Why is the most powerful man in the United States Senate, Harry Reid, setting up Cliven Bundy, an aging Nevada rancher who supposedly owes grazing fees, to be destroyed?
Here’s some of Reid’s latest vicious press statement about Bundy just posted on his official Senate website:
Today, Bundy revealed himself to be a hateful racist. But by denigrating people who work hard and play by the rules while he mooches off public land he also revealed himself to be a hypocrite.
To advance his extreme, hateful views, Bundy has endangered the lives of innocent women and children. This is not a game. It is the height of irresponsibility for any individual or entity in a position of power or influence to glorify or romanticize such a dangerous individual, and anyone who has done so should come to their senses and immediately condemn Bundy. For their part, national Republican leaders could help show a united front against this kind of hateful, dangerous extremism by publicly condemning Bundy.
Wow. That’s almost as “hateful” and “extreme” as Reid’s comments last weekend. You remember: The dramatic standoff – between hundreds of armed federal agents including sharpshooters, snipers and snarling dogs, and Bundy and his hundreds of supporters, some armed – appeared to have concluded peacefully when the BLM left the scene.
Immediately, Reid announced, “It’s not over,” followed shortly by his bizarre public characterization of the Bundy side of the standoff as “domestic terrorists.”
Why, pundits asked, did Reid make such an over-the-top statement – and double down on it the next day? And why, they further asked, when the government could simply place a lien on Bundy’s property and extract the money he supposedly owes (with interest) when he dies or sells his property, does it seem like the government almost wants to provoke an armed confrontation, tasing family members and killing cattle?
As I have previously pointed out, one of the left’s most cherished narratives is that normal, patriotic, conservative Americans are the real extremists, the real danger, the real “domestic terrorists.” That’s why tea party members, veterans, pro-lifers, constitutionalists and the like are constantly portrayed by the left as extremists and racists. It’s why, shortly after Barack Obama became president, his Department of Homeland Security released a nine-page report titled, "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," which prompted Oliver North to publish his widely read public rebuke of the DHS report, “I am an extremist.”
I offered my analysis of the left’s secret, unspoken reasons for all this in “Obama’s perfect crisis”:
There is one perfect crisis for Obama and the entire progressive left, one event that would serve as the ultimate validation of all their delusions, fantasies and projections, something that would validate every prejudice, lie, unworkable idea and failed policy they espouse.
The one event that would be Barack Obama’s grand-slam homerun would be if, in response to the ever-increasing outrages and provocations of the left, someone on “the right” becomes unhinged and goes violent in a big way.
That terrible event would constitute the perfect answer to all Obama’s problems, the fulfillment of the left’s fondest dreams. Haven’t you wondered why the liberal media are always painting the tea party as racist without a shred of evidence, and are always hoping out loud that every new terror act or school shooting was perpetrated by a conservative? Didn’t you see how the media fell over one another trying to portray – ridiculously and incorrectly – the Boston Marathon-bombing Tsarnaev brothers as right-wingers, and how ABC News reported – ridiculously and incorrectly – that the Aurora, Colo., movie theater mass shooter might be a tea-party member, and how the Department of Homeland Security painted pro-lifers, constitutionalists, libertarians, NRA members and returning war veterans as potential “right-wing extremists” and terrorists?
Why do they do this? Because, in their imaginations at least, violence on the right would validate their narrative. Worse, it would finally seem to justify and even necessitate Obama’s violations of Americans’ core liberties – gun control and confiscation, censorship of conservative news and talk radio as “hate speech,” the growing police state, advanced surveillance state and so on. All would be seen as necessary restraints against all those conservative terrorists out there.
With that in mind, let’s recall that when the Bundy standoff was unfolding under the heavy glare of media lights, many observers both left and right expressed their concern that the Bundy standoff could end like the disastrous 1993 Waco Massacre or, especially, the deadly Ruby Ridge confrontation and siege in 1992.
In the Waco disaster, multiple federal agencies, believing federal firearms laws had been violated, assaulted the group home of the Branch Davidian religious sect, resulting in the FBI burning the entire compound down to the ground, killing 76 people inside – including many women and children.
