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You know a news story is important when memes about it go viral on yr Facebook feed. Which is why I now know who Cliven Bundy is and what he’s been up to in Nevada. (Namely, getting into an armed standoff with the US Bureau of Land Management over the fact that (1) Bundy lets his cows graze on federal land and (2) Bundy doesn’t recognize the authority of the US govt to tell him where his cows can and cannot graze.)
It’s as bizarre a story as you can get from the Hardcore Libertarian front, even though it’s a story that’s been going on for over 20 years, apparently.
In fact, it’s such an old story – and one where Bundy is on shaky legal ground – that even Tea Party politicians aren’t that interested in exploiting it, if only because they’ve already got Obamacare to kick around, and that’s going to motivate the national base more than some oppressed rancher in Nevada.
But that hasn’t stopped Sean Hannity and other conservative pundits from gushing all over it as a kind of penultimate example of the evils of Big Obama Govt Tyranny and how you can defeat it if you have enough guns. And judging from my Facebook feed, their audience is pretty much eating it up, if only because they were sold on the Obama Is Hitler/The Antichrist/Both meme back when he was still just a junior senator.
Anyway.
Personally, I think the BLM did the right thing in backing off – not because Bundy is right, but because it wasn’t worth getting into a bloody battle over a bunch of cows eating federal grass. On the other hand, you can see the dilemma it’s created, as Steve Benen at MSNBC has correctly pointed out:
So it’s fair to ask: what happens next time?
And there probably will be a next time. Because there is a considerable "Go Galt" constituency out there who would very much like the Federal Govt to leave them alone in every respect (especially the paying taxes respect).
A lot of the blame has been put on conservative media outlets for throwing gas on the fire. That’s probably true to an extent – when you trade in angry alarmist paranoid rhetoric directed against a specific POTUS/party and yr audience tends to be well-armed, you can’t very well act surprised when some of them take you seriously enough to break out the guns (although Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson have done a pretty good job of that).
On the other hand, most conservatives don’t get involved in armed standoffs with the Feds, and I’m pretty sure the militia guys would have shown up locked and loaded even if the media hyperbole had been kept to a minimum.
In any case, it’s pretty symptomatic of where America’s head is at in 2014. And I don’t expect it to get better anytime soon.
I’m tempted to go off on a tangent here about how Glenn Beck described the armed militias (which he described as “"violent, anti-government groups") as "the right's version of Occupy Wall Street".
But we all know about Glenn Beck by now, so there’s no sense spending any more time on that.
All hat no cattle,
This is dF
It’s as bizarre a story as you can get from the Hardcore Libertarian front, even though it’s a story that’s been going on for over 20 years, apparently.
In fact, it’s such an old story – and one where Bundy is on shaky legal ground – that even Tea Party politicians aren’t that interested in exploiting it, if only because they’ve already got Obamacare to kick around, and that’s going to motivate the national base more than some oppressed rancher in Nevada.
But that hasn’t stopped Sean Hannity and other conservative pundits from gushing all over it as a kind of penultimate example of the evils of Big Obama Govt Tyranny and how you can defeat it if you have enough guns. And judging from my Facebook feed, their audience is pretty much eating it up, if only because they were sold on the Obama Is Hitler/The Antichrist/Both meme back when he was still just a junior senator.
Anyway.
Personally, I think the BLM did the right thing in backing off – not because Bundy is right, but because it wasn’t worth getting into a bloody battle over a bunch of cows eating federal grass. On the other hand, you can see the dilemma it’s created, as Steve Benen at MSNBC has correctly pointed out:
[…] it’s unsustainable to think a group of well-armed extremists can simply block the enforcement of American laws in the United States. It’s perfectly understandable that the Bureau of Land Management saw a crisis unfolding and pulled back to prevent bloodshed, but there’s an obvious problem with establishing a radical precedent: you, too, can ignore the law and disregard court rulings you don’t like, just so long as you have well-armed friends pointing guns at Americans.
So it’s fair to ask: what happens next time?
And there probably will be a next time. Because there is a considerable "Go Galt" constituency out there who would very much like the Federal Govt to leave them alone in every respect (especially the paying taxes respect).
A lot of the blame has been put on conservative media outlets for throwing gas on the fire. That’s probably true to an extent – when you trade in angry alarmist paranoid rhetoric directed against a specific POTUS/party and yr audience tends to be well-armed, you can’t very well act surprised when some of them take you seriously enough to break out the guns (although Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson have done a pretty good job of that).
On the other hand, most conservatives don’t get involved in armed standoffs with the Feds, and I’m pretty sure the militia guys would have shown up locked and loaded even if the media hyperbole had been kept to a minimum.
In any case, it’s pretty symptomatic of where America’s head is at in 2014. And I don’t expect it to get better anytime soon.
I’m tempted to go off on a tangent here about how Glenn Beck described the armed militias (which he described as “"violent, anti-government groups") as "the right's version of Occupy Wall Street".
But we all know about Glenn Beck by now, so there’s no sense spending any more time on that.
All hat no cattle,
This is dF
