Ruby Ridge: a disgusting anniversary.

A most disgusting anniversary. (Yes, even the Wikipedia article has enough to make the blood boil.)

On this date twenty years ago, our pious and heroic FedThugs, while sneaking not-so-secretly about the Weaver property trying to plan a suitable way to ambush and arrest Randy Weaver for his refusal to turn snitch after an entrapment ploy and legal railroading convinced him he couldn't get a fair hearing, killed his dog and son and shot at a family friend.

But stay tuned.  Twenty years ago tomorrow, the cynically named "Hostage Rescue Team" (which has a rather ironically more honest acronym, HRT) will shoot Randy too (in the back, while trying to get to the body of his dead son*), and kill his unarmed wife Vicki (standing in the doorway holding her infant daughter), and successfully shoot the same family friend.

And still they're not done.  During the ensuing "siege", why not taunt the survivors over the megaphone?  "Hey Vicki, we're having blueberry pancakes for breakfast.  What are you having?"

Prosecutions come next.  (Of the Weavers, silly.  The thugs were just following orders;  nothing has happened or will happen to them.)  Acquittals or dismissals on every single thing except for Randy's "failure to appear" from the original railroad, even though the state admitted it had given Weaver the wrong court date. 

Get that?  After all this, absolutely nothing stuck.  The legal case was so flimsy the only thing the judge could stomach hanging Weaver on was a technicality--a technicality so ridiculous that it sends its own clear message that some sort of conviction was pre-ordained, so that at least the state could say that it "got a conviction" out of the deal.

And nobody in officialdom was punished in any meaningful way.  As the late Jeff Cooper used to put it, "As far as I can tell, Lon Horiuchi is still walking around free."

But hey, don't get all uppity.  See, Randy Weaver apparently associated with white separatists, and furthermore was a gun owner, and (worse than all that) was distrustful of government, so the "extremist" just musta had it coming.  Not like he ever actually harmed anyone beforehand, of course--nobody seems to claim that.  But, see--and make sure you get the full gravity of this thought--he might have hurt someone.  And so "we" sent "our" noble protectors to ensure--to enforce--that he wouldn't.

And hey, did they not succeed?  Randy Weaver did not, in fact, hurt anyone.

See?  More funding, bitches!





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* Perhaps the more recent "first, drone the principal, then drone the funeral" tactic has its official origins here?  Just wonderin'...