Through the past week we have witnessed events that should be viewed as our dead canary in the mine shaft. The bird who bit the dust was that not-quite-defensible old rancher out in Nevada, Cliven Bundy, who got chewed into a mess, not just by a demonstrably dishonest New York Times, but by a pack of media minds eagerly seeking to prove to the reigning media elites their politically correct bonafides:

Bill O’Reilly

Sean Hannity

Glen Beck

Without questioning the accuracy or completeness of a quote attributed to Cliven Bundy, the rancher under assault by the Federal Bureau of Land Management, all three seized firmly in their powerful jaws the deviously doctored Milkbone the Times threw out to the slavering pack of worshipful media that considers the Times a Manhattan version of the Oracle at Delphi.

Despite an overwhelmingly negative response from their watchers, readers and commenters, which can be verified by any cursory examination of the comments sections on virtually every conservative website, all three of the above-cited adherents to the worship of Political Correctness, continue to defy their bases, the very Americans who have made them what they are.  

Inexplicably they continue their clearly uninformed, hip-shooting, media assassinations of an old western rancher who doesn’t even begin to understand the eastern elitist kneejerk reactions to his admittedly fumbling attempts to express his beliefs about social issues that had nothing whatsoever to do with his mano-a-mano confrontation with an overreaching federal bureaucracy. We all know the old guy was set up by a conniving reporter from the Times, one Adam Nagourney and the issue of race was the Times Bomb selected to destroy a man defiant to over-reaching, overwhelming federal enforcement. Had the Times editorial board instead dispatched a mafia hit man to Nevada to silence the old rancher with a bullet to the brain, they could not have violated his humanity more.

Or so they so smugly thought. Surf the Internet and read the comments: they are running as a very strong tide against their supposed spokesmen, about 98 to 2, maybe even 99 to 1. I can’t recall any past event where these so-called conservative spokesmen were so out of touch with those who have made them who they are. Like so many of those Americans who feel we have been deserted by those we thought shared our beliefs, I am filled with a combination of anger, disappointment and contempt for those three men who chose to cowardly and ignorantly bow at the altar of political correctness when, were they genuine, they would have expectorated upon it.

From me, all three have lost a huge measure of trust; from how many millions of others, who knows?