JOSEPH CAMPBELL: We are still feeling the aftershocks of the Oklahoma City bombing.
On ABC News, the network’s national security correspondent, John McWethy, reported that “if you talk to intelligence sources and to law enforcement officials, they all say … that this particular bombing probably has roots in the Middle East.”
And in a commentary published shortly after the bombing, syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer asserted “the indisputable fact is that it has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East.”
Surprise was substantial when, two days after the attack, the Oklahoma City bomber was brought briefly before television cameras as he was taken into federal custody. The bomber was no foreigner. He was not from the Middle East. He was Timothy McVeigh, a lanky white American from upstate New York.
McVeigh nursed numerous grievances about the federal government. He was outraged by the deadly assault by federal agents in 1993 to end a weeks-long siege near Waco, Texas, at the compound of the Branch Davidian cult. McVeigh timed his attack on the nine-story Murrah building to coincide with the second anniversary of the fiery end to the standoff in Waco, in which 76 Branch Davidians were killed.
According to his biographers, McVeigh was neither a leader nor a member of an extremist hate group or of a self-styled paramilitary militia. Contrary to a New York Times report four days after the Oklahoma City attack, there was no “broader plot behind the bombing” nor was there “a conspiracy hatched by several self-styled militiamen who oppose gun laws, income taxes and other forms of government control.”
And then there was Bill Clinton’s shameful exploitation of the bombing, as Byron York wrote 15 years ago this month: How Clinton exploited Oklahoma City for political gain.
Later, under the heading “How to use extremism as issue against Republicans,” [Dick] Morris told Clinton that “direct accusations” of extremism wouldn’t work because the Republicans were not, in fact, extremists. Rather, Morris recommended what he called the “ricochet theory.” Clinton would “stimulate national concern over extremism and terror,” and then, “when issue is at top of national agenda, suspicion naturally gravitates to Republicans.” As that happened, Morris recommended, Clinton would use his executive authority to impose “intrusive” measures against so-called extremist groups. Clinton would explain that such intrusive measures were necessary to prevent future violence, knowing that his actions would, Morris wrote, “provoke outrage by extremist groups who will write their local Republican congressmen.” Then, if members of Congress complained, that would “link right-wing of the party to extremist groups.” The net effect, Morris concluded, would be “self-inflicted linkage between [GOP] and extremists.”
Clinton’s proposals — for