizes that would have been a good idea once he gets into his wet-dream shtick about "the emerging Vermont independence movement" that they're going to prevail, that's despite getting no one elected and no legislator to announce support for their fantasy. Ain't. Ever. Gonna. Happen. Rob. And that's no matter how many bumper stickers (that people throw away once they get clued into the racism, anti-Semitism and other forms of hate that comes with it) and useless commentaries and Facebook posts that Rob, Matt Cropp, Juliet Buck and the other tiny group of bedwetters plaster onto the Internets. Vermonters won't forget Williams' role as the then vice chairman of Second Vermont Republic in bringing neo-Confederate racists and segregationists to our state to arouse a secesher dream of division and exclusion. The KKK inspired and slavery loving group that Williams thought so much of that he had them on the SVR advisory board was the infamous League of the South, a group he has yet to denounce although only a bit more than a year ago he claimed to have put an end to the criticism of his group for having sought to affiliate with racists. (How's that going, Rob?) Like the neo-Confederate wing of the hate based secesher movement, Williams' hate blog will no doubt keep chugging along promoting attacks on Israel, Jewish "international bankers", the Vermont legislature, rule of law, etc. in its usual ineffectual way.

Vermont secession theology, like most faith based ideologies and theologies, has a well developed eschatological component. The world as we know it is going down (peak oil, peak fracking, peak F-35s, you name it) and there's only one way to escape the horrors and that's through the secesher rapture (Now where have I heard that before?). Tie that with their confiscatory economic theories that promote the largest grab of private property since the Stalin era and you can get a sense of why their political campaigns have been so, like, totes failed.

VTCommons contributors were able to maintain their reputation as being invariably late to the media party, such as when Gaelan Brown, the renown VTC house derp, who wrote about the compost sales tax debacle six months after it had been covered much more responsibly and professionally by Vermont's print and electronic media. Brown failed to disclose his own bottom line interest in the composting industry in his piece for VTCommons', uh, journal hate blog, a huge journalistic no-no. Me wonders how his conspiracist exposé of the collusion between the U.S. military and space aliens over extraction mineral resources from the dark side of the Moon in exchange for advanced alien military technology is going - oh, and don't forget the hidden truth about aircraft contrails that Brown has the scoop on since that's bigger than the Snowden disclosures (except for the difference that Snowden's dealing with, like, facts and truth, and not the attenuated sort of truth churned out by Teh Secesher Crheyzies!).

2013 entertained no new secesher conventions such as the small nations thing that was to be funded by some bored prince that Naylor and the mini-Naylor, Rob Williams had been sucking up to, nor has any secesher made a meaningful announcement to run for office in 2014 - heck, for their 2012 run debacle they wouldn't shut up even when they had no right to speak, so why are they so silent now? No Jim Hogue "Ethan Allen" drag shows that I noticed. Not even a peep for months from the not-so "Senator" Robert "Needed Killin' " Wagner despite his still having an inactive 2014 campaign website of sorts. Speaking of never-gonna-be senators, I've been following the random, mostly just for nothing Denny "Hit List" Morrisseau comments which read more like deranged outbursts as he derps the net and should give'em a mention but I've misplaced my Morriseau-to-English dictionary and without that they still don't make sense. Suffice it to say that, aside from Naylor himself, Morrisseau, who describes himself as "The Very Foreign Minister of SVR but is more aptly the "impacted bowel" of SVR, is possibly the most staggeringly anti-Semitic passenger of the Vermont secesher crazy train. You can read about his proposed "hit list" for Jews here.

The death of Naylor, the longtime and apparently only Vermont secesher sugar daddy, spelled the end to the gravy train of show conventions and videos attended by tens of people (mostly out-of-staters and sometimes not even that many/few) over the years. One could even speculate that the unseemly association with a group and an e-"publication" that has long term ties to racists, homophobes and anti-Semites in its past and present "issues" led to the departure this summer of one sham radical from a frontline position in the leadership of the minuscule anti-Vermont National Guard group (or as they like to frame themselves, the anti-F-35 movement) or maybe she just got tired of holding the reins on stoopid.

