Most of those ranchers expressed support all year for 'shutting down the government', and voted for Thune.

Most of them are utterly dependent on government subsidy year-round, in the form of drastically below market charges for grazing on Federal lands, for the living their business provides.

They are, by and large, not the independent, rugged individualists they imagine themselves to be, but leeches and moochers who could not exist without government assistance, and into the bargain, they are whiners who expect help they would deny others be extended to them as a matter of right.