Comments on: Bill Clinton talks up Timothy McVeigh

By: ahem

ahem — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 07:33:29 +0000

Ian: Absolute nonsense.

By: John B

John B — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:58:01 +0000

Sure, Owinok, I don’t think that these things are planned and executed type scenario. Some may be, sometimes. I do think it is much more along the lines of opportunism, but I think it is very often more “hands on” than just seeing an opportunity and riding the fall out.
Doors are left unlocked, or even open. Events are ignored until they are ripe. Trends are gently encouraged. Greed is nudged in the required direction. Foolish people are encouraged in their folly. Freedom that promotes license is endorsed. Straight thinking is set up for ridicule and mocked when it loses it.
Much is probably not even intentional. Just the outworkings of fondly held beliefs and justifiable requirements.

By: Owinok

Owinok — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:23:22 +0000

Not too sure that anyone can be certain Clinton would have lost save for Mc Veigh. And even if, that narrative of a crisis being the salvation of a political career reminds me a lot about the last US president. Didn’t he just have a “trifecta” from some crises too? In short, all politicians take advantage of such crises and I am unsure that another president would see it differently. Opportunism is perhaps an equal opportunity vice for politicians and their hacks.

By: Gabriel

Gabriel — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 21:42:54 +0000

Ian B: Ha! And people here think I’m mental.

By: Ian B

Ian B — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:49:26 +0000

I’ve often wondered whether that wonderfully timed “failure of capitalism” was so very random. I’d love to have auditors crawl all over Soros’s accounts to see what he was doing with his money and market influence immediately before it.

By: John B

John B — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 16:44:38 +0000

” . . . The 550 billion dollar electronic run on the bank was no accident on September 11,2008. McCain was leading, but the financial meltdown opened the door for the Mansourian candidate.

He has, inside of a year, destroyed our alliances, abandoned our allies, nationalized banks, insurance companies, and the automotive business, and rammed communist healthcare down our collective throats. He has bankrupted this country and stolen the wealth of our nation and our children. He has embraced Islamic anti-semitism, sanctioned the Islamic bomb of the Iranian mullahcracy, handed Russia Eastern Europe on a plate, thrown away our nuclear advantage, and despised us for our superiority. And then contemptuously told us to thank him and kiss his marxist ass. . . ”

Courtesy Pamela Geller. The whole article is at Eurasia Review:

http://www.eurasiareview.com/2010/04/taking-it-all-over-next-up-control-of.html

By: mezzrow

mezzrow — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 11:50:17 +0000

You can taste the yearning for the next McVeigh over here from the left and the media. They will find an event to market to the public as the next “fascist militia uprising” before we get to November. Look for a ramped-up progression of bearded guys in camo cleaning guns and talking about liberty on the nightly news. If they can’t find enough of them to present on NPR and the networks, we’ll start seeing this bogie-man in a lot of fictional storylines and the random Hollywood film. It won them the last war (the current scenario tastes just like 1994 to the Dems at this point – not so tasty) and the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the event kicks off the attempt at meme-implantation into the American public. Unfortunately (from their viewpoint) the way we communicate and get our news information is nothing like it was then. Not to missed is the promotion of Clinton as a Democratic face with proven appeal, unlike you-know-who and the clown college that is running Congress these days.

By: John B

John B — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 11:15:08 +0000

I think, also, one has to look beyond national and other localised bodies. While those who sought power by various means may have been present in the Yankees I don’t think the Yankees, as such, were IT.
Likewise the Soviets and the nations of the West are and/or were perhaps agencies for other more international groupings that may have little to do with nationality or even ideology.
I do think one has to look beyond what one accepts as being reality, because inevitably, that is the world view which one has been fed and perhaps needs to get beyond. If that view is concealing an agenda then perhaps all is not what it seems in ways that one might not have imagined.

By: Slartibartfarst

Slartibartfarst — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 03:24:37 +0000

@Brian Micklethwait: Thanks for this post. Interesting.
A request: Could you and other Samizdata posters be able to make the opening para of your posts more summary/concise/snappy?

Reason: I only see the title, author and first 4 lines of the post in my Google Reader. If I don’t see something interesting in the seconds required to take that in, then I just move quickly on to the next entry. It’s the only way I can rapidly get through my reading list. It’s the way I scanned the newspapers – when I used to read them.

I nearly flicked this one off in similar fashion as it made me doze off just reading it in G/Reader, but then I reflected that Brian Micklethwait usually seems to write fairly cogently, and so overcame my impatience and went to read the whole thing. I don’t know how many good posts I may have missed because they were not “snappy” enough in the opening para.

(Thanks for listening.)

By: MG

MG — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 02:31:55 +0000

Ian B,

That’s nonsense.

I used to hear most of it during the 70s and 80s from English socialists . . . but of course you’ve already dismissed inter/national socialism.

Regards

By: Natalie Solent

Natalie Solent — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:35:14 +0000

Hmm, I just don’t remember this (“this” being not just the events but the story that was told about them, as you point out) the way you do. What I remember was not a change from “government is hostile” to “the government protects you” – apart from anything else, the government had just demonstrated that it could not protect the people killed in the bombing – but a change from “the most frightening bad guys are foreigners and broadly left wing” (Either commies or Arabs, and Arab terrorism had a more secular character back then) to “the most frightening bad guys are domestic and broadly right wing.” And/or “anti-state people are frightening”. Note that this narrative can deal with the Branch Davidians under the idea that, yes, sad about the kids, but the adults there brought it on themselves.

The whole thing you cite about “the state as the necessary partner of the people” – how could anyone, anyone at all, derive that from the Oklahoma bombing?

By: Michael Jennings

Michael Jennings — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 21:40:08 +0000

Opposition parties in the US do have an astounding ability to field terrible candidates against sitting presidents – don’t they. John Kerry comes to mind. In both cases, the president was vulnerable to defeat by a decent opponent, but…

Of course, Bill Clinton was a beneficiary of this, given that none of the supposed strong candidates from his party wanted to run against a sitting president in 1992.