[Yesterday, Cliven Bundy held a barbecue for his fans and supporters to commemorate 1 year since he and his forced the federal agents to back down and release his cattle.
](Las Vegas News | Breaking News & Headlines | Las Vegas Review-Journal)IMO he and his supporters conspired to thwart federal agents from performing their lawful duties, and also many of them pointed loaded weapons at the agents, threatening their lives. Some of them did it on camera and talked openly about their roles in the so-called standoff.
Yet a year later, none of the participants has been arrested and charged with a crime. Clive Bundy still hasn’t satisfied the judgement against him, nor even acknowledged the validity of the claim. In fact, the delusional jackass continues to make idiotic statements to the press and to his fans:
See, he knows that what he does is avail himself of land and resources that belong to the public and that he then sells those resources to people in the form of meat. He just thinks that isn’t stealing or anything he should have to pay for, mostly because of other delusions he has regarding how long his family as been in the area and what that means to anyone who isn’t also named Bundy.
Anyway, the rant is beside the point, which is, when do you think Cliven Bundy and/or anyone else involved organizing, promoting or participating in the armed standoff will ever be charged with a crime and arrested?
Does anyone think there will be any convictions?
I’m starting to think that the Feds are trying to ignore it and hope it goes away or is at least forgotten, but I don’t think it ever will be as it seems to prove that if you have enough people with guns, you can do whatever you want; that lesson isn’t going to be lost on various segments of the populace.
He’s a thug and criminal. There is no reason why now that the uproar has died down he shouldn’t have been picked up and tried for his crimes. And he he could easily be picked up quickly without any bloodshed.
There are lots of ways he could be arrested or induced to give himself up. Many of them less likely to result in bloodshed than rolling out to his place with a lot of badges and guns. His case is interesting to me solely because of the number of people who seem bitterly unhappy that some redneck hicks didn’t get killed that day.
Who here on the SDMB has written something that makes you think that “people who seem bitterly unhappy that some redneck hicks didn’t get killed that day” are present on the board or in this thread such that you felt justified in asking after the OP “Would you be happier if some people had been killed?”
Me? No, I much prefer that everybody, anti-gummint cranks and jack-booted thugs alike, all go home alive and with no extra holes. The cranks pointed guns at the JBTs and the government is electing not to act on it. That is their prerogative. if the cranks hadn’t had guns, would you really give a wet fart about Cliven Bundy and grazing rights? Did you follow the issue before he was part of it?
Meh, I’ve had super-intelligent aliens in ever hovering spacecraft hired by the US government with ray-guns pointed at me for 35 hours a day — probably.
This is a no-win tarbaby for the current administration. And will be for any Democratic president. The propaganda negatives, even of a 100% peaceful arrest and prosecution, far exceed the benefits to society. The whole thing will be spun as the leading edge of the Fed’s *Confiscatin’ our GUNS!!! *movement and the crazy won’t subside for years.
Under a Republican administration there will be an opportunity to deal with Bundy. And spin it as a simple matter of law-and-order. If he’s smart he’ll go back to being a rancher not an internet celebrity. I bet he won’t be smart. He may never be prosecuted for the earlier stand-off. But there will be another provocation for which he will be arrested.
So my answer to the “when” question is sometime in year 2 or 3 of the next Republican administration. I won’t speculate on whether that happens in the 2016 election or 2020 or even later.
I know that this is a hard thing to remember once you’ve been here a while, but there are people outside this board who have even dumber opinions than we do.
Now would be a good time for an arrest. It’s long before the election and none of his supporters would vote for Hillary, anyway. And if somebody forgot to take away his bootlaces and an unfortunate incident occurred in his cell, well, that would be tragic, wouldn’t it?
So was George Washington.
I don’t remember where I read it, but this has stuck with me. – “One of the quickest ways to get a reputation as a dangerous person is to go around repeating things that the Founding Fathers said.”
Read about the Whiskey Rebellion, son. George Washington would have been on the side of the feds and would have not let Clive Bundy insinuate the federal government had no authority in this situation.
But he does raise an interesting point which is why does the BLM control 66 percent of the state? Nevada and Utah are both mostly under federal control while a tiny percentage of the land east of New Mexico is under federal control. If you look at the map of federally controlled lands in the U.S. it is rather apparent that the western States are screwed compared to the eastern half of the country.
I imagine that if ranchers in Texas or farmers in Georgia ran into similar issues you would see a similar response. But probably without the racist idiocy.
Slee
Here in Nevada, it’s because that was the deal when the Feds agreed to allow a bunch of people to form into the State of Nevada. All the land here was controlled by the federal government long before Nevada was even a pipe dream. And the folks forming up Nevada agreed because statehood was more important than a lot of waterless, inaccessible terrain.
The gist is that the land remains in federal control because it is federal land that was never homesteaded – a lot of Nevada and Utah is desert. Another thing to note is that most of the western states were formed out of land that was acquired by the federal government through treaties or purchases – a stark contrast to the way eastern states came to being.
Pretty much all of the land north of Texas and west of the Appalachians used to belong to the feds. The BLM’s predecessors (the General Land Office, for most of the country’s history) sold off this land to anybody who would buy it, and after 1862 anybody who would homestead it.
[Texas has a separate land history, courtesy of its status as an independent republic, and the original 13 colonies controlled all of the unclaimed land within their borders at the time the U.S. was founded.]
As you get further west, however, the land gets drier and less desirable for farming. By the time you get to Nevada, nobody WANTED to buy or homestead the land before the feds ended homesteading and most sales in 1976, whereas pretty much all of Missouri had been sold to private landowners by the time of the Civil War, and the desirable parts of Kansas were mostly gone by the 1890s.
Similarly, the Union Pacific Railroad remains one of the largest private landowners west of the Mississippi because they received enormous amounts of land as part of the Pacific Railway Acts in the 1860s and 70s. The good land in places such as Kansas was snatched up more than a century ago; they’re still trying to peddle dry lands in places such as Nevada.
