Thaddeus McCotter’s Weird Goodbye and Ode to Sovereign Citizens

Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 12:26 am

Goodbye, Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI).

We will miss you much, but not as much as we’ll miss your Odes To Pretension and bizarre form of Republican “hipster”isms that led to this resignation notice:

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Today I have resigned from the office of United States Representative for Michigan’s 11th Congressional District.
After nearly 26 years in elected office, this past nightmarish month and a half have, for the first time, severed the necessary harmony between the needs of my constituency and of my family. As this harmony is required to serve, its absence requires I leave.
The recent event’s totality of calumnies, indignities and deceits have weighed most heavily upon my family. Thus, acutely aware one cannot rebuild their hearth of home amongst the ruins of their U.S. House office, for the sake of my loved ones I must “strike another match, go start anew” by embracing the promotion back from public servant to sovereign citizen.
I do not leave for an existing job and face diminishing prospects (and am both unwilling and ill-suited to lobby), my priorities are twofold: find gainful employment to help provide for my family; and continue to assist, in any way they see fit, the Michigan Attorney General’s earnest and thorough investigation, which I requested, into the 2012 petition filing.
While our family takes this step into the rest of our lives, we do so with the ultimate confidence in our country’s future. True, as at other times in the life of our nation, we live in an Age of Extremes that prizes intensity over sanity; rhetoric over reality; and destruction over creation. But this too shall pass, thanks to the infinite, inspired wisdom of the sovereign people who, with God’s continued blessings, will again affirm for the generations American Exceptionalism.
Truly, it is a challenging and fortunate time to live in our blessed sanctuary of liberty.
In closing, to The People of Michigan’s 11th Congressional District, I can but say this: Thank you for the privilege of having worked for you.

Yes, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze calls Congressman Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan “a hipster’s Republican.” So now you know.

Is ‘hipster Republican” code for going rogue?

Poor Thaddeus seems to suffer from the same Republican English language disease of logorrhea, afflicting also too his sister comrade and Sovereign Citizen adjacent Sarah Palin.

For those who missed it, Sovereign Citizen is not just a pretentious way of saying I’ll no longer be Somebody – it’s a group of rather dangerous white supremacist, militia types who threaten to run on the Constitution Party (Sarah Palin’s militia friendly group) ticket for revenge.

Perhaps Thaddeus is just very, very confused.

The ADL reported:

The “sovereign citizen” movement is a loosely organized collection of groups and individuals who have adopted a right-wing anarchist ideology originating in the theories of a group called the Posse Comitatus in the 1970s. Its adherents believe that virtually all existing government in the United States is illegitimate and they seek to “restore” an idealized, minimalist government that never actually existed. To this end, sovereign citizens wage war against the government and other forms of authority using “paper terrorism” harassment and intimidation tactics, and occasionally resorting to violence.

The Sovereign Citizen movement came to the forefront “On May 20, 2010, when two West Memphis, Arkansas, police officers were killed and two Crittenden County sheriff’s officers wounded in two linked shootouts involving an anti-government sovereign citizen with ties to Ohio and Florida.”

This is also when it came out that had the police been warned by that Right Wing Extremism Department of Homeland Security memo that had to be retracted after the Right wing whined too much, they might have had a fighting chance.

Well, maybe Thaddeus’ “hipsterism” doesn’t involve going militia rogue, maybe he’s just really, really odd. Maybe he just writes with the confused, addled mind most often found in the dregs of today’s Republican Party.

Or maybe, and I’m going out on a limb of hope here, the apple has soured past its due date, and even the Republican Party wants some distance.

I say that hopefully because it would suggest that the Republicans have standards, and if this is true, the American people would be much relieved to hear it and look forward to a time when by their hearth they might too also find comfort in the home of sanity, for all sovereign people who much targeted and unduly harassed though they might be, and facing challenges unfair and mighty, still cling to that last vestige of hope that indeed, their Grand Old Party has found its bottom and with God’s infinite wisdom have chosen to, at long last, put an end to their great descent.

Oh, I kid Thaddeus. It’s just so fun to hang out there on the limb of a run run run on. He’s not the only one who likes to live dangerously.

Image: cropped version of Thaddeus McCotter (Lon Horwedel/AP)

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