Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did not bite his tongue in his description of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters Thursday. He called them “domestic terrorists.”

Reid was speaking at an event hosted by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

“These people, who hold themselves out to be patriots, are not. They’re nothing more than domestic terrorists,” Reid declared.

The Nevada Democrat also said that he had personally spoken with Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI Director James Comey, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, as well as Nevada’s Clark Country sheriff about Bundy and his refusal to pay decades worth of federal grazing fees for his cattle, and what the federal government is now prepared to do about it. At this writing, those fees total more than $1 million.

“Keep in mind what happened up there. There were hundreds, hundreds of people from around the country, that came there,” Reid said. “They had sniper rifles on the freeway. They had assault weapons. They had automatic weapons.”

Reid also quoted some of these protesters as saying that they had “children and women lined up because if anyone got hurt, we wanted to make sure they got hurt first, because we want the federal government hurting women and children.

their language, and now their actions, bear an eerie and uncanny resemblance to a certain time gone by, and to which we thought we would never return.

Reid noted that Bundy “does not recognize the United States.”

“He says that the United States is a foreign government. He doesn’t pay his taxes. He doesn’t pay his fees, unlike the rest of Nevada ranchers. And he doesn’t follow the law. He continues to thumb his nose at authority,” Reid concluded.

As has been widely reported, tensions rose over last weekend after Bundy’s cattle were rounded up by the Bureau of Land Management for his continuing failure to pay grazing fees.

However, the BLM eventually returned the cattle in order to avoid “escalating tensions” with the armed protesters, The Associated Press reported.

However, Reid’s comments come hard on the heels of a week-long verbal tete-a-tete between Bundy and the lawmaker. Reid vowed Monday that the situation at the ranch was “not over.”

Bundy immediately responded by virtually banning Reid from the state. He said that the senator should stay out of Nevada altogether and focus on doing his job in Washington.

Refusing to be cowed (pun very much intended), Reid shot back with: “It is an issue that we cannot let go, just walk away from.”

Opinion

We have been down this road before.

It is about time somebody in “authority” called out these right wingers and their “conservative” supporters for what they really are: domestic terrorists.

The overheated rhetoric of these people rings a certain bell, doesn’t it? For decades

These are people who would have us believe that there is no such thing as “federal” land or more importantly, “federal” sovereignty over state or “private” property. As Reid noted, they do not “recognize” the federal government’s right to exist at all (except when it comes to controlling women’s reproductive rights).

These people are the spiritual — and in many cases, actual physical — descendants of “state’s rights” advocates of a couple of generations ago, and Southern secessionists and Confederates of 150 years ago. You know, the people who precipitated (and lost) this nation-state’s bloodiest war in its history, the Civil War. That war was fought because those “conservatives” and right wingers also refused to “recognize” the federal government. Most particularly and especially, they refused to recognize the federal government’s authority to “regulate” slavery — read: take away their black slaves.

And, it seems, with the constant egging on by their very own billionaire-funded, right wing media mavens (Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, etc., ad infinitum), it is entirely possible — even probable — that just such a war may yet again be in the offing.