Rush Limbaugh: "With this comment you have just set the stage for violence in this country. Any future acts of violence are on your shoulders, Mr. Clinton."
TAPPER: Do you have any response?
CLINTON: Doesn't make any sense. The only point I tried to make is that when I went back and started preparing for the 15th anniversary of Oklahoma City, I realized that there were a lot of parallels between the early '90s and now, both in the feeling of economic dislocation, and the level of uncertainty people felt. The rise of kind of identity politics. The rise of the militia movements and the right wing talk radio with a lot of what's going on in the blogosphere now.
And in the right wing media, and with Oath Keepers, the 3 percenters, the -- all these people, you know, who are saying things like, "If Idaho wants to succeed from the union," the militia group out there says, you know, "We'll back them." One leader of one of these groups said that all politics was just a prelude to civil war. And then the politicians of course have not been that serious, but a lot of the things that have been said, they -- they create a climate in which people who are vulnerable to violence because they are disoriented like Timothy McVeigh was are more likely to act.
And the only point I tried to make was that we ought to have a lot of political dissent -- a lot of political argument. Nobody is right all the time. But we also have to take responsibility for the possible consequences of what we say. And we shouldn't demonize the government or its public employees or its elected officials. We can disagree with them. We can harshly criticize them. But when we turn them into an object of demonization, you know, you -- you increase the number of threats.
But I worry about these threats against the president and the Congress. And I worry about more careless language even against -- some of which we've seen against the Republican governor in New Jersey, Governor Christie.
I just think we all have to be careful. We ought to remember after Oklahoma City. We learned something about the difference in disagreement and demonization.
To make the point that the same anti-government themes that are present today were also around in the 1990's without also acknowledging that there has been a zero shift in domestic and foreign policy between then and now is so intellectually and politically dishonest. The economic degradation of American towns and cities has been a gradual process that began even before the 1990s, and is approaching its final stages in this decade. So if Clinton sees "parallels" its because he's looking at the same political picture. Except the picture has gotten darker and more distinct. The powerful U.S. Establishment has continued unpopular policies of government expansion, corporate consolidation through central bank regulations and Congressional deregulation, and imperialism.
If Clinton was honest, he would admit that political dissent and different views about government policies are rarely allowed on national television and mainstream newspapers. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, almost zero anti-war critics were heard on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and other corporate news outlets.
Astute observations of the political current is one thing, but washing over recent history is another. Clinton pretends to speak for civil society and the rule of law. But his lesson about "the difference in disagreement and demonization," was missing in the Waco saga. Individuals who lived on a private ranch were demonized by the government and media, and then murdered without provocation. And when his administration decided to bombard Iraq with crippling sanctions that caused the death of hundreds of thousands of people, including children, Clinton forever terminated his privilege to speak as a respectable citizen of the world. He lost any sense of civility and dignity that he may have had at one point in his political career by endorsing policies of government violence and government hate.
So don't be fooled when Clinton speaks. He does not have interests of the American people in mind, or for that matter, of any people, anywhere.
