Is Cliven Bundy in over his head? Or does he even have a head?

I really shouldn’t be taking the time to post this. After a week devoted to a personal health scare that turned out to be nada, I’m up to my eyeballs in neglected work that now has to get done.

But I feel sorry for Cliven Bundy, the Nevada Rancher who doesn’t want to pay the gub-mint for grazing his cattle on public lands, and who let slip enough overheated racist remarks to melt down a statue of Jefferson Davis.

No, I don’t feel sorry for him because he's getting skewered by the press and abandoned by many of his former "friends." I feel sorry for him because of his Neanderthal stupidity. Or am I insulting Neanderthals? Bundy is standing firm on his stubbornly unyielding ignorance, and I know there must still be some people, equally ignorant, who want to stand with him, but it’s time to straighten these fools out.

Look, Bundyites: The government owns those grazing lands in Nevada. It has owned them ever since the United States, backed by ithe U.S. Army, stole the territory from Mexico.

I think it was the late Senator Everett Dirkson who proudly declared of the land, “We stole it fair and square.” Or maybe he was talking about the Panama Canal Zone. Doesn't matter. Same idea.

Anyway that public land now belongs to every citizen of the United States, with the U.S. Government serving as our agent to preserve the space.

But you can use that space, Mr. Bundy. You can graze your cattle on it to your heart’s content, just so long as you pay the cheap price, relative to commercial land, that all of us American citizens are charging you. 

If you don’t want to pay, get the hell off our land and pay higher commercial rates somewhere else. It’s that simple.

You say private interests ought to have the right to buy the land? Do that, and there will be no public land left in the United States. In New York, private interests will buy up Central Park to build skyscrapers. They’ll turn Yellowstone  and Yosemite Parks into golf courses. Or into strip mines, for all I know.

So we can’t allow that, and we can’t allow wanton trespassing on our land. Pay up or get off. Just get the hell off.

As to your racist remarks, they are beneath contempt. I’ve used all of my contempt up on your crackpot legal theories of land use. So far as I’m concerned, the U.S. Marshals can remove you from our land – and empty out your bank account for the back payments you owe. And if this turns into another Ruby Ridge confrontation, you’ll be one roasted rancher I won’t lose any sleep about.