Oklahoma City: Flashback to 1995

The Oklahoma City bombing was 15 years ago, said Carl Hulse in The New York Times, but to former President Bill Clinton, those awful memories are suddenly tinged with a new foreboding. Clinton spoke out last week on the anniversary of that deadly spasm of American terrorism, in which Timothy McVeigh detonated a massive truck bomb at a federal building, killing 168 innocent people, including 19 children. The extreme rhetoric coming today from the Right, Clinton said, reminds him of the climate in April 1995, with “profoundly alienated, disconnected people” insisting that “the greatest threat to American freedom is our government.” Such demonizing rhetoric, he warned, has “the potential for stirring a violent response.” As the prosecutor who helped convict McVeigh, I share that fear, said former federal prosecutor Aitan Goelman in Politico.com. When mainstream Republicans speak of “secession” and “revolution,” impressionable nuts like McVeigh can conclude that violent resistance is both moral and necessary.

Where was Clinton during the last Bush administration? said W. James Antle in The American Spectator. Why didn’t he spend those eight years admonishing mainstream liberals who warned that Bush and Cheney were dragging us toward a fascist, “imperial presidency”? Clearly, Clinton has no problem with extreme rhetoric per se, only with those “uncouth enough to criticize the government from the Right.” Once again, Clinton is milking 168 deaths for “political gain,” said Byron York in Examiner.com. Back in 1995, then–President Clinton—“in deep political trouble”—exploited the tragedy to tar all Republicans with the “extremist” brush. By suggesting, in effect, that “today’s Tea Partiers are tomorrow’s right-wing bombers,” Clinton once again hopes to suppress dissent by marginalizing it.

Try reading my mail, said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. I receive a steady stream of alarming communications from readers who are convinced that only armed resistance can prevent the coming of tyranny. These kind of people used to express their rage in letters written in crayon; in the Internet age, “the least sane among us” can share their views with the world. The number of hate and vigilante groups has swelled 54 percent over four years, and now totals 1,000. Given this climate, when mainstream politicians speak of putting opponents “in the cross hairs,” they are “complicit in whatever transpires.”

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