Did he, and does he, feel his shame? 394

This article discusses the revelation made by Dick Morris that Bill Clinton himself, not his attorney general Janet Reno, was primarily responsible for the Waco massacre:

It looks like somebody is going to have to update the Waco Siege page on Wikipedia. Apparently the whitewashed history that former President Bill Clinton would like us to believe regarding the 1993 federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, is missing important details regarding his own personal involvement.

In response to Bill Clinton’s highly publicized linking of the Tea Party movement to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in an op-ed piece for the New York Times, former Clinton adviser Dick Morris disclosed on Monday that it was Clinton himself, and not Attorney General Janet Reno, as Americans have been led to believe for the past 17 years, who called the shots during the 1993 botched invasion that led to the death of seventy-six people.

Speaking on the Hannity program on the Fox News Network, Morris criticized Clinton for his Oklahoma City comments: “Let’s understand what was Timothy McVeigh’s motivation …he himself had said that it was the reaction to the Waco takeover. Bill Clinton orchestrated that takeover.”

Morris went on to say, “Clinton in fact was so ashamed about what he did in Waco that he was not going to appoint Janet Reno to a second four-year term. She told him in a meeting right before the inauguration day … ‘If you don’t appoint me I’m going to tell the truth about Waco.’ And that forced Clinton’s hand … It’s never been said (publicly) before.”

For years, Clinton has been criticized for his leadership of the federal government during the Waco crisis, but he has managed to escape personal responsibility for the tragedy. With Morris’s statements, it appears this may no longer be possible. It would seem that Clinton was far more intimately involved with the government response at Waco than previously reported. …

For Clinton to associate such a horrible act of violence with freedom loving [Tea Party] Americans, especially given the fact that he must be fully aware that it was his decisions that led to the Waco catastrophe which in turn inspired Timothy McVeigh, is remarkably shameless.

Arms and The Man 113

Are the Dictator and his collectivists bringing some patriotic Americans to the point of seriously contemplating armed insurrection?

The Washington Post reports:

Daniel Almond, a three-tour veteran of Iraq, is ready to “muster outside D.C.” on Monday [today] with several dozen other self-proclaimed patriots, all of them armed. They intend to make history as the first people to take their guns to a demonstration in a national park, and the Virginia rally is deliberately being held just a few miles from the Capitol and the White House.

Almond plans to have his pistol loaded and openly carried, his rifle unloaded and slung to the rear, a bandoleer of magazines containing ammunition draped over his polo-shirted shoulder. The Atlanta area real estate agent organized the rally because he is upset about health-care reform, climate control, bank bailouts, drug laws and what he sees as President Obama’s insistence on and the Democratic Congress’s capitulation to a “totalitarian socialism” that tramples individual rights. …

Others consider it an alarming escalation of paranoia and anger in the age of Obama.

“What I think is important to note is that many of the speakers have really threatened violence, and it’s a real threat to the rule of law,” Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said of the program for the armed rally. “They are calling health care and taxes that have been duly enacted by a democratically elected Congress tyrannical, and they feel they have a right to confront that individually.”

On the lineup are several heroes of the militia movement, including Mike Vanderboegh, who advocated throwing bricks through the windows of Democrats who voted for the health-care bill; Tom Fernandez, who has established a nationwide call tree to mobilize an armed resistance to any government order to seize firearms; and former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, who refused to enforce the Brady law and then won a Supreme Court verdict that weakened its background-check provisions. …

The brandishing of weapons is “not just an important symbol” but “a reminder of who we are,” said Almond. “The founders knew that it is the tendency of government to expand itself and embrace its own power, and they knew the citizenry had to be reminded of that.” …

April 19 is the anniversary of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and the government’s final confrontation in 1993 with the Branch Davidian cult members in Waco, Tex. But Almond said he chose the date to honor the anniversary of the 1775 battles at Lexington and Concord that began the Revolutionary War, “and that is the only reason.”

So-called open-carry rallies have been sprouting across the country. Hundreds gathered in Michigan, New Mexico and Ohio last week, and rallies also are taking place Monday in Arizona.

The left bias of the Washington Post shows in such words as “self-proclaimed”, suggesting bragging vanity; ”upset”, as if were unreasonably emotional to demonstrate opposition; “paranoia”, hinting at mental unbalance. The report implies that “a democratically elected Congress” could not be tyrannical. Slightly sarcastically, it picks out the names of demonstrators who are known to be activists as “heroes of the militia movement”, to imply that the whole demonstration is the result of a somewhat fanatical mind-set. Although it states that the date for the rally was chosen because it is the anniversary of two battles at the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775, the reporter drags in the information that it is also the anniversary of two deplorable events.

One of them, in Oklahoma City, was the act of mass murderers that these demonstrators have nothing in common with.

The other, at Waco, though it involved ludicrous religious beliefs, was in our opinion a harrowing lesson in the evil of tyrannical government rather than of resistance to it.

Both have unpleasant connotations, and are mentioned, superfluously, only to tarnish the participants in the rally.

Cling to your guns, patriots, and never mind the slander and the sneering!