After several days of taking a low-key approach, Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward — known by all in Burns, Oregon, as “Sheriff Dave” — is mounting a media counterattack against Yokel Haram.

He is, in short, turning to spectacle.

That was evident at a meeting Wednesday at the Harney County Fairgrounds. The meeting, called by the sheriff on his home turf, was ostensibly to answer community questions. …

… Ward said his wife’s tires were slashed, prompting her to “pack up and leave town.” His parents were seated in the audience, and he asked them to stand, saying they had been followed home. “Those are true Americans right there,” he said to applause.

John Lamborn, a local defense attorney, approached the microphone. Lamborn and Ward are usually on opposite sides at the local county courthouse, but not at this meeting.

“Now, there are some people questioning your patriotism,” Lamborn said.

Ward nodded.

“Sheriff Dave, you’re a veteran, right?” Lamborn asked.

Ward said he was, and proceeded to detail his military history, including tours in Somalia and Afghanistan.

The crowd cheered.

“If he doesn’t hit all of these guys in the face with a pie in the next few days,” Charles Pierce writes, “Sheriff Dave’s got the Nobel Peace Prize locked up.”

I don’t doubt the part about slashed tires, as Sheriff Dave has been targeted by some right-wing sites for being a government stooge (example).

Meanwhile, Y’all Qaeda has torn down a government fence so that a local rancher can graze his cattle on the occupied wildlife preserve, and they’ve been digging through employee files in the compound looking for “transgressions” they can expose.

I personally think the government ought consider a variation of Sherman’s March. Maybe now the BLM should move on the Bundy Ranch in Nevada to seize cattle and other assets to help pay the delinquent grazing fee.  The Mullah Militia (that’s pronounced MOO-law, y’all) might find they have a bigger problem on their hands than being short of snacks.

I’m not going to call the meatheads occupying buildings in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge “terrorists” because I don’t think they rise to the level of competence to actually terrorize anybody. They’re more like play-pretend insurgents.

According to Jennifer Williams at Vox, most of the “militia” men are  “a small group of individuals who travel around the country attaching themselves to various local fights against the federal government, usually over land rights.” They seized some buildings in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge ostensibly to offer shelter to Dwight and Steven Hammond, a couple of local ranchers who were convicted of setting fires on federal land.  The feds say the Hammonds started one fire to cover up evidence of illegal deer poaching, although as the fires destroyed all the evidence of poaching I don’t know how the feds would know that. Oh, the feds got it from a witness, it says here.

Anyway, long story short, the Hammonds are turning themselves in after being resentenced to more prison time. They turned down the offer of a refuge from the law.

There may be a legitimate argument that the re-sentencing wasn’t fair, but the “militia” is not making that argument. Instead, they are arguing that federal land ought to be turned over to the states, which in turn ought to let the righteous white men of the West do whatever they want with it, sandhill crane habitat or no sandhill crane habitat. This has something to do with the U.S. Constitution, which they say is an “inspired document by Our Lord Jesus Christ.” However, I’m not aware of any part of the Constitution that deprives the federal government from retaining federal reservations within state boundaries. I believe in the case of national parks and wildlife reserves, states agreed to let the feds run the land and were compensated for it.

And if you want to be really picky about it, the Paiutes have a stronger claim to the land in questions than the state or the ranchers.

The question is, what’s to be done about this situation? Apparently the feds are being cautious, wanting to avoid another Waco. But letting the meatheads get away with these little tantrums seems to encourage them. I’d vote for a blockade; once they’re out of beer and beef jerky they may become more pliable.

Every now and then Dana Milbank writes something worth reading, and he did so this week. See “The GOP’s War on ‘Politically Correct.’” Milbank effectively demonstrates that, in current right-wing usage, the term “political correctness” has no actual meaning. “Once a pejorative term applied to liberals’ determination not to offend any ethnic or other identity group,” Milbank wrote,  “it now is used lazily by some conservatives to label everything classified under ‘that with which I disagree.’ ” For example:

GOP candidates are now using the “politically correct” label to shut down debate — exactly what conservatives complained politically correct liberals were doing in the first place.