In Ruby Ridge, Randy Weaver, accused of a minor firearms violation, was entrapped by the federal government, wrongfully targeted with an arrest warrant, ambushed by U.S. marshals, and saw his dog, and then his 14-year-old son, shot dead. Thanks to outrageous “shoot-on-sight” rules of engagement given to government snipers, Weaver’s wife, Vicki, was also shot dead while standing in a doorway holding her baby.
Today, Waco and Ruby Ridge are universally regarded as two of the most egregious examples of out-of-control and deadly government overreach in modern U.S. history.
Take note, however: There was one element present in the Ruby Ridge siege that has been absent from the Bundy standoff. Although both include a legal issue weighing against them – Weaver the firearms violation and Bundy the court-ordered federal grazing fees – Weaver was painted as a marginal, hateful, racist individual, a “white separatist,” while Bundy was just a hard-working American rancher.
And while the alleged firearms violation served as the legal pretext for sending a division of heavily armed federal agents out to Weaver’s remote Idaho cabin, the racism allegation allowed many Americans to muse, “Oh, he must have been some kind of violent, hateful nut – a white supremacist or something.”
So when the Bundy showdown resolved last week due to admirable restraint, both on the part of the BLM and the other law enforcement personnel on scene, and on the part of Bundy supporters on scene, some of them armed and all of them frustrated and upset over the bullying of the Bundy family, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
After all, Bundy was a hero, a rancher, a Christian, an almost iconic, all-American figure. How would it look if someone like that was attacked by armed federal agents?
But wait! Suppose Bundy turned out to be a racist? What if he was, in Harry Reid’s words, “a hateful racist” and “dangerous individual” who had “endangered the lives of innocent women and children” – not to mention a “domestic terrorist”?
I mean, don’t we kill terrorists?
Wouldn’t Reid’s outrageous defamation make it easier for the government to commence Round 2, as Reid promised?
Let’s go back to Reid’s press release and zoom in on one sentence:
“National Republican leaders could help show a united front against this kind of hateful, dangerous extremism by publicly condemning Bundy.”
“United front.” Where have I heard that term before?
Oh yes, it’s leftwing code, which even Wikipedia accurately deciphers:
The united front is a form of struggle or political organization that may be carried out by revolutionaries or communist political regimes. The basic theory of the united front tactic was first developed by the Comintern, an international communist organization created by communists in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
According to the thesis of the 1922 4th World Congress of the Comintern: “The united front tactic is simply an initiative whereby the Communists propose to join with all workers belonging to other parties and groups and all unaligned workers in a common struggle to defend the immediate, basic interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie.”
The united front allowed workers committed to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism to struggle alongside non-revolutionary workers. Through these common struggles revolutionaries sought to win other workers to revolutionary socialism.
OK Harry, we get the message. It’s important for even the hated Republicans, whom you revile daily, to join in your “united front” against the rancher in your state who is disputing his grazing fees on constitutional grounds. Ever hear of civil disobedience? It’s how the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘60s was won.
You, Sen. Reid, have been a major player in harming the nation that has so graciously given you wealth, power, fame and comfort – particularly through your role in dismantling the world’s best healthcare system – but now, with our nation and world aflame, old Clive Bundy is the one with whom you are most obsessed.
Could it be that, deep down in their conniving, progressive brains, leftists like Reid kind of want to provoke a war with some rightwing “domestic terrorists”?
I hope – I pray – restraint will win out, and the situation resolve peacefully, and with finality.
If the government wants to slap a lien on Bundy’s property for the grazing fees it says he owes, so be it. But this is not about the million dollars the government claims Bundy owes, because the government spends that much every nine seconds. It’s not about the rule of law, because Reid helps lead the most lawless government in U.S. history. It’s about intimidation, about coercion, about bullying and getting your way, and about making an example out of Cliven Bundy, his wife and their 14 children.
Make no mistake: If there’s to be a confrontation, it will be because Harry Reid wants a confrontation. They don’t call him “Dirty Harry” for nothing.
By the way, not that it really matters that much, but regarding Bundy’s supposedly racist comments? Watch the video of what he said in context, and then watch the edited video below it and see what the New York Times and Media Matters left out.
Unedited video of Cliven Bundy:
Edited video of Cliven Bundy:
Related columns:
New York Times sting entraps Bundy by Joseph Farah
Why the land belongs to Bundy by Ilana Mercer
Additional reports
Prominent black leader supports embattled rancher
Bundy's son: N.Y. Times quote 'out of context'