Patriotic hypocrisy

I want to tell you one thing I know about the Bunkerville rancher.

He’s a freeloader, refusing to pay his fees. Most other cattle ranchers in Nevada do pay. He’s a self-proclaimed patriot who delights in riding his horse waving the flag of his country, while simultaneously declaring he doesn’t believe in the federal government and won’t obey its laws.

His opinion is the one that matters, you see, and if challenged, he’ll rally an armed militia to his side, a militia proud to put its women at the battlefront, to take the government’s bullets first and thus incite America to rise against herself.

He relishes the attention of the national media and if the Battle of Bunkerville is over, well, the rancher will hold the media focus by expounding on his personal beliefs on race, showing the world how profound a thinker the Bunkerville rancher can be.

Maybe now the rest of America will catch up to his way of thinking and recognize the patriot for who he really is. A fool.

It was only a matter of time before Cliven Bundy would go too far. Last week, as the media attention receded over the failed BLM round-up of the scofflaw’s cows, the rancher vowed to continue dominating the news cycle. He delivered off-the-cuff remarks that were racist and reprehensible, ignorant, and really, quite sad.

Here’s what he told a reporter from the nation’s most prominent newspaper, the New York Times:

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said, telling a story about driving past subsidized housing in North Las Vegas. “And in front of that government house, the door was usually open and the older people and the kids—and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch—they didn’t have nothing to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do? They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And 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 his prominent supporters from U.S. Sen. Dean Heller to Gov. Brian Sandoval quickly denounced his statements, the welfare cowboy wasn’t through. The next day he held another news conference to explain himself.

“Cliven Bundy’s a-wondering about these people, now I’m talking about the black community, I’m a-wondering. Are they better off with their young women aborting their children, are they better off with their young men in prison, and are they better off with the older people on the sidewalks in front of their government-issued homes?”

Bundy wanted to know if they were “happier than they was when they was in the South in front of their homes with their chickens and their gardens and their children around them and their men having something to do.”

The real question is why Cliven Bundy is so determined to embarrass our state and Nevada’s noble ranching profession by uttering such ridiculous racist views, so far out of the mainstream you can’t even call them stereotypes from another century.

And that wasn’t the last of Bundy’s “a-wondering.” The next day on CNN he held a dead calf in his arms and compared himself to Rev. Martin Luther King.

We can only cringe and take comfort that the nation recognizes him for the buffoon he is and hope Nevada isn’t further tainted by media coverage of his distorted views of reality

Nevada is so much better than Cliven Bundy.

But he’s never going to figure that out.