Margaret Houston describes BLM assault–Town Board Meeting 04/09/14 Cliven Bundy’s siter

o allow the Bundy brothers and their supporters to remain in control of a U.S. federal installation, fully armed, while federal law enforcement effectively does and says nothing, is a wide-open invitation to disaster.

The Obama administration’s decision in March 2014 to withdraw federal personnel from the Bundy Ranch in Clark County, Nevada, laid the groundwork for the storming of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns, Oregon, that now unfolds. The folly of that decision was obvious then and the result is all too clear now. The current situation in Oregon is the direct consequence of inaction at the Bundy Ranch.

This approach to meeting a direct, armed challenge to federal authority is totally unprecedented in U.S. history. If you run once, you will run again. Right now this is a small cadre of disgruntled misfits. But if this ragtag self-appointed militia can back the Obama administration and federal law enforcement down again, this will absolutely become an emboldened movement.

The Obama administration’s handling of this situation is not only dangerously short-sighted but also racist. By treating the armed white protesters as different and somehow more equal than protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, or Oakland, California, or on Wall Street, President Obama and all of federal law enforcement bow down to, actually facilitate, armed white supremacy.

Fear of a Waco or Ruby Ridge repeat is absolutely no rationale whatsoever for directing federal law enforcement to back down in the face of an armed takeover of an active federal installation. The situations in Waco and Ruby Ridge were totally different. No one at the Branch Davidian compound or the Weaver cabin sought a confrontation with federal law enforcement. The Bundys and their numerous, heavily-armed supporters do.