This… THIS… is the photo that Bruce Busa chose as his campaign portrait. Sadly, it’s a decent reflection of his politics.

Busa is the Republican candidate for Vermont House in Bennington-1, currently represented by Democrat Nelson Brownell. This isn’t Busa’s first run for office; in 2018 he was an independent candidate for U.S. Senate. Bernie Sanders won with more than two-thirds of the vote. Busa finished ninth out of nine candidates with 914 votes, or a whopping 0.34% of the total.

So here he is again. He’s not a “stealth conservative” because he makes no bones about who he is. But his candidacy is yet another stain on the Republican brand in Vermont.

High-, or lowlights. Busa believes that the combination of Article 22 and the Global Warming Solutions Act could lead to state-mandated abortions. He thinks school shootings are the schools’ fault. He wants creationism taught alongside evolution. And of course he’s dead set against the Covid vaccine.

Oh, almost forgot. He attended the January 6 insurrection, and he thinks it was a false flag operation incited by Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

He also endorses the platform of the Bennington Republican Committee which, I didn’t realize they had one. Of course I was curious.

It’s not really a platform, just a series of short declarative sentences. Right there near the top is “We believe in adopting a balanced budget” which, um, Vermont is legally mandated to adopt a balanced budget.

It gets worse. They support school choice and back-to-basics education including “American History, not revisionist ideology.” So no more of that critical race theory claptrap. The section on “Environment” prioritizes “affordable energy.” Climate change can go screw.

And naturally they oppose abortion and support “voter integrity,” which means making it harder to vote.

Back to Busa. A correspondent sent me a screenshot of a Busa social media rant about the January 6 insurrection, which he attended. He asserts that he saw “the presence of antifa, and the presence of BLM activists, the resistance, and just plain ‘others.'” He also minimized the Capitol attack with some back-of-the-envelope math. “Let’s say there were 2,000 unruly beaching protesters to the 1,000,000 total number of protesters. 2,000/1,000,000 = 0.2%.”

Well, first, ain’t no million. Second, even if it was only 0.2% of the crowd, which it wasn’t, that’s no excuse for breaking the law and terrorizing our elected officials. Third, “beaching” protesters? Hope they brought sunscreen.

Otherwise I didn’t have to go beyond Busa’s campaign Facebook Page, to fill my shopping cart. His page has a whopping 19 followers and, unlike those of stealth Republicans, is completely unrestrained.

The four most recent posts are about Article 22, which he calls “the Worst ‘Article’ proposal I have ever seen.” This isn’t your usual stealth conservative plaint about “vague language.” This is way out there in space.

You can tell by the random fonts, boldfaces, capitalizations, and loose adherence to the rules of spelling and grammar that this guy has a well-grounded view of reality.

Once he gets Article 22 off his chest, he moves on to school shootings. The problem there isn’t the guns, no sirree. “School shooters seem to be school children; there must be something wrong in the schools!”

He quotes Jack Sawyer, the young man who plotted a mass shooting in Fair Haven, as saying that school shootings were “‘natural selection taken up a notch,’ therefor he was a DARWINIST and the theory of evolution leaves the soul empty of reason.”

My mind is empty of logic.

You just know where he stands on the Covid vaccine.

A person should NOT be refused alternate treatment nor treatment for unrelated issues because of their refusal to put a foreign substance into their body. Such as a COVID jab. Especially one that has Not been through the normal ten years testing process.

Sure, let’s let the pandemic run wild for a decade while we wait for the usual drug approval process to unspool.

Here’s the Busa wisdom on climate change.

If the politicians would leave the market to work, the alternatives would develop as the need develops. There is no need to falsely manipulate the market.
Does it not make sense that as the climate warms, we will use less heating fuels?

Well, that’s comforting.

Finally, Busa issues a warning on a developing bugaboo of the far right, a little something called ESG. That’s short for Environmental, Social, and Governance. It’s a way to measure the sustainability of a business. “ESG Scores is an invasion of our privacy,” Busa writes. If you haven’t heard of it, just wait. It’s going to be right up there with critical race theory.

Does Busa have a shot at unseating Brownell? I sure as hell hope not. My inner chaos enthusiast wouldn’t mind seeing Busa roam the halls of the Statehouse and do his best to gunk up whichever committee he gets put on. But for the sake of reason and good lawmaking, let’s hope he quickly returns to the spider hole he emerged from.

Note: The title of this post is an homage to the late great professional wrestler Pampero Firpo, the Wild Bull of the Pampas. Busa’s face kind of rang a bell.