Profoundly failed 2012 gubernatorial wannabe (99.24% of Vermonters all voted for someone else), Dennis Steele, managed to finally snag an interview in 2013 where he mentioned America but not a secesher Vermont while promoting an addictive product that the CDC has been found to contain substances harmful to humans, including carcinogens. Steele even asserts, without presenting any evidence whatsoever that,

"there are a growing number of people who are moving from cigarettes to electronic cigarettes..."

But as the American Cancer Society has noted,

"(while) e-cigarettes have not been shown to be effective tobacco cessation tools and are not FDA approved, some distributors are marketing them for smoking cessation."

Nice going with the new craptacular project, Dennis. Given that New Hampshire has banned them and that New York is well on its way to doing so and that Vermont isn't likely to continue to allow them, you've certainly seemed to have latched onto another big loser. Perhaps you'd have saved something of what's left of your reputation if you'd just taken some more money from out-of-state racists, misogynists and homophobes and had not climbed aboard the poisonous gravytrain of Big Nicotine.

Anti-Semitic "journalism" continued to be a niche product among many VTCommons contributors throughout 2013 including a tasty bit of Rothschild-Federal Reserve conspiracism late last year that cites as a source a video favorite of the head bangers that congregate at Holocaust denial raves. In an apparent end of year attempt to seize the low ground in foisting anti-Semites into the Vermont discussion of, you know, The Jew, VTCommons has highlighted the work of Robert K. Moore, a noted anti-Semite and writer for the Canadian Holocaust Denial work in progress, Michel Chossudovsky’s Global Research hate site.

"As overseer of the anti-U.S., anti-globalization website GlobalResearch, Chossudovsky has manufactured a long list of eyebrow-raising accusations that often read more like wild-eyed conspiracy theories than serious political discourse: the U.S. had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks ("Of course they knew!"); "Washington's New World Order weapons have the ability to trigger climate change"; the U.S. knew in advance about the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, but kept it to themselves (apparently so they could ride to the rescue of devastated coastal regions); big banking orchestrates the collapse of national economies. Of course, all that talk of banking conspiracies can lead one into some bigoted territory. B'nai Brith Canada has complained to the University of Ottawa about anti-Semitic postings on Chossudovsky's site." Source

You know, the Jews, such complainers. So what's their problem, anyway?

Robert K. Moore, an aficionado of drunk culture, seethes Jew hatred in that uniquely 21st century fashion that talks about The Jew without saying the word Jew, "but we all know who we're talking about" kinda way. You know, Rothschilds, Tri-Lateral Commission, architects of the Federal Reserve, the money masters, blada-blada-blada, sorta like wearing a transparent jockstrap for the huge wood he harbors for world Jewry. He also posts his garbage at the vehemently anti-Semitic website of Pater Meyer's called, oddly, Serendipity.

"I regard Judaism as, among all religions, the least worthy of admiration," Peter Meyer, 2004

Similarly, in 2012 when the secesher brain trust was bursting onto the senator/guv campaign scene they connived on their super-secret campaign listserv where they waxed fondly about their similar feelings about world Jewry. There they'd been charmed by their largest out-of-state contributor who happened to be a regular then at the neo-Nazi Stormfront.org website. Williams had cautioned the head of the ticket, Dennis Steele, about sounding as whacked out on the topic as their VTfuhrer, Thomas Naylor, but with little success.

Sadly, VTCommons house anti-Semite, grande dame Carol "Shit-fer-brains" Moore has drifted from her once primary role as the ardent, incessant Jew hater and segregation proponent at VTCommons and at her blog into merely lamenting her Medicare eligible physical form (target weight: 180 lbs!) that's rendered, according to her, her slinky black leotards a mere figment of her imagined past. Maybe in this moment of self revelation she'll finally come clean about the tale that she tells about "choosing" to live in a minority neighborhood because she's, you know, so-o-o committed to whatever the fuck it is that she's up to at the moment - it's really just a marginal area investment property duplex owned by a Maryland Libertarian Party cohort of hers who no likely feels sorry for her tired ass. Oh, and did she ever find a taker for her role as cook for whatever loser would be willing to hump her ass and play the docile, self loathing male that she advertised for on her blog a year or so ago? Sad, Carol, really sad.

