http://thinkprogress.org/2010/04/16/clinton-oklahoma-15/Clinton: Media, Politicians Shouldn’t Fuel ‘Hatriot’ Groups With Anti-Government Rhetoric That Inspired McVeigh
Fifteen years ago, a deranged anti-government extremist named Timothy McVeigh set off a truck bomb below the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children under the age of six. In a speech delivered at the Center for American Progress Action Fund today,
President Clinton drew eerily parallels between that incident and the current atmosphere of right-wing, anti-government hatred.He specifically pointed to the influence of right-wing media in the 90s, saying that those hate radio hosts “understood clearly that emotion was more powerful than reason most of the time, and it happened that they got much bigger listenership, and more advertisers, and more commercial success, if they kept people in the white heat.” People like Timothy McVeigh were “highly vulnerable to the suggestions and implications of the most militant rhetoric of the time.” Both and politicians therefore need to be responsible in their rhetoric since it falls on the “serious and the delirious alike”:
We can’t let the debate veer so far into hatred that we lose focus of our common humanity. It’s really important. We can’t ever fudge the fact that there’s a basic line dividing criticism from violence or its advocacy, and that the closer you get to the line and the more responsibility you have, you have to think about the echo chamber in which your words resonate. <...>
But what we learned from Oklahoma City is not that we should gag each other or we should reduce our passion for the positions that we hold, but the words we use really do matter because there are — there’s this vast echo chamber, and they go across space, and they fall on the serious and the delirious alike. They fall on the connected and the unhinged alike. And I am not trying to muzzle anybody, but one of the things that the conservatives have always brought to the table in America is that no law can replace personal responsibility. And the more power you have, and the more influence you have, the more responsibility you have.
In 1995, McVeigh’s targets were federal employees. In the past year, there has also been a suicide attack of an IRS building in Texas, a shooting of officers at the Pentagon, and threats of violence against Census workers. Clinton stressed that there’s a difference between criticizing a policy and demonizing a whole class of government workers, and the latter should be unacceptable after the Oklahoma City bombing...
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http://thinkprogress.org/2010/04/16/clinton-oklahoma-15/
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