Although Ukraine and Nevada are 6500 miles apart, intriguingly similar rebellions are underway in the two places. For starters, both are beset by armed gangs, aided and abetted by people from away, who want to weaken or destroy the central government.
So far, these groups have behaved like bullies everywhere: attack first, retreat to claim victim status later.
For 20 years, a rancher in Nevada named Cliven Bundy refused to pay a fee totaling more than a million dollars for grazing his cattle on federal land. He justified this by saying, “I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing.” When federal Bureau of Land Management officials attempted to impound his cattle, Bundy gathered a posse of armed supporters, who surrounded the federal agents and forced them to surrender the cattle.
Outside agitators included Fox News, where they called Bundy a "folk hero." Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said on that same Fox News that the Bundy family “…had virtual ownership of that land because they had been using it. You need the government out of it.”
Now consider Russia’s presence in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, where hordes of hooded armed men have engaged in undercover work, electronic jamming, and extensive propaganda designed to spread discontent and stoke antipathy toward the central government in Kiev 400 miles away.
Of course, the armed men in Eastern Ukraine are apparently only opposed to the Ukrainian government – not all governments everywhere - while the armed resistance in Nevada seemed to reject the notion of governmental authority altogether. But at least Bundy’s supporters have been willing to show their faces, and even bravely sing the Star-Spangled Banner. In Ukraine, faces have been covered and identity obscured - probably because there, experts say the lead actor is really Russian President Vladimir Putin.
And since this confrontation is central to a test of wills among Putin, the U.S. and Europe, the Russians are happy to put the Ukrainians up front, while they continue to conduct large scale military maneuvers along their border with Ukraine.
In Nevada, Bundy supporters threatened to use women up front as human shields if the government attacked. A retired Arizona sheriff who came to lend a hand is reported as saying that if shooting started, “…it’s going to be women that are going to be televised all across the world getting shot.”
Apparently, this was too much for the Nevada Cattlemen's Association, who issued a statement that they did “…not condone actions that are outside the law in which citizens take the law into their own hands.”
But for two weeks Bundy was a lightning rod for all manner of anger against Washington, until he made statements like the one about how African-Americans had been better off under slavery – and his celebrity status faded.
To quote from country singer Trace Adkins, "All hat and no cattle ain't gonna get it done."
For now, the Nevada stand-off is over. The one in Ukraine is not.