This past year also gave us the duplicitous spectacle of VTCommons hate blog publisher Rob Williams showing his contempt for the public by crowd sourcing the promotion of a mobile Yak BBQ food cart without ever telling the potential suckers that he'd put his yak herd/ranch on the market four or so months earlier. Didn't he think that sort of disclosure, as in like transparency, was necessary for the marks to really make an informed investment decision, huh? Must be making Champlain College proud of Perfesser Williams, no? That's just the sort of sleazy practice that makes it harder for legitimate kickstarters but, hey, WTF? The kids gotta learn. Heh... And as if to show how unconcerned he is about having provided a hate platform for years at VTCommons, from one of its very earliest issues for the likes of UVM's white supremacist professor Robert S. Griffin, convicted felon & racist LoS Board of Directors member Franklin Sanders to today's stable of anti-Semites, Williams proudly points to his role as publisher of the hate blog on his Champlain College bio. Don't go looking for Griffin's white supremacist essay from VTC issue #2 or Rob's own cheerleader-like hummer for Lincoln hater, white supremacist and LewRockwell.com nutter Thomas DiLorenzo in VTC issue #3 since they've been scrubbed. More intellectual transparency from Champlain College's own inhouse anti-Semite, Herr Doktor Rob Williams.

Looks like the Vermont seceshers won't be crowing, "We winned!" any year soon. Rumor has it that they may be lowering the 2014 "achievement" bar to adopt steal a salute (just like they tried to steal the Vermont National Guard's Green Mountain Boys flag) from the French anti-Semitic, Holocaust denying comedienne Dieudonné called "La Quenelle", "a gesture which involves touching the right upper arm with the left hand whilst keeping the right arm pointed downwards," also called the "reverse Nazi salute." I can almost see the 2014 secesher alumni photo being taken in front of the Vermont Statehouse - not quite enough people to make up a full calendar but with the entire group saluting in a manner that points to the ground in both a symbolic gesture acknowledging the passing of the baas, the Dixie singin' Thomas Naylor, and the death of their movement. I'm sure that the French bigot Dieudonné won't mind and might even welcome the appropriation from a companion anti-Semitic organization. Then the tiny group could do a statewide tour of synagogue's and take selfies of their doing the salute in front of such places - it's all the rage among anti-Semites these days.

The Second Vermont Republic: Vermont's own Y2K but with even less impact. 2014 should prove to be even less impressive as Williams (sans Naylor) continues to shake his fist impotently at Vermonters, the state legislators, statewide office holders, the congressional delegation and passing cars. Rumor also has it that Rob "The Champlain College Media Internets Expert" Williams has been doing a makeover/re-boot of his hate blog at VTCommons; it's pretty much the same ol'turgid, conspiratard nonsense (like the Boston bombing was a "false flag" operation) and anti-Semitism that the site is noted for with some of Naylor's vintage, sage/suckest mind farts cut and pasted on because there's nothing like re-worked failure to keep a website on life support. No doubt that the teevees rollout of the fifth season of Duck Dynasty is on the secesher "must watch" list for tonight. I'll keep you posted.

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Earth to SVR Apparatchik and Vermont Commons Editor-at-large Kirkpatrick Sale: The Lost Cause of Southern Secession Was Always About Slavery

A Second Vermont Republic founder and longtime advisory board fixture, as well as a "Vermont Commons" editor, Kirkpatrick Sale, has been involved in the modern 21st century secessionist movement almost from its inception. Certainly, he has become one of the movement's "big thinkers"; fact is, I don't think there's one member of today's tiny, secession from the "US of Empire" movement that doesn't consider himself (yes, it's a largely male group) a "big thinker." And if by "big thinker" they mean that they'll just make shit up to have their way, I'd also agree with that descriptive for the lot of them.

Earlier this spring a friend of the blog passed along a piece that Sale had written about the sesquicentennial of this country's Civil War (here) and suggested that I comment on it. VTCommons
"publisher" and poohbah-in-chief at the Vermont secesher propaganda print journal, Rob Williams, personally promoted Sale's historical fiction in the February issue of his soon to be defunct rag.

In his convoluted perversion of history Sale asserted, in all seriousness, that,

"(W)e should understand that the issue of slavery, strictly, was not the cause of Southern secession or the reason for the war on the Confederate side."

Nothing could be further from the truth. Sale even goes so far as to say that Lincoln's refusal to capitulate and submit to Southern secessionist's demands was "a clear and deliberate act of war."

