The Southern Poverty Law Center has weighed in again on Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada at odds with the federal government over grazing rights, fees and endangered turtles on federal land.

Having restrained itself from calling Bundy a “terrorist lawbreaker,” as the Daily Kos did, SPLC may be reconsidering. Apparently upset that Daily Kos is ahead of SPLC in smearing the Nevadan, Mark Potok, the SPLC’s chief hitman, said thusly of Bundy and his crew on MSNBC’s “All In:”

Well, they’re not quite domestic terrorists, not yet. But you know, I’ve seen the pictures, they weren’t merely sitting up overlooking law enforcement officers with their sniper rifles, they had them trained — scoped rifles trained on the heads of law enforcement officials. I mean, you know, they were a split second away from real bloodshed, and bloodshed that was entirely provoked by the Bundys and the Bundys’ supporters.

That was the slick way to defame them and get away it, rather akin to apophasis. “I have no intention,” the old political joke goes, “of raising my opponent’s criminal past.”

Inasmuch as Potok and his leftist fellow-travelers have redefined terrorist to include anyone they don’t like — which, like labeling everyone a “racist,” leaves the word meaningless — readers will be forgiven for asking whether all SPLC “terrorists” look like Bundy; i.e., like whites in cowboy hats. Or do they look something like Terrio Pope and Ramon Huntley, black teens, as the media always call them, who face charges in the beating of an octogenarian white woman?

Or maybe, to reprise Potok, “they’re not quite domestic terrorists.” After all, if guilty, Pope and Huntley didn’t kill the woman. They only left a bloody footprint on her face.