End of a fed

A gruesome scene in a mountain cemetery of Clay County, Kentucky, discovered on September 12th by Jerry Weaver, with his wife and daughter, while visiting family graves:

"He was murdered," Weaver said. "There's no doubt."

"The only thing he had on was a pair of socks," Weaver said. "And they had duct-taped his hands, his wrists. He had duct tape over his eyes, and they gagged him with a red rag or something."...

According to a Kentucky State Police statement, the body was hanging from a tree with a rope around the neck, yet it was in contact with the ground.

"And they even had duct tape around his neck," Weaver said. "And they had like his identification tag on his neck. They had it duct-taped to the side of his neck, on the right side, almost on his right shoulder."

He could see writing on Sparkman's chest, but could not read that it said "fed."

Authorities have said the word was scrawled with a felt-tip pen.

As the victim was an employee of the Census Bureau, much is being made of this specific detail, particularly in "liberal media" outlets, with suggestions that the first blood has been shed in the civil war of our time, which up to now has only involved shouting.

A case in point, from the Washington Monthly:

...what we've learned thus far is gruesome, and continues to raise the prospect of what may have been a politically-motivated slaying. Faiz Shakir added, "Regardless of what the motive for the killing may have been, why would a murderer(s) take such pains to so blatantly convey anger, fear, and vitriol towards a Census employee? Perhaps because some on the right have created an impression that Census employees are terrifying."

The record on that front is clear -- Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Glenn Beck, and Neal Boortz have invested considerable energy in trying to convince confused, right-wing activists that the Census and those who work for the Census Bureau are not to be trusted, and may even be dangerous.

But, what is known of the case thus far scarcely lends itself to such interpretation. The purely jurisdictional aspects might tell us more. The entirety of Clay County is within Daniel Boone National Forest. As such, it is spared the ravages of mountain top removal mining. Instead, one of the main economic engines of the area, besides tourism, is marijuana farming. Being in a national forest, the abundance of public lands lends jurisdictionally fertile grounds for this illegal crop. But, at the same time, it makes for very tense relations between local growers and federal employees, even for hapless census workers... nay, especially for hapless census workers. Taking into account the increasingly nosey features of the census, particularly when it comes to documenting discrepancies between employment, income, home values and the like, these federal employees might rightly be regarded as reconnaissance agents in the war on drugs.

But, don't expect your average smarmy media morons to comprehend these subtleties. Rather, their socio-political milieu compels them to entertain the speculated motive... Like third rate conspiracy theorists, they give the buffoon Glen Beck far too much cache.

But on that score, it is interesting that the story broke (in the national media) two weeks late. The body was discovered on September 12th, which happened to be the signature day of Beck's patriotic campaign and rally in Washington. So, why not cart the story out in the immediate aftermath of the rally? Instead, the murder and its purported connection to anti-government sentiment on the right made the national media rounds immediately preceding the day that hearings were held in Congress for Ron Paul's "Audit the Fed" bill, this coming just as Paul published his book, End the Fed (a phrase we might imagine Sparkman's killers uttering in his final moments). This association would not be lost to the psy-ops string-pullers of the mainstream and "alternative" media. Even the name, Bill Sparkman, invites the association, by co-opting the logic of Paul's supporters: Ron Paul, the man whose bill will spark a Second American Revolution!

So, we think, the timing of the story is itself a volley in psychological warfare, overtly trashing the likes of Glen Beck; but subliminally, its main target is Ron Paul.


Update, Nov. 24

Census worker's death ruled a suicide