I'd meant to examine this bit of secesher historical revisionism earlier but when I recently found this piece by UVM race relations professor emeritus, James W. Loewen, that succinctly exposes the mythology (read: junk history) promoted by Sale and his friends at SVR, VTCommons and the rest of the sorry neo-Confederate enterprise, it seemed the perfect way to address Sale's historical dishonesty.

Getting the Civil War Right

William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” He would not be surprised to learn that Americans, 150 years after the Civil War began, are still getting it wrong.

During the last five years, I’ve asked several thousand teachers for the main reason the South seceded. They always come up with four alternatives: states’ rights, slavery, tariffs and taxes or the election of Lincoln.

When I ask them to vote, the results—and resulting discussions— convince me that no part of our history gets more mythologized than the Civil War, beginning with secession.

My informal polls show that 55 to 75 percent of teachers—regardless of region or race—cite states’ rights as the key reason southern states seceded. These conclusions are backed up by a 2011 Pew Research Center poll, which found that a wide plurality of Americans—48 percent— believe that states’ rights was the main cause of the Civil War. Fewer, 38 percent, attributed the war to slavery, while 9 percent said it was a mixture of both.

These results are alarming because they are essentially wrong. States’ rights was not the main cause of the Civil War—slavery was.

The issue is critically important for teachers to see clearly. Understanding why the Civil War began informs virtually all the attitudes about race that we wrestle with today. The distorted emphasis on states’ rights separates us from the role of slavery and allows us to deny the notions of white supremacy that fostered secession.

In short, this issue is a perfect example of what Faulkner meant when he said the past is not dead—it’s not even past.

The Lost Cause
Confederate sympathizers have long understood the importance of getting the Civil War wrong. In 1866, a year after the war ended, an ex-Confederate named Edward A. Pollard published the first pro-southern history, called The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. Pollard’s book was followed by a torrent of similar propaganda. Soon, the term “Lost Cause” perfectly described the South’s collective memory of the war.

All these works promoting the Lost Cause consoled southern pride by echoing similar themes: The South’s leaders had been noble; the South was not out-fought but merely overwhelmed; Southerners were united in support of the Confederate cause; slavery was a benign institution overseen by benevolent masters.

A chief tenet of the Lost Cause was that secession had been forced on the South to protect states’ rights. This view spread in part because racism pervaded both North and South, and both ex-Confederates and ex-Unionists wanted to put the war behind them. Beginning with Mississippi’s new constitution in 1890, white southerners effectively removed African Americans from citizenship and enshrined their new status in Jim Crow laws. Northerners put the war behind them by turning their backs on blacks and letting Jim Crow happen.

From 1890 to about 1940, the Lost Cause version of events held sway across the United States. This worldview influenced popular culture, such as the racist 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation and Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 bestselling paean to the Old South, Gone With the Wind. As I point out in my book Lies My Teacher Told Me, history textbooks also bought into the myth and helped promote it nationwide.

What’s Wrong About States’ Rights?
But advocates of the Lost Cause— Confederates and later neo- Confederates—had a problem. The leaders of southern secession left voluminous records. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s prompted historians and teachers to review those records and challenge the Lost Cause. One main point they came to was this: Confederate states seceded against states’ rights, not for them.

As states left the Union, they said why. On Christmas Eve of 1860, South Carolina, the first to go, adopted a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” It listed South Carolina’s grievances, including the exercise of northern states’ rights: “We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.” The phrase “constitutional obligations” sounds vague, but delegates went on to quote the part of the Constitution that concerned them— the Fugitive Slave Clause. They then noted “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery. ... In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed ...”

South Carolina also attacked New York for no longer allowing temporary slavery. In the past, Charleston gentry who wanted to spend a cool August in the North could bring their cooks along. By 1860, New York made it clear that it was a free state and any slave brought there would become free. South Carolina was outraged. Delegates were further upset at a handful of northern states for letting African-American men vote. Voting was a state matter at the time, so this should have fallen under the purview of states’ rights. Nevertheless, southerners were outraged. In 1860, South Carolina pointed out that according to “the supreme law of the land, [blacks] are incapable of becoming citizens.” This was a reference to the 1857 Dred Scott decision by the southern- dominated U.S. Supreme Court.

