To the Editor
Mr. Chmelik’s self serving demagoguery over federal land ownership merits response.  He hides a bushel of logical fallacies in his self styled patriotic apple pie.  What he is now serving may taste alright to his less than particular fellow partisans, those with gullible tastes.  But Mr. Chmelik’s poorly baked proposal is no less dangerous to consume.  
It is dangerous because Mr. Chmelik serves up a variant form of Bolshevism, despite how he styles it.  He rouses the proletariat to “compel” seizure of federal lands, using the State as his agent, and crony capitalism as his excuse.  What he ignores are two necessary ingredients:  “constitutional authority” and “property title”.  Whether he understands or not, equitable property rights also apply to the federal estate, particularly in Idaho where federal forests have been under continuous ownership since 30 April 1803…when title was purchased from France.  Too many other misrepresentations exist in Mr. Chmelik’s bitter batter to accept his recipe as a palatable argument. 
Mr. Chemlik wants to sell his pie, and yet eat it too.  He speaks in length about compelling title “transfer”.  But nowhere does Mr. Chmelik mention purchasing title under competitive bid in a free market…so the taste of hypocrisy is self evident in his claim jumping.  He certainly cannot have property rights both ways.  Were he honest, Mr. Chmelik would place his purported principles where his political speechifying is.  Unfortunately, demagoguery never follows factual recipes closely, and so we suffer accordingly from Mr. Chemlik’s spoiled neo-Bolshevism.  
Spoiled or not, if one accepts Mr. Chemlik’s logical fallacy (technically, post hoc ergo propter hoc), then one must necessarily also accept the faulty presumption which follows from it.  Specifically, using his logical fallacy, forest fires would doubtless be eradicated if only the proletariat would seize our federal forests.  Lightning strikes, drought, arson, economics, silviculture, indeed nature itself, whether human or otherwise, must all acquiesce under Mr. Chmelik’s self-advertised “bold innovation”.  That messianic hubris alone is astounding even if the bold gentleman’s half baked logic is not.
Floyd Whitley
Vice Chairman, Constitution Party of Idaho 

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