If Republicans would like to nominate anyone—anyone at all—who is not a loon, we would all be down with that. I mean, c’mon.
In previously unreported comments that were captured on video, Colorado Republican attorney general candidate Cynthia Coffman can be seen telling supporters that she intends to lead a legal fight against the U.S. government to seize America’s national forests and public lands for state ownership and control. […]
[The video] shows Coffman describing her plan to attend the annual Conference of Western Attorneys General this summer with a “mission” to build support for taking over America’s public lands. Coffman says public land “has been taken from us” and that “it is time that the Western attorneys general join together and fought back against the federal government, and we took back that land.”
Surely, anyone running for the office of attorney general (and Coffman is the state’s current chief deputy attorney general) ought to know be aware that “taking back” government land is a garbage issue peddled by saps. It all hearkens back to the Sagebrush Rebellion, the corporate-funded pre-Reagan movement that demanded we sell off our public lands to fine upstanding companies who could put it to good use by mining, logging, or otherwise paving over the lot of it. It is what the people at the Bundy Ranch were going on about, because Bundy considers his own personal use of public land to be superior to that of the entire rest of the United States population combined, and when you find yourself on the same side of an issue as the people laying themselves out flat on highway bridges in preparation for possibly having to execute federal officials to protect crazy freeloading racist crackpots you should probably pause for a moment to contemplate your life’s choices up ’til now.
Coffman also surely has to know that her proposed remedy of “taking back” federal land is unconstitutional, though I imagine the remedy is to simply rewrite the offending parts until we get to the desired outcome. Those national parks aren’t going to frack themselves, after all.
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Again—If we could have just a few Republican candidates here and there who did not base their public appeals on decades-old conspiracy theories, that would be grand. If we had a few that were not quite so outraged at the thought that there might be scraps of land in America that the highest bidder still cannot profit from, that would be a nice change of pace. The world will not end if we do not run our manly ATV’s over every last desert tortoise, or if a tree stands on a Colorado mountainside that will live out its days without being transformed, phoenix-like, into a pallet of toilet paper. We do not need to sell every hill.
