Ethan E. Rocke
LAS VEGAS -- Embattled rancher Cliven Bundy and his followers woke Friday morning to find the federal lands adjacent to Bundy’s property littered with the bloody entrails of the rancher’s herd of more than 900 cattle and two of his 98 children.
The carnage appears to be the result of a highly coordinated military operation, involving dozens of attack drones. The drones apparently launched a number of cluster bombs at the cattle, which had been illegally grazing on the federal lands for more than 20 years. Bundy says his 15-year-old son, Oxford Bundy, and his 49-year-old son, Theodore Bundy, had been standing watch over the cattle when the drone strikes occurred around 2:30 a.m.
Bundy says he believes the attack was perpetrated by the US military on behalf of the Bureau of Land Management, whose agents Bundy and dozens of armed militia members clashed with a week ago.
The standoff between the Bundy camp and BLM agents ended without bloodshed when the BLM backed down, citing concerns for the safety of their personnel.
“Those bastards destroyed everything I have! They murdered my boys! Stole my livelihood!” Bundy said, crying through tears of rage and desperation. He promised to exact revenge against the federal government. “That ------ in the White House is going to pay for this. We will rise up. We will fight them, and we will win because God is on our side. God is great!”
Pentagon spokesman General Motors issued this statement in response to the news of the blown-up cattle: “The allegation that the US military would carry out this type of operation on US soil is patently absurd. Our drone policy is clear; we only kill US citizens with drones outside the United States.”
A Pentagon official who asked not to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the matter said an objective analysis of the blast patterns would conclude that the strikes could not have come from the US military because they are "far too imprecise.” The official could not elaborate on how an analysis of the blasted area could be conducted to prove his claim because doing so would reveal state secrets that could potentially harm America’s national security.
Two US Marines who were camping in the desert near Bundy’s ranch while on leave from the Marine base at Twentynine Palms, California, unwittingly live-tweeted the whole ordeal.
Lance Corporal Shane Tadowski, whose Twitter handle is @BigDickPlaya, posted this tweet at 2:38 a.m. “Sky is full of magic hornets n they rainin fireworks. shit is ill as fuck! Dis be batcountry, bitches #trippingballs!” Private First Class Ryan Stormly, whose Twitter handle is @CactusEater, tweeted minutes later, “I just watched like 50 cows explode at once! BEST TRIPPING CAMP EVER. FTW!” Minutes later, Stormly tweeted “I just wrote tripping camp. LOL! #fearandloathingnearlasvegas.” At 3:45, Tadowski tweeted, “Charring the fuck outta a fatty rack of ribs with @CactusEater prime cuts literally fallin out the sky tonight! #trippingcamp #bros #cowcarnage.” Stormly followed with a twitpic of himself sitting on a desert tortoise and gnawing on a cave-man-sized rack of ribs at 3:47: “@BigDickPlaya cooks some mean ribs but bitch sucks at turtle jousting. #pwned #bros #trippingcamp.”
General Motors’ statement offered a possible explanation for the presence of drones in the night sky, directing journalists to a story published in the University of Nevada Las Vegas's student newspaper, The Rebel Yell, April 22. The article reported that the university had launched an extensive attack-drone research program April 21 after receiving a five-million-dollar grant from a little-known think tank called The Skynet Foundation. The Pentagon stopped short of trying to explain the exploding cows. “Beats me,” Motors said in an email response to Ethan Rocke Media’s inquiries. “Maybe you should ask Mr. Bundy. They’re his cows after all. The US military has absolutely no interest or involvement in the Bundy affair, and we’re not going to entertain any more of these ridiculous allegations.”
The Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity suggested that if military drones were involved they had to have come from another country. “Yemen, for example, has a very sophisticated military drone program,” he said.
Motors also pointed out that the location of the strikes is the natural habitat of the endangered desert tortoise. He said that current government policy requires that protection of the species remain a higher priority than any military bombing operations in the region. “Are you beginning to see how preposterous this whole tyrannical government narrative is?” Motors wrote in his email. He added, “This part’s off the record, but maybe you should try doing some real journalism for once instead of trying to tear this great country apart. Motors out.”
UPDATE: Shortly after publishing this story, UNLV’s School of Life Sciences sent Ethan Rocke Media a press release announcing the school has received a two-million-dollar grant from the federal government to study the phenomenon of spontaneous combustion in cows whose digestive systems have violent reactions to the natural foliage in the federal lands within Nevada.
Disclaimer: This is satire. That means all the parts that could get me sued are definitely not true at all, and those parts exist only to make you laugh.