WaPo | The Senate majority leader who called President Bush a “loser” and a
“liar,” declared former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan a
“political hack” and asserted that all Obamacare horror stories are
“untrue” has now called Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters
“domestic terrorists.”
The comparison is as noxious as it is
absurd. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist.
The Unabomber was a domestic terrorist. Centennial Olympic Park bomber
Eric Rudolph was a domestic terrorist. To equate Bundy and his
supporters with these murderers is, quite simply, appalling.
It
was the federal Bureau of Land Management that provoked the
confrontation — descending with 200 armed men, including some with
sniper rifles, to seize the Bundys’ cattle on land their family has
grazed since 1877. Whatever one thinks of the Bundys’ legal case over
unpaid grazing fees — and the federal government’s desire to protect the
desert tortoise — defending your property against a paramilitary force
of armed federal agents is not the equivalent of blowing up a federal
building or sending letter bombs.
It would be easy to dismiss Reid
as a buffoon with a chronic case of logorrhea. But this was not a slip
of the tongue on Reid’s part. Video shows that when Reid first used the
phrase “domestic terrorists” at a Las Vegas Review Journal event,
he looked down at his notes just before he spoke the words. It was a
carefully planned line of attack. Then, when he was asked during a Nevada TV interview
a day later “What did you mean by that?” he replied, “Just what I said”
— before engaging in an extended attack on the Bundy family and its
supporters.
Why would Reid, the senior senator from Nevada, make such an outrageous accusation?
First,
Reid is defending the Obama administration from the charge that it used
excessive force to try to seize the land. Most Americans recoil at the
sight of armed federal agents training sniper rifles on a group of Boy
Scouts, veterans, parents and grandparents engaged in civil
disobedience. But if Bundy’s supporters are not protesters but “domestic
terrorists,” then sending a federal force to confront them is not
excessive.
Second, Reid is defending his former staffer, Neil
Kornze, who presided over this debacle as the newly installed head of
the Bureau of Land Management. Kornze, who is just 35 years old, was
Reid’s handpicked choice to run the BLM. “Neil is just perfect for this
position,” Reid declared
when Kornze was nominated, adding that he “really understands the role
of public lands in rural America, and natural resources across the
West.”
In his first days on the job, Kornze demonstrated that
understanding by launching a paramilitary raid against a Nevada rancher.
Kornze tried to silence Bundy’s supporters by setting up “First
Amendment Zones” where protesters would be corralled and fenced in like a bunch of cattle.
And he provoked an armed standoff that might well have resulted in the
death of innocent men, women and children. The only way his actions
could be even remotely defensible is if he was confronting “domestic
terrorists.”
