Editorial: Cliven Bundy's Cattle Battle

A Chinese solar farm that fries birds is OK, as is redrawing tortoise habitat boundaries to benefit political donors. But an American rancher grazing his cattle brings feds with sniper rifles.

It appears Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy has, at least temporarily, wonhis "range war" with the paramilitary wing of the Bureau of Land Management. Fearing another Waco, BLM has announced it will no longer enforce a court order and stop stealing Bundy's cows, called "trespass cattle" by the feds, accused of grazing free on part of the 84% of Nevada that is federal property.

If the forces deployed in and around the Nevadan's ranch had been deployed to Benghazi, it's likely Glen Doherty, Ty Woods, Sean Smith and Ambassador Christopher Stevens would be alive today. If illegal aliens were grazing on the disputed property, there would not have been federal snipers perched nearby with American citizens in their sights.

The government that has detonated hundreds of nuclear weapons in the Nevada desert claimed a rancher's meandering cattle threatened a protected species.

BLM, one of the myriad federal agencies armed to the teeth these days, would have us believe the 67-year-old rancher is a trespassing bitter clinger who isn't paying his federal grazing fees as his cattle munch on government-owned vegetation and threaten the endangered desert tortoise.

So BLM SWAT teams descended on the ranch west of Mesquite, Nev., where cattle and the tortoise have lived in harmony for over 100 years. BLM claims Bundy owes them grazing fees dating back to 1993; he says his grazing rights predate the BLM. The desert tortoise in fact is so "endangered" in this area that the government is planning to euthanize some of them.

...Bundy, who lives in a country founded by armed Americans resisting a tyrannical government, has objected, reviving the long-simmering Sagebrush Rebellion between residents of the West and a land-grabbing federal government.

In the end, Bundy and the people who rallied to his cause, some of whom carried firearms of their own while demonstrating , proved what the Second Amendment is all about.

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