Delegates also took offense that northern states have “denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery” and “permitted open establishment among them of [abolitionist] societies ...” In other words, northern and western states should not have the right to let people assemble and speak freely—not if what they say might threaten slavery.

Thoroughly Identified With Slavery
Other seceding states echoed South Carolina. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery— the greatest material interest of the world,” proclaimed Mississippi. “... [A] blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.” Northern abolitionists, Mississippi went on to complain, have “nullified the Fugitive Slave Law,” “broken every compact” and even “invested with the honors of martyrdom” John Brown—the radical abolitionist who tried to lead a slave uprising in Virginia in 1859.

Once the Confederacy formed, its leaders wrote a new constitution that protected the institution of slavery at the national level. As historian William C. Davis has said, this showed how little Confederates cared about states’ rights and how much they cared about slavery. “To the old Union they had said that the Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state,” he said. “To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery.”

Their founding documents show that the South seceded over slavery, not states’ rights. But the neo-Confederates are right in a sense. Slavery was not the only cause. The South also seceded over white supremacy, something in which most whites—North and South—sincerely believed. White southerners came to see the 4 million African Americans in their midst as a menace, going so far as to predict calamity, even race war, were slavery ever to end. This facet of Confederate ideology helps explain why many white southerners—even those who owned no slaves and had no prospects of owning any—mobilized so swiftly and effectively to protect their key institution.

This historic map shows how the United States was divided in 1861, as the Civil War began. All of the seceding southern states were heavily dependant on slavery. Keeping African Americans in bondage allowed slave owners to cheaply grow cash crops like cotton, rice and sugar cane.

Tariffs, Taxes and Lincoln
The other alleged causes of the Civil War can be dispensed with fairly quickly. The argument that tariffs and taxes also caused secession is a part of the Lost Cause line favored by modern neo-Confederates. But this, too, is flatly wrong.

High tariffs had been the issue in the 1831 nullification controversy, but not in 1860. About tariffs and taxes, the “Declaration of the Immediate Causes” said nothing. Why would it? Tariffs had been steadily decreasing for a generation. The tariff of 1857, under which the nation was functioning, had been written by a Virginia slaveowner and was warmly approved of by southern members of Congress. Its rates were lower than at any other point in the century.

The election of Lincoln is a valid explanation for secession—not an underlying cause, but clearly the trigger. Many southern states referred to the “Black Republican Party,” to use Alabama’s term, that had “elected Abraham Lincoln to the office of President.” As “Black Republican” implies, Alabama was upset with Lincoln because he held “that the power of the Government should be so exercised that slavery in time, should be exterminated.” So it all comes back to slavery.

Study the Writing of History
None of this was secret in the 1860s. The “anything but slavery” explanations gained traction only after the war, especially after 1890—at exactly the same time that Jim Crow laws became entrenched across the South. Thus when people wrote about secession influenced what they wrote.

And here the states’ rights argument opens a door for teachers to explain how perceptions of the past change from one generation to the next. Most students imagine history is something “to be learned,” so the whole idea of historiography—that who writes history, when and for what audience, affects how history is written— is new to them. They need to know it. Knowledge of historiography empowers students, helping them become critical readers and thinkers.

Concealing the role of white supremacy — on both sides of the conflict — makes it harder for students to see white supremacy today. After all, if southerners were not championing slavery but states’ rights, then that minimizes southern racism as a cause of the war. And it gives implicit support to the Lost Cause argument that slavery was a benevolent institution. Espousing states’ rights as the reason for secession whitewashes the Confederate cause into a “David versus Goliath” undertaking— the states against the mighty federal government.

States’ rights became a rallying cry for southerners fighting all federal guarantees of civil rights for African Americans. This was true both during Reconstruction and in the 1950s, when the modern civil rights movement gained strength. Today, the cause of states’ rights is still invoked against federal social programs and education initiatives that are often beneficial to people of color.

In other words, teaching the Civil War wrong cedes power to some of the most reactionary forces in the United States, letting them, rather than truth, dictate what we say in the classroom. Allowing bad history to stand literally makes the public stupid about the past—today.

Source: Teaching Tolerance Magazine, Issue 40, Fall 2011

Well said, professor. I couldn't have said it nearly as well.

