Lin in Kansas sez:
    I think the whole point of "Beer for My Horses" is contained
    in this line:

    "A man had to answer for the wicked that he done."

    What a novel idea in these days of "It's ALWAYS somebody
    else's fault!"

Ummm, sometimes, it _is_ someone else's fault. On no fault at
all, just an imagined slight (think Emmett Till). Which is
why vigilantism is bad, bad, bad. Hell, even _with_ "due process",
we seem to convict many innocent people. Think that Toby Keith's
version of justice is going to do better? Why should we
laud that type of mentality?

As for whether lynchings in Texas are cattle rustlers, or
something else, here's from Michael Lind's book "Made In Texas"
(p. 8), talking about McLennan County, home of Dubya's
Crawford "ranch":

    Waco was one of the centers of lynching in the United States.
    In Texas, 20 of the lynchings that claimed 468 victims between
    1885 and 1945 took place in a belt of eleven counties
    along the Brazos River, including McLennan County. (As
    it happens, the George Herbert Walker Bush Library at
    Texas A&M in College Station, like the younger Bush's
    ranch, is in the heart of the historic Texan lynching
    belt). Most of the victoms of mob violence in Texas
    as a whole were black (339), although there were also
    whites (77), Latinos (53), and one Native American.
    Lynching was all but unknown in the perts of Texas
    untouched by plantation agriculture; only 15 of 322
    incidents occurred outside of East Texas.

So much for the "cattle rustler" theory here. Lind also
describes Waco (near Crawford) and East Texas as one of the
strongholds of the KKK in the post-Civil-War, and even
describes Crawford as a "white-flight suburb" of Waco.

As for who Keith is talking about (assuming he wasn't
really in favour of _lynching_ the person whose acts
killed his father), he says:

    We got too many gangsters doing dirty deeds
    We've got too much corruption, too much crime in the streets
    It's time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground
    Send 'em all to their maker and he'll settle 'em down

If he's talking about Mafiosi here, that'd be news to me.
And I'd say that if he wants vigilantes to take on the Mafia,
he may find they're better armed and financed. . . .

As for corruption, I doubt he's asking that Kenny Lay
(or Thomas White or Dick Cheney) be strung up.

The last line seems to echo the line, "Kill 'em all,
and let God sort 'em out. . . ."

Maybe I'm being a bit sensitive, but I do think it's
worth taking a little closer look at the sentiments
expressed (and to remember the historical background
of these acts as well). . . .

Cheers,

                              -- Arne Langsetmo