When CNN’s John Berman last week asked Rick Santorum about Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from entering the country, Santorum employed the familiar evasive maneuver.

“Republicans are sick and tired of the political correctness that we can’t talk about this,” he said. “You can’t say the word ‘Muslim.'”

It wasn’t clear which officer in the P.C. Police told Santorum he couldn’t say “Muslim.”

People say “Muslim” all the time. And Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from entering the country was discussed rabidly throughout the nation for several days, with armies of people pointing out why this was a really bad idea, not to mention bigoted and possibly unconstitutional. What it is Frothy thought he was not allowed to talk about I can only guess.

Ted Cruz said that political correctness is “killing people.” I had to hunt to find out how. He was referring to the Obama Administration’s policy of not using the term “radical Islamic terrorism.” Apparently if the President would just say that phrase, ISIS would shrivel up and die on the spot.

And Ben Carson seems to think that not waterboarding people is just being PC. In his world, there is no other reason to not torture people. As Milbank said, this is intellectual laziness on its face.

I’ve only relatively recently stumbled into the acronym SJW, meaning “social justice warrior.” Apparently being a social justice warrior is a bad thing. According to Rational Wiki (which may or may not be accurate, but it’s fun to read), the phrase “social justice warrior” was coined in 2009 by a blogger named Will Shetterly. Shetterly was talking about people who like to engage in arguments favoring social justice on the Internet but aren’t committed to fighting for it anywhere else, like in the real world. They’re phonies, in other words, who are posing as liberals to raise their social status. I’m not sure why anyone would do that, but whatever.

However, SJW has since morphed into a term, meant to be a pejorative, applied to any progressive political or social activist. The subtext of this is that all progressive political or social activism is phony; people just pretend to champion liberal views to make themselves look good to other liberals who must be as phony as they are.

(Years ago I read a social psychology paper in which researchers had determined that white racists sincerely believe all other white people also believe nonwhites are inferior, and that the only reason some whites won’t support white supremacy is that “they’re just being PC.”)

“SJW” seems particularly popular among libertarians and “men’s rights advocates” (MRAs). It says here, SJWs are

… people who, according to Urban Dictionary, engage in “social justice arguments on the internet… in an effort to raise their own personal reputation.” In other words, SJWs don’t hold strong principles, but they pretend to. The problem is, that’s not a real category of people. It’s simply a way to dismiss anyone who brings up social justice–and often those people are feminists. It’s awfully convenient to have a term at the ready to dismiss women who bring up sexism, as in, “You don’t really care. As an SJW, you’re just taking up this cause to make yourself look good!”

Labeling someone “SJW” is just a way to not have to answer their arguments. Most women will recognize this as a variation of the “women are just emotional” line that sexists have used forever to avoid listening to us.

I’ve noticed that complaints about people or opinions being PC/SJW tend to follow a pattern (a recent example, if you want one). If the individual is educated enough to be writing for a commercial publication, we will learn he was traumatized in his college years by  fascistic “PC police” on campus. Even assuming some young people get a bit over-strident in their intolerance of intolerance, college is a relatively brief interlude in life that is quickly left behind as one marches into adulthood. So who’s oppressing him now? Hard to say, but he will complain bitterly about being “censored” without giving us any specific examples. Ahem.

If you want to see specific examples of people who try to intimidate other people into shutting up, see the Mahablog archive on conservative correctness.  I wrote back in 2007,

When the phrase “political correctness” was first coined, as I recall, it was something of a joke, ribbing academics for going overboard creating “inclusive” language, like “physically challenged” for “disabled.” Wingnuts seized the phrase and turned it into an all-purpose explanation for why liberals say crazy things like “racial discrimination is wrong”– the standard response is “Oh, you’re just being P.C.” Meaning, “you don’t really mean what you say.”

But we really do mean what we say, and when righties conjure up some phony outrage in order to bash liberals, we get all caught up in answering charges, explaining logical fallacies, and pointing out hypocrisies. We do this because we assume they mean what they say. And, frankly, the more cognitively challenged among them probably do mean what they say, because they can’t critically think their way out of a wet paper bag.

