Much about the travails of Nevada rancher Clive Bundy, who has been facing down the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) with the help of militia-type groups from across the country, offers many lessons from a conservative point of view.  David French makes a good one:

With few options left within conventional politics, rural Americans are beginning to contemplate more dramatic measures, such as the state secession movements building in Colorado, Maryland, California, and elsewhere. The more viable state secession movements aim to limit urban control by literally removing rural counties from their states and forming new states around geographic regions of common interests.

But until there’s a long-term solution, we may very well see more Bundy Ranch moments, where individual Americans (and their allies) simply refuse to consent to laws that destroy their way of life for the sake of regulations that provide no perceivable benefit to others. (I can only imagine my frustration if I had to end a more-than-century-old family lifestyle, arguably for the sake of a turtle that no one will see).

So does Peter Kirsanow:

One can acknowledge that the government has the right — in fact, the responsibility — to enforce the law, yet object that this administration habitually enforces the law in a capricious, arbitrary, and discriminatory manner. They imperiously go after a Bundy while excusing scores of miscreants whose get-out-of-jail-free card is membership in a politically-correct class. They regularly waive legal requirements out of sheer political expediency. They fail to defend duly enacted statutes with which they, the enlightened, disagree.

It can hardly be denied that President Obama and the progressive movement generally traffic in divisiveness, especially when they feel those who wind up on their side of the divide are more powerful.

The thought that keeps returning to me, however, is that the Bundy episode is a great illustration of the different perspectives of the Left and the Right.  I mean, one needn’t give total credence to speculation that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) is orchestrating the routing of the rancher as part of a Chinese solar farm deal to think the whole story sounds very familiar… even to the point being a cliché.  The main difference is that the Hollywood cliché would require the powerful force behind the strong-arm tactics to drive people off of their land to be Big Business.  Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Nowhere to Run comes quickly to mind.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that progressives, the media, the Democrats (etc.) would find a huge story worthy of deep investigation in the controversy if it were a private business doing the strong arming.  When it’s the government, though, we may get some minor concessions that the BLM is going about things the wrong way, but motives and justifications are assumed to be pure.