Professor Loewen's book, The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The “Great Truth” about the “Lost Cause” , written with Edward. H. Sebesta, a researcher and expert on the neo-Confederate movement, is noted in the links column to the right.

Editor's Note: Kirkpatrick Sale has relocated to South Carolina to wage his war against truth where it all began. He is also now a South Carolina delegate to the Southern National Congress, a reincarnation of the secesher movement of the 1850s. Here's what one local South Carolina commentator and admirer of Sale, Will Moredock at the Charleston City Paper, has to say about Sale's ludicrous historical revisionism.

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Eye On "The 30" - 5 ≠ 6

Apparently "Senator" Wagner was a bit stung by my observation in the August 1 Eye On "The 30", that only two of the six candidates that he's bragged about are announced as running as the "Gang of 30."

The "Senator" intends to sweep the 2012 Vermont election cycle and Take Back the Senate® in the name of secessionist, constitutional strict constructionism and, after my criticism, he's put up the list of the other four announced candidates names on his website. He just forgot to put himself on his list but that still wouldn't have brought the total to the six that he announced on his website on July 20:

"So lobbying around the legislature for a few word changes in this or that amendment isn’t really going to take us anywhere or save our bacon. If you want to live free here and be able to make an honest living too, in agriculture or at all, you need to get into this fight."

"WE NEED TO RUN 30 DECENT VERMONT NON-POLITICIANS FOR THE VT SENATE NEXT YEAR AND WE NEED YOUR HELP TO ACCOMPLISH THIS…..SO WE CAN STOP MONSANTO & LOCKHEED’S TAKEOVER OF OUR STATE. STOP IT COLD WITH A ‘NO’ VOTE IN OUR SENATE……OURSELVES." (All caps his)

"Because no one else is going to have the integrity and courage to do this… no one now sitting will do this for us. They have all already caved."

"If we do this… when we just get near the goal, I am telling you the whole world will notice, and help for our cause will come gushing in. So far we have six of the Thirty." (emphasis mine)

"Please join us. Help recruit those 30 decent Vermonters."
Source

Get it? The present members of Vermont's Senate are all indecent. He's called his neighbors who serve in the legislature thieves, so why not indecent? I suppose that's what "Senator" Wagner's baas of the Second Vermont Republic, our own Magnolia Vermonter, Thomas Naylor, was refering to when he told Boston Globe columnist, Alex Beam:

“In a left-wing state like Vermont, politics are basically grounded in anger and fear."

That Naylor's slate of candidates in the 2010 election cycle had injected a theretofore unheard of degree of rancor and invective into the campaign is undisputed. His handpicked gubernatorial candidate, Connecticut native Dennis Steele, had gone so far as to "(thank) the Vermont Press Association 'for allowing (him) to take pot shots at 'Colonel' Dubie'" at a debate [1] - almost as classy as when gubernatorial candidate Steele stood at the side of a road and waved his middle finger at Vice President Biden. [2] or when Steele openly accepted campaign donations from an out-of-state bigot. [3]

And still wincing from his own utterly failed campaign for the lite guv slot, "Vermont Commons" blogger Peter Garritano, one of the five announced candidates for the Vermont Senate, ironically pronounced civil rights as "irrelevant" to Vermonters just days before Martin Luther King Day. [4]

In all my years I'd never seen such a persistently negative degree of campaigning from such an irrelevant group, the Vermont seceshers, to the Vermont body politic. True, there have been instances in the past when Vermont pols have drifted into such negative territory, normally only seen in the national campaigns, but invariably they all pull back and resume the civil exchange that Vermonters are accustomed to. Not so the seceshers. From the time they announced in January 2010, the barrage of negativity was the staple of their various campaigns. No doubt that given Naylor's homage to campaigns "grounded in anger and fear" above, we should expect much more of the same from his lackeys again this time around.

Problem is, even if you use the Teatard math and economic reckoning that "Senator" Wagner relies upon so heavily or how many times he changes the graphics at the Robert Wagner for Vermont Senate 2012 website, five still does not equal six.

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Vermont Birthers Move Over, There's a New Game in Town

Or more to the point, there's a new "pig" for the Angry Birds© over at the "Vermont Commons" blog to hurl themselves towards.

Led by VTCommons publisher Rob Williams, the nattering nabobs of nuttiness there have dived headlong into the latest conspiracy theory - "The Death of Osama Bin Laden Is a Lie!"

Amongst all the other bird-brained ideas that spin out from the VTCommons propaganda machine, 9/11 Truthiness has been a constant staple feeding the wingnutters.

Williams lobbed this bit'o bird crap today, as a follow up to his attack on Monday.

Monday's offering from Williams here sports this rant from last Fall's secesher Lieutenant Governor candidate and all around fowl ball, Peter Garritano - it's a beaut:

"Osama Bin LadenObama poll numbers falling!!! Time to kill the boogie man In one of the most unbelievable stories ever to come out of the White House, Osama Bin Laden has been killed and his body dumped at sea. Don’t worry we got some DNA to prove it!! In the age of guilty before proven innocent, and torture to provide evidence, wag the dog has provided us with yet another timely news item. After 9 years of fake audio tapes made on a cassette recorder from the 50’s, we can now put an end to this sad chapter of CIA fakery. It is sad that Osama’s body was dumped at sea because he should have been buried with military honors. The Pentagon propaganda machine kept him alive and the military industrial complex raked in the dough. Osama’s time had come though because Obama is feeling the heat with the bad economy, endless military aggression, foreclosures, and plunging dollar. Nothing better than a lynching to pep up the population. The five seconds of news(sic) video I was able to stomach seemed like a clip from an old Frankenstien movie, burning torches and wild eyed hungry people. It’s time to focus people. Osama is not the reason for your woes. Corporate terrorists have caused the condition that now grips the world economy. Guantanamo’s inmates should include the CEOS from Goldman Sachs, Monsanto, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, and Halliburton to name a few. Osama’s funeral at sea is only a temporary fix and like most news items, it will have little effect on our daily lives.. The carnival will leave town and the naked truth of the creeping fascist state will emerge once again. Big brother is watching, he’s well armed and well paid, and will be forever indebted to Osama Bin Laden."

Submitted by Peter Garritano on Mon, 05/02/2011 - 7:15pm.

Whew!

Betwixt the Williams posts comes this one from Jim Hogue, reënactor horribilis, also spinning the Osama lives/been dead/never happened or whatever myth.

No doubt the other little Angry Birds© will be chirping it up soon, what with all this new seed...

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Secession Myths & Second Vermont Republic Advisory Board Member Thomas J. DiLorenzo

In a piece by Corey Meyer entitled "Secession: It’s All the Rave These Days", Meyer does a spot on job of refuting some of the historic untruths routinely repeated by secession scholars bullshit artists like Thomas DiLorenzo, Second Vermont Republic baas Thomas Naylor, "Vermont Commons" publisher Rob Williams, Kirkpatrick Sale and their associates at the "old times there are not forgotten," neo-Confederate, Abbeville Institute.


Here's a sample:

“(This) letter is one written by George Washington in 1783 to John Hancock,"

“There are four things, which I humbly conceive are essential to the well being, I may even venture to say, to the existence of the United States, as an Independent Power–

•1st An indissoluble Union of the States under one fœderal Head.
•2dly A sacred regard to public Justice.
•3dly The adoption of a proper Peace Establishment, and
•4thly The prevalence of that pacific and friendly disposition among the People of the United States, which will induce them to forgit their local prejudices and policies, to make those mutual concessions which are requisite to the general prosperity, and in some instances, to sacrafice their individual advantages to the interest of the Community.

These are the Pillars on which the glorious Fabrick of our Independency and National Character must be supported–Liberty is the Basis, and whoever should dare to sap the foundation or overturn the Structure, under whatever specious pretexts he may attempt it, will merit the bitterest execration, and the severest punishment which can be inflicted by his injured Country.”

You can read Meyer's entire piece here. I especially liked the "D'oh!" moment in Meyer's description of his gotcha of Thomas DiLorenzo, the perpetrator of the Lincoln historical revisionist history fraud so loved by VTCommons' (and then SVR co-chair) Williams and his early VTCommons contributor, white supremacist and UVM professor, Robert S. Griffin. (More on that sorry chapter at VTCommons and SVR here.)

(h/t to a regular reader)

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.