But Bill’s hypothesis is that many of the opinion leaders among them — he discusses Michelle Malkin because he knows her personally — don’t mean what they say. They know good and well that many of the outrages they gin up to bash us with are contrived. They’re just trying to bully us, often because (deep down inside) they think we’re trying to bully them. So while we’re exhausting ourselves in a mighty intellectual struggle, they’re just playing tit for tat and barely working up a sweat.

Now we’re hearing about “victimist” culture, never mind that righties can’t so much as say good morning without adding a complaint about how they are being victimized (see, for example the “war on Christmas”).

As has been said elsewhere, the original “PC” effort was well-intended, even if it sometimes got a bit silly (“differently abled”?). The backlash, however, is about nothing other than being able to express hate speech without being criticized for it.

And I’m done with it. The only correct response to “Oh, you’re just being PC” is “Oh, you’re just being an idiot.”  And a bigoted one at that.

I am linking to this without comment, except to say the writer is not trying to be funny. This is a Breitbrat; they have no sense of humor. Or any other sense, for that matter.

It takes a pathological degree of self-obliviousness to be a white conservative guy like Jonah Goldberg and write this:

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson took a plausible stab at why Carson is popular. “They like him, they like him,” he repeated, referring to conservatives in Iowa and elsewhere who admire Carson’s dignified and soft-spoken demeanor.

True enough; Carson has the highest favorables of any candidate in the GOP field.

But what’s remarkable is that at no point in this conversation did anyone call attention to the fact that Carson is an African-American. Indeed, most analysis of Carson’s popularity from pundits focuses on his likable personality and his sincere Christian faith. But it’s intriguingly rare to hear people talk about the fact that he’s black.

One could argue that he’s even more authentically African-American than Barack Obama, given that Obama’s mother was white and he was raised in part by his white grandparents. In his autobiography, Obama writes at length about how he grew up outside the traditional African-American experience — in Hawaii and Indonesia — and how he consciously chose to adopt a black identity when he was in college.

Meanwhile, Carson grew up in Detroit, the son of a very poor, very hard-working single mother. His tale of rising from poverty to become the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital is one of the most inspiring rags-to-riches stories of the last half-century. (Cuba Gooding Jr. played Carson in the movie about his life.) He was a towering figure in the black community in Baltimore and nationally — at least, until he became a Republican politician.

Like I said, it takes a pathological degree of self-obliviousness for Goldberg to assume he is in any way qualified to judge “authentic” African-Americanism. But note what Goldberg is saying here — he’s complaining that the world isn’t perpetually commenting on Ben Carson’s blackness.

It gets better. Goldberg then descends into the Usual Whining about how everybody picks on Republicans, and if a Democrat were to be treated as shabbily in media as Carson is being treated — the New York Times has stopped calling him “Dr.” — “charges of racism would be thick in the air.”

Then there’s the crowing about Hey, liberals — we got us a black politician, too! How do you like them apples?

How strange it must be for people who comfort themselves with the slander that the GOP is a cult of organized racial hatred that the most popular politician among conservatives is a black man. Better to ignore the elephant in the room than account for such an inconvenient fact. The race card is just too valuable politically and psychologically for liberals who need to believe that their political opponents are evil.

Carson’s popularity isn’t solely derived from his race, but it is a factor. The vast majority of conservatives resent the fact that Democrats glibly and shamelessly accuse Republicans of bigotry — against blacks, Hispanics, and women — simply because they disagree with liberal policies (which most conservatives believe hurt minorities). Yet conservatives also refuse to adopt those liberal policies just to prove they aren’t bigots. Carson — not to mention Carly Fiorina and Hispanics Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — demonstrates that there’s no inherent contradiction between being a minority (or a woman) and supporting conservative principles. And that fact is just too terrible for some liberals to contemplate.

Of course, that depends on what “conservative principles” one is talking about, but never mind.

Conservative PACs raise millions … for conservative PACs.