And, thus, the page abruptly turns:
Republican leaders are backing off their support of Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy after he made a series of inflammatory racist remarks reported in the New York Times.
I have to wonder why Clive Bundy agreed to talk to the official house media organ of the Regime that invaded his property, stole and slaughtered his cattle, tasered his son, and made every appearance of wanting to kill him. On the other hand, I have no doubt as to why the New York Times wanted to talk to Clive Bundy: they wanted to set him up with the easiest play in their propaganda playbook so as to change the subject from federal tyranny to the ten billion and third playing of the race card.
Mission accomplished:
The rancher, who won a showdown this month with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management over grazing rights for his herd, attacked African-Americans for their dependency on government assistance and claimed that they abort their children and end up in jail because they have no jobs.
Bundy, a registered Republican with 14 children, said to the Times, “I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
While claiming that many African-Americans are “basically on public assistance,” he added, “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton.”
Enough, already. Clive Bundy is not a politician, and he's not media savvy. That much is obvious, and was obvious to the Times, which is why they led him to the PR slaughter. I would characterize Bundy's remarks as ignorant and stupid, not racist. I can, at a great stretch, even see what he might have been trying to say - that the statist mentality that tried to take his land in jackbooted fashion is the same philosophy that has enslaved so many African-Americans in welfare dependency and family destruction, only the modern version of it is far more insidious than the cotton plantations of the antebellum South, because with the former the "slaves" don't recognize their own chains.
But, not being either politically or media savvy, Bundy was completely unable to articulate that thought, and it came out as the effortlessly exploitable mess that it did. If Bundy had been at all politically or media savvy, he'd have declined any comment on race issues at all, since they had less than nothing to do with what the BLM tried to do to him. But he wasn't, and he didn't, and now the page has been turned with extreme, well, prejudice.
And, naturally, Republicans are heading for the tall grass:
Nevada’s Republican Senator Dean Heller had previously claimed that Bundy’s supporters were “patriots,” but following Bundy’s hateful remarks he’s started to “backtrack,” according to Rawstory.com.
His spokesman , Chandler Smith, told the Times that the senator “completely disagrees with Mr. Bundy’s appalling and racist statements, and condemns them in the most strenuous way.”
Senator Rand Paul, the libertarian Republican from Kentucky who may make a run for the White House in 2016, had supported Bundy’s cattle battle with the government.
But in a statement provided by a spokesman for Paul to Business Insider on Thursday, the senator denounced Bundy's comments. "His remarks on race are offensive and I wholeheartedly disagree with him," Paul said.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott had jumped into the controversy by stating that the BLM was planning to claim thousands of acres in the Lone Star State along the Red River, and he had made it clear that he had told the agency to back off.
But his spokeswoman Laura Bean tried to distance the Republican gubernatorial candidate from Bundy by telling the liberal newspaper that the letter Abbott wrote to the BLM “was regarding a dispute in Texas and is in no way related to the dispute in Nevada.”
See how this sets up? When the BLM guards tank army returns to Casa Bundy, either his supporters will refrain from standing with him again for fear of being smeared as "racists," or they'll support him anyway, and that stigma will convince most, if not all, LIVs and NIVs that Bundy deserves whatever he gets, up to and including the massacre of himself, his entire family, and any "foolish" enough to stand with him. And certainly the public policy side of this burgeoning Western range war has been cut down in its metaphorical crib, as even as erstwhile a Tea Party stalwart as Rand Paul has now conceded that Americans are not entitled to their Constitutional rights if they hold a politically incorrect view or two.
Well, bullbleep. Kevin Williamson sums it up in the Corner today:
There is a time to break the law, and the fact that the law is against you does not mean that justice is against you. The law was against Washington and Martin Luther King Jr., too. That does not mean that what is transpiring in Nevada is the American Revolution or the civil-rights movement; it means that there is a time to break the law. As I wrote, “Cliven Bundy may very well be a nut job, but one thing is for sure: The federal government wouldn’t treat a tortoise the way it has treated him.”
Critics on the left, being an ignorant bunch, may be unaware of the fact, but the example of Mohandas Gandhi is here particularly apt, given that the great man had some pretty creepy ideas about everything from race to homosexuality, for example writing that blacks aspired to nothing more than passing their time in “indolence and nakedness,” objecting to blacks’ being housed in Indian neighborhoods, etc. Americans, many of whom seem to believe that Mr. Gandhi’s first name was “Mahatma,” generally confuse the Indian historical figure, a man whose biography contains some complexity, with the relatively straightforward character from the Richard Attenborough movie. We remember Gandhi and admire him because he was right about the thing most closely associated with him. In the same way, there is more to the life of Thomas Jefferson than his having been a slave owner. The question of standing in opposition to a domineering federal government that acts as the absentee landlord for nine-tenths of the state of Nevada is only incidentally related to Cliven Bundy’s having backward views about race. Mr. Bundy’s remarks reflect poorly on the man, not on the issue with which the man is associated....
There’s no explaining away Mr. Bundy’s remarks, and I abhor them, and am pleased that Rich Lowry and others have taken the time to address them.
There’s no explaining away the lawlessness of the Obama administration or the crimes of the IRS, either. A nation can survive its cranks, but not a criminal government.
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