Nevada Rancher Denies He's Racist
BLITZER: We return to that controversy over the rancher, Cliven Bundy, who is in a fight with the federal government over federal grazing fees. His racist remarks have clearly blunted that message, caused so many of his supporters to simply bail out.</s>BUNDY: You know I -- maybe I sinned, and maybe I need to ask forgiveness, and maybe I don't know what was - what I actually said, but, you know, when you talk about prejudice, we're talking about not being able to exercise what we think and our feelings, we don't have - we're not freedom to say - we don't have freedom to say what we want. If I call -- if I say Negro or black boy or slave, I'm not - I'm not -- if those people cannot take those kind of words and not be offensive, then Martin Luther King hasn't got his job done yet.</s>BLITZER: Let's bring in our chief congressional correspondent Dana Bash and our CNN political commentator Paul Begala, who's just written a very, very tough piece on cnn.com. Some of it very funny.</s>BLITZER: But you're on fire when it comes to the fallout from this whole incident. And give it - give us a little nugget.</s>BEGALA: Well, I think the more interesting thing is not that this rancher has said this racist stuff, which is newsworthy and it's reprehensible, it's how before he said that right-wing pundits and politicians jumped to his side and his defense. And my argument is, they should have known better. I mean there's a pattern here. They keep finding these folk heroes. Ted Nugent or Joe the Plumber, the "Duck Dynasty" guy or, more notoriously, George Zimmerman, and they rush to their side and then they're shocked, shocked when they say outrageous things. They just ought to know better, candidly. And if they'd applied their real principles, conservative principles, to this situation and just changed the facts a little, what, for - and I argued this in the piece, what if, instead of a rancher out in Nevada, it had been the New Black Panther Party and they'd holed up in a city in a federal facility and for 20 years have been taking federal property and not paying for it. Do you really think Sean Hannity would be out there in sympathy with them or any of these right-wing politicians? Of course not. So my interest is more in the right-wing politicians and pundits who seem duped every time by these eccentric characters.</s>BLITZER: What's been the political fallout from all of this, Dana?</s>DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, you're certainly right, that many of those, not surprisingly those who maybe need viewers (ph) and those who want Republican-based voters, amid those who are thinking about running in 2016, many of them ran to his defense. Those are the people who are quickly saying that -- distancing themselves from him. The Rand Pauls, the Rick Perrys, people like that. But it should be noted for the record that the major Republican organization, the RNC, the NRSC, which is a group that tries to help Senate get elected, which is the big money prize this fall, they didn't say a word about him. In fact, one of my sources at one of those groups said to me, I was asked by reporters many times and I don't want to talk about that yahoo because he just had a feeling about it. So, you know, there is sort of a difference within the Republican party about who runs to these folk hero's defense. The other thing that I will say is that I've got a lot of frustrated phone calls from Republican sources saying, you know what, there's a double standard. We heard Sean Hannity say this on his - on his program yesterday, but some of my Republican sources were giving me specifics. For example, a sitting governor in Illinois, Pat Quinn, tweeted out something, it's an article which talked about Jewish people collaborating with the Nazis during World War II, likening that to black voters who support his Republican opponent. Now, they had to apologize for it. It's not the same kind of thing because he wasn't saying explicitly racist remark, but it's not just a yahoo from Nevada, as some would say, it's a sitting governor. And the point there is that they don't get the kind of -- Democrats don't get the kind of scrutiny necessarily that Republicans do.</s>BEGALA: Here's the difference. First off, it's reprehensible. That's the first I've heard of it, but of course that's reprehensible and Governor Quinn ought to be ashamed of himself. As I say, as a Democrat, he's in my party as well. The difference is, I don't think we ought to be running to every politician every time somebody says something crazy or offensive.</s>BASH: Right.</s>BEGALA: They -- conservative pundits and some politicians, they rushed to Mr. Bundy.</s>BASH: Absolutely.</s>BEGALA: They embraced him. And then once you do that, and they did it with Ted Nugent, Greg Abbott, the attorney general in Texas, had him -- Nugent at one of his rallies introduce him.</s>BASH: No question (ph).</s>BEGALA: So once you embrace these nuts, you're going to have to take what comes with it. And I -- just as a strategist they - you -- people you talk to, the national party, did the right thing.</s>BASH: They got it (ph).</s>BEGALA: They -- you could smell this guy's craziness a mile away. I mean it's, you know, there's a lot of things that you can see coming, and this one you saw coming. It's going to happen again, though, you watch. It will happen again. We'll have another right wing folk hero and the Hannitys of the world, so blinded by hatred for the president or hatred of the federal government or whatever it is they hate, are going to step in it again, you watch.</s>BLITZER: Because, you know, it's hard to understand all the sympathy. Even before the racist remarks came out, the fact is, he was violating federal law, didn't pay</s>BASH: Our colleague last night did an interview with him, Bill Weir, and called him a welfare queen in a cowboy hat. So that's to your point. But I think the answer to that, and you're from Texas, you're from the area with big lands, unlike here on the East Coast, you know better than I, but there is -- there's a definite kind of feeling out there, and this is a real issue. It has been since the time of Waco back when you were covering the Clinton White House, that land issues are just kind of a different kind of beast when it comes to how people out there in the real world, in big sky country and so on feel about the government.</s>BLITZER: You want to weigh in?</s>BEGALA: And when there are those disputes, if you love your country, you obey the laws. And the laws are determined by the courts. And then when the courts say, as apparently they did in this case, you have to vacate that land or you can no longer graze, you obey that. And, to me, that's where the line was crossed. And I think, for all these pundits and politicians to have been embracing him, even before he said the racist stuff, was an enormous mistake. And if you had changed the facts ever so slightly, what if he was a Muslim and wanted to set up a caliphate there, they would have never embraced him. So I just think that this is an enormous mistake for Republicans but it is one you hide and watch, as Bill Clinton used to say, hide and watch. They're going to make the mistake again.</s>BLITZER: Very quickly, Dana, the speaker, John Boehner, he's causing a little bit of a stir out there. Immigration reform has sort of died lately, but I think he'd like to see it revived. And he had some strong words.</s>BASH: That's right. He was speaking at his -- in his home district in Ohio to a local group there and talked about the fact that his members don't want to take tough votes on immigration. Listen to what he said.</s>REP. JOHN BOEHNER (R), HOUSE SPEAKER: But here's - here's the attitude. Oh, don't make me do this. Oh, this is too hard.</s>BASH: Now, he's getting some backlash from conservative groups saying, you know, that this is inappropriate for him to be saying this. And it is the first time we have seen him do this publically. But I can now tell you, because I got approval to do so from somebody in Boehner's world, that he does this a lot, off the record, and in private. That this is something that he regularly says, I've witnessed him doing this, talking about the fact that his members don't want to take these tough votes, especially on immigration. He does it all the time, to their faces.</s>BLITZER: All right.</s>BASH: So, for then, they're not going to be surprised, but it certainly is an issue in public (ph).</s>BLITZER: Let's see if immigration -</s>BASH: I'm sure you're - you're not that happy about it.</s>BLITZER: Let's see if immigration reform can be revived right now.</s>BEGALA: Yes.</s>BLITZER: We'll see if it happens. Guys, thanks very much. Up next, we'll have more on the search for Flight 370. There's been a major -- one major thing missing, the beacons that were supposed to send signals in a crash, did not go off, any of them, none of them. There are four that were supposed to go off. None of them worked. What happened? Stay with us.