You have to be extremely stupid to send a couple of
hundred armed government agents to confiscate some bullheaded rancher’s cattle
without contemplating how the rest of the nation will interpret your actions.
What was obvious to voters who rejected Barack
Obama’s run for the presidency the first and second time was the fact that he
lacked any record of competency to be President. The rest voted for him because
they wanted to say they helped elect the first black President of the United
States and because they believed what this pathological liar said then and
since.
The assertion that Obama’s and Eric Holder’s
actions and policies are opposed because they are black is absurd. It is an
insult to everyone who voted for Obama and to the rest of us.
I love the notion that Cliven Bundy lives in
Bunkerville. It reminded me of Bunker Hill and you know how badly that
eventually turned out for the British in 1775. What ensued was a guerrilla war
led by George Washington that defeated the most powerful nation of its time.
There is no way a militia with small arms can defeat the kind of arms the U.S.
government can bring to bear on such a battle, but one has to admire the
courage of those people who showed up to confront them. That’s quintessentially
American!
Bundy should have paid his grazing rights fees.
Other ranchers do. What he has done, however, is bring greater awareness the
amount of land that the federal government owns in Nevada and elsewhere,
particularly west of the Mississippi, and expose a regime that wants to
intimidate Americans with force.
According to Wikipedia, “The Bureau
of Land Management (BLM) is an agency within the United States Department of
the Interior that administers America's public lands, totaling approximately
247.3 million acres, or one-eighth of the landmass of the country. The BLM also
manages 700 million acres (2,800,000 km) of subsurface mineral estate
underlying federal, state, and private lands. Most public lands are located in
western states, especially Alaska. With approximately 10,000 permanent
employees and close to 2,000 seasonal employees, this works out to over 21,000
acres (85 km) per employee. The agency's budget was $960,000,000 for 2010
($3.79 per surface acre, $9.38 per hectare)”
I can understand the need for national forests and
reserves, but I have concerns that those reserves are used as an excuse to deny
access to massive energy sources that lie beneath their surface. If the U.S.
didn’t own most of Nevada, Bundy would not need to pay grazing fees. Most certainly,
his ancestors didn’t. The other excuse, that the government is trying to
protect an endangered tortoise, is just part of the environmental movement’s
efforts to keep energy sources from being available to all of us. Endangered
species is pure fiction.
What worries me and many of my blogger colleagues
is the prospect of a renewed effort by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)
regarding what is essentially a fairly minor dispute between it and Bundy.
Showing some common sense, the BLM backed off its initial effort.
I don’t think the BLM response to Bundy was
exclusive to the agency. That decision needed to be sent up the line as far as
the White House. Indeed, it was likely initiated by the White House.
Even more scary is the fact that only Fox News
channel had reporters on the scene. No other major television news outlet set
journalists to record the event. How much in league with the White House does
the media have to be to ignore two hundred armed government agents descending
on a ranch in Nevada?
I suspect that a lot of Americans and most
certainly those who live in the rural areas of the nation are going to remember
the Bundy face-off with the BLM come the November midterm elections. While most
voters are crowded into the cities on the East and West Coasts, there are a lot
of others in “flyover country.’
When you add in all the folks who lost their
healthcare insurance and others who have discovered they can’t even buy a
policy until next January, that’s going to be a voting bloc that could decimate
Democratic Party candidates.
All tyrannies over-reach at some point and we are
seeing that occur in the White House. The nation is fortunate to have the House
controlled by Republicans and now needs a Senate as well in order to dispense
some much needed justice on behalf of Americans.
It’s going to be interesting to see how the White
House responds to the May 16 “Operation American Spring” being organized to
bring a million or more to Washington, D.C. to participate in an event that
will demonstrate the breadth of the unhappiness that has spread since Obama’s
first election and is gaining momentum since his second.
The White House response will tell us all a lot
about its current state of mind. Whatever it has in mind is likely to leak. The
best thing about Washington, D.C. is its inability to keep a secret. The worst
thing is the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.
© Alan Caruba, 2014
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