Phonies in Hats

A visit to Rinoville

At my first of two fall visits to Pastor Chuck Baldwin’s Liberty Fellowship, I met my friend, human dynamo, Dr. Annie Bukacek. If you ever listen to Chuck’s sermons online, you’ll hear indefatigable Annie in the audience, saying, “Yep, Exactly.”, “Amen!”, “That’s right!”, “Praise the Lord!”, etc. For a short time, these frequent interjections annoyed me a little and I thought, “What is this, O’Tuckalofa Baptist Church of Yalobusha County, Mississippi?* If I visit this place am I going to have to redo my baptism properly and go wade in the water down at the swamp? I get enough of that during pond-cleaning season!”

(*I actually did not make that up. Such a place exists, and is now on my bucket list.)

Nowadays, however, I dig the constant affirmations coming from Dr. B and I betcha Pastor Chuck would feel a bit lost if he didn’t have his one-woman Amen corner in the crowd. I couldn’t invite Annie out for pizza after Pastor Baldwin’s service because she had to run, but before she was out the door, she said, “Oh, Dan! What are you guys doing next Friday evening?”

-Nothing, as far as I know.

-You guys wanna go to a Bitterroot Republican fundraiser? They’re trying to make rodeo the state sport. I’ve been invited down as a guest and they said I could bring a friend. You and Lukas can come as my dates. There’ll be lots of food and some speeches; it’ll be a blast.

On Monday, I told Bonnie, co-chair of Bitterroot Sons of Liberty.

-She’s gonna go meet with them!?

-Yeah. Why?

-Those are the local RINOs. They’re about as conservative as a modern Disney movie script! I wonder if Annie knows what she’s doing.

Recently there has been a local power struggle between the old guard Republicans, let’s call them the Hannity Republicans, and the firebrand upstarts who finally got politically engaged after the train of abuses finally broke the camel’s back during the pandemic. Let’s call the 2nd group the Constitutionalists. If Annie Bukacek and Pastor Chuck’s congregation were down here, they’d of course side with the 2nd group. “We gotta tell her who she’s dealing with!” warned Bonnie.

Bonnie doesn’t pussyfoot around. If there’s a job to do and nobody volunteers, she and Ed will do the job themselves. They are all over the county, at city hall meetings, county health commission hearings, fairs, speeches, street demonstrations, etc. They are the gadflies making officialdom uncomfortable. The opposition sees them as tin-foil-hat hell raisers, but they are very beloved in the true conservative and constitutionalist camp, who, by the way, also appreciatingly see them as hell raisers. I wondered how the conversation between Dr. Bukacek and Bonnie might go. I tried to call Annie to give her a heads up, before Bonnie the human tornado waylaid her.

The next day I called Bonnie. I said, “I tried to call Annie, but she wasn’t answering last night or this morning.”

-Oh, I got her.

-You did?

-Yep. I told her all about the fund-raiser. I told her they were just getting her down there so they could present someone normal at their little party. They want to appear legitimate so they bring down someone who actually works for Montana and the people.

-Did you convince her to stay away?

-No, she said it was too late. But at least she’s been warned about it. She said she’ll take that into account.

Annie has to finesse both sides for the time being. She won election to the District 5 Public Service Commission seat as a Republican so she can’t just go all Rambo against the RINOs, the way Bonnie seems to.

Lukas and I arrived a few minutes early and just as we were walking into the big indoor hall at the Fairgrounds, I heard my flip phone indicating a text had come in.

took in too many patients at the clinic today and have run way overtime. can’t make it down to Bitterroot. Tell them I’m sorry and you guys have a blast!

Now I felt a little weird. This place would be full of Republican donors, each shelling out forty bucks or so, plus fatter donation opportunities on top of that. The only ones not paying were the staff and the invited guest speakers and notables like Annie, and me and Lukas. Lukas was good to have around. He didn’t feel at all weird. The smell of roast beef was wafting to the entrance end of the hall and that’s all Luke needed to overpower any sense of freeloader guilt, not that that feeling is in his emotional quiver anyway.

They had you on a spread sheet and when you told them your name the printer spit out a name tag, sticky on one side so you could tack it to your shirt. Luke and I passed by the dessert table and took a couple seats about as far from the center podium as possible. With Annie, I would have been “friend of Dr. Bukacek”, but without her, I would just stand out as the underemployed-in-winter pond-scum cleaner while discussing the latest news on FOX with Ravalli County’s Republican donor class.

Annie had told us it was going to be a five course meal and I’d imagined a wait staff of dozens running to a fro in white, collared shirts and bow ties, but I think someone had overpromised the food side of the event when they invited her. It was self-serve at a long, rectangular table where you could access the 3 stainless-steel buffet servers from either side. Meat, potatoes and steamed corn and carrots. I think the gravy was course #4 and the dessert would be #5. A bit of a let down but hey, I wasn’t paying, and the meat was excellent and you can never go wrong with roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy. Considering a lot of the ticket price would go toward the political donation, they did about as well as you could expect.

Five or six speakers would address the audience during the course of the meal. Before dinner, they announced the luminaries in attendance. Dr. Bukacek wasn’t on the list of speakers, as of course they certainly wouldn’t want to risk her talking about her specialty, public health and the disaster that was/is the ‘covid’ response and fraud. I agreed with Bonnie, they just wanted Annie here to lend some street cred to the gathering.

After dinner they announced the dessert auction would commence. Whoever thought this up is a genius. They get volunteers to bake a bunch of pies and cakes, and put them on display. There must have been 25 or 30 dessert plates on that table, from classic apple pies to meticulously decorated cakes of all sorts of varieties.

At auction time, each table collects donations for the cause and puts them in a big envelope with the table number on it. Then they collect the envelopes and rank each table according to the size of the donation. Nobody wants to look like a skinflint putz so around the huge hall you could see wallets and purses opening and cash coming out. Now, I’m a bit of a skinflint to begin with but the main problem here was I couldn’t have cared less about the effort we were financially supporting. All this hoopla was for a push to make rodeo the state sport of Montana. In each of the speeches by various Montana politicians, every one of them had to mention how great rodeo was and how much it was a Montana thing and gee we really need to recognize this fact by making it our state sport, whatever that meant.

With all the crap going on statewide, nationally and globally, I thought the Republican Party of Montana could be spending time and money more wisely. I think the whole thing was mainly a chance for politicians to get up and politick. And I love rodeo!

So I didn’t make a donation. Neither did Lukas, which meant our table, with only two potential donors, sent back an empty envelope. Ever the pessimist, I imagined we’d be punished for our tightfistedness. Here we were coming as unpaid, uninvited guests of a no-show invitee, and stuffing ourselves at the buffet and helping ourselves to the entire bowl of salad and basket of dinner rolls for our table and not introducing ourselves to the silver hairs and for all this we would get no dessert and possibly a hugely embarrassing public shaming when they announced our table last. “And finally table 37, you may claim the last dessert, thanks to your contribution of….em…well, just go ahead and collect your Jell-0 Holiday Eggnog Ring.”

Lukas, ever the optimist, looked at me and said, “Are you really worried they’re going to say something and not give us any dessert?”

-I don’t know if they’re going to say something, but we’re going to be last and we’ll be just sitting here while everyone who made a donation is eating dessert. It’ll look pretty pathetic!

Turning his head back to the fifth dinner roll that he was buttering, Lukas said, “I don’t think we need to worry about it. We’ll probably get something.”

Lukas was right; after they went through the donor tables, from big money to small, they called our table, and we weren’t even last; there were other cheapskates in the hall! Still embarrassed, I told Luke to go get the dessert. “I don’t care what you grab. I’m sure the good pies are gone so whatever you want is fine with me.” Lucky Lukas grabbed a big banana cream something or other and even had a lady come up to him and say, “Nobody claimed the desert we made. Do you want to take home a Green Angel Lime Cake?”

Lukas said yes, of course, thank you very much and he brought it to the table but on closer inspection it looked like the remains of some chemical explosion in the meth lab and he was able to pawn it off on someone’s grandkids at another table.

After dessert the heavy hitters came up to do their shtick- ‘24 will be an election year. Republican senate candidate Tim Sheahy spoke and gestured often toward his wife and kids. I guess the biggest big shot was US House Representative Ryan Zinke. I don’t know, I suppose I appreciate that he and Sheahy were Navy Seals, at least in the sense that very few people are mentally and physically tough enough to achieve that. But for me the bigger questions in judging his character and record are, “So, what did you do as a Navy Seal? I mean, I get that you led a bunch of very bad-ass fighters on dangerous combat missions, but really, for what? How did your kicking ass in Iraq improve the life of Joe Average Montanan, or improve America?” Our involvement in Iraq didn’t seem to do much for the average Iraqi either. And so I hesitate to applaud a political candidate for his military involvement in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria, etc. I mostly kept to myself that evening as I know how unpopular these sentiments are among such a crowd.

Congressman Zinke is just like you and me- the baseball cap is proof! And isn’t that a nice touch- haybales and horse figurines.

Candidate Tim Sheahy for US Senate also made hay out of his career as a Navy Seal, and as a successful businessman. He runs a firefighting aerospace company out of Belgrade, MT. His customer is the US government.

Both candidates seemed to know how to work a crowd. Sheahy did a great job at sounding earnest. Lukas really liked his speech, even when I told him it was all hot air and not one promise would be kept after the election.

Of the two, however, Zinke sounded slimier.

His speech sounded like a boilerplate DC-insider sales pitch for the booboisie back on the home front. I don’t know much about Zinke but I got a bad feeling listening to his schtick. As he droned on, schmoozing the crowd, I couldn’t help but think of disgraced former Montana US Senator Billy Jorgenson. Remember him? I knew that guy was trouble the first time I saw his phony, homespun campaign ad: