property rights
Showdown on the Range

Showdown on the Range

The issues that caused the standoff between the federal BLM and a Nevada rancher are being clouded by deliberate misinformation from government officials and the media. ...
William F. Jasper

“Domestic terrorists.” That is how U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid referred to the hundreds of supporters who had come to Bunkerville, Nevada, to stand with the besieged ranch family of Cliven and Carol Bundy against the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

While most critics of the Bundys and their supporters have veered short of the verbal excesses of Nevada’s senior senator, they have nonetheless showered the 67-year-old rancher and his adherents with venom and ridicule. “Welfare rancher,” “deadbeat,” “crackpot,” “redneck teabagger,” “fools,” “fanatics,” “wackos” — those are some of the more printable epithets. Elias Isquith at Salon.com delivers the typical “liberal” analysis, describing Bundy as “wingnut rancher” and his allies as “anti-government extremists.” Over at the Huffington Post, college student Brian Jecunas was given column space to pontificate that Bundy is a “dangerous knave” and a “selfish radical.” “Hopefully,” Jecunas wrote, “Bundy and his followers will end up where criminals belong — a cramped prison cell.”

Presumably, Harry Reid and others of his ilk would have been satisfied had the standoff gone beyond arrests and incarceration, ending with Cliven Bundy and the hundreds of ranchers, cowboys, cowgirls, clerks, truck drivers, Boy Scouts, grandmas, moms, dads, and children — the “domestic terrorists” — mowed down by the federal army of agents from the BLM and other agencies.

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