Saturday, April 19, 2014

The Great Bundy Ranch Conspiracy

     This week giddiness must be running rampant inside the White House over the Bundy Ranch standoff. The Obama administration could not have orchestrated a better performance to support candidate Obama's 2008 statement about "bitter clingers," than the scene being broadcast to Americans from Nevada. When the Bundys climbed up on their horses with their firearms at the ready to repel the federal agents there to illustrate the heavy hand of government, they could not have played into the stereotype that the Left propagates about the South more unless they would have had barbecue sauce on their chins and black slaves in tow. A stereotype which has no merit, but is the Lefts favorite characterization of the South.
     The object of this post is not to re-litigate the two court decisions that were adjudicated against Mr. Bundy, or to question the Nevada state constitution which relinquished claim of the land in question to the federal government in 1864. Nor is my purpose to re-legislate the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, which explicitly defined grazing permits as having no rights of either ownership of the land, or of unlimited rights to even graze said land by those who held such permits. I feel bad for the Bundy family, whose previous generations labored under a false assumption of non-existent rights to the land they used to graze their cattle. A false assumption they bequeathed to their descendants.
     What Barack Obama the community organizer knew, was that if he sent federal bullies to the Bundy ranch he would elicit a response from the Bundys like the one he got. Having the agents back off made the Bundys look like the aggressors in the minds of a large swathe of an uniformed American public. If this was a planned response by the administration, it would be part and parcel to the Saul Alinsky tactic of marginalizing political opponents. And what better way for the Obama administration, and the tyrannical Left, to gain support among the non-gun owner population of this nation, than to have a group of armed cowboys confront and repel federal agents from federal lands? Whether those lands are legitimately owned by the federal government or not.
     One has to wonder why the Obama administration has not charged the Bundys with sedition, having taken up arms against the United States government. It is because the spectacle of armed militias guarding federal lands to keep out federal agents on the evening news, is more politically advantageous to President Obama than video of God-fearing people being forcibly removed and put in handcuffs.
     There is no greater proponent of smaller, less intrusive government than me, anyone who has read my past posts would know this. But far from making the case for smaller government, the Bundy standoff has, in the opinion of the politically uninvolved American public, made the case for just the opposite argument. Liberty implores and requires her defenders to make her case with level heads and reasoned arguments, not by taking up arms against the United States government.
     I know that I am in the minority in Conservative circles with my opinion. But I fail to see what the end game is of armed confrontation with federal agents. It will not serve to make things right in the minds of the Bundys or generate sympathy among most Americans for their case. I would like to ask a question of those who seem intent on securing liberty through armed conflict with our government. If by some miracle you were successful, what then? Do you then make Hollywood bend to your will at the point of a gun, or the news media, or educators? Are you not just substituting a tyranny you despise for one you do not? And in so doing, do you not enervate the cause of liberty and give fodder to the Obama cannons of an even more restrictive government?
     Our founders fought a war to secure the rights of a free people. But they also implemented a brilliant and divinely inspired Constitution so that future battles for our freedom would exist within the context of the public square, two chambers of congress, and the intellectual pursuit of winning the minds and hearts of the populace. To take up arms while the mechanisms of the Constitution are, admittedly worn and abused, but not yet exhausted, would be a sin against common sense, reason, and that very document we claim to want to protect.

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