To The editor:
An apparent big rift in Wyoming Republican politics just got wider this past weekend with dueling messages on Facebook.
State Sen. Anthony Bouchard (R-Cheyenne) and his l’il club WYGO (Wyoming Gun Owners) have taken a cheap shot at State Sen. Ogden Driskill (R-Devils Tower) and accused him of being soft on guns. Furthermore, they have impugned the political integrity of one of Wyoming’s most stalwart Senators. This behavior is unbelievable!!
First off, my old friend Ogden is a crusty, old-school senator from the upper east side of Wyoming – an area not at all known as a hotbed of Bolshevism. His conservative Wyoming credentials are beyond reproach. For a carpetbaggin’ bunch of opportunists like WYGO to call them into question is laughable.
Beyond that, I have known Ogden most of my life. We were brought up the same way. Ogden and I can grump and growl at each other when we politically disagree, but then have a beer together and swap stories about snotty broncs. That’s how we disagree in Wyoming. Face-to-face. And always with a fundamental respect for each other as Wyomingites.
WYGO loudly proclaims their “Wyoming Republican values”, but that’s just hot air my friends. They behave like spoiled kids at the dinner table. Make no mistake, the godfathers of the Wyoming Republican Party, the Hansens, the Hathaways, and the Simpsons would haul these brats by the ear out to the political woodshed.
There, upstarts like Anthony Bouchard and WYGO’s Aaron Dorr would learn important lessons about not acting up that the table and not throwing food.
It’s a disturbing thought, but WYGO might just be a microcosm of what is happening within the Wyoming Republican Party.
It’s certainly no secret that there is intra-party turmoil and a schism within the Wyoming GOP. There is a tug-of-war between the hard, right wing zealots of the party and . . . well, everyone else.
They call everyone else RINOs, or “Republican in Name Only,” and they have the temerity to try to apply that term to Ogden Driskill, and to a good share of our Wyoming Legislature.
That WYGO is likely acting as attack dog for the lunatic fringe of the party goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. WYGO is acting as attack dog for the lunatic fringe of the Wyoming Republican Party.
And they have every right to act up and throw food at the political table. As long as their paperwork with the IRS and the Secretary of State is in order (and I’m not saying it is, I’m not saying it ain’t).
Outside agitators like WYGO are free to cross our borders. They are free to try to drive wedges between us, free to politic on a platform of fear, free to hawk their snake oil. They are free to badmouth anyone they want.
But they need to realize that this is Wyoming. We’ve seen this crap before and we’ve dealt with it.
Folks with that buckin’ horse on their license plate are notoriously immune to outsiders coming into Wyoming and trying to tell us what to do. When they attack our friends and neighbors, regardless of the donnybrooks we may have had with that neighbor, we have our neighbor’s back.
If WYGO, that gun-totin’, whiny little bunch of newcomers who come in here trying to get us to fight each other, doesn’t realize that, they need to spend a little time contemplating the statue on the courthouse lawn in Buffalo.
Ogden Driskill not a conservative? Don’t make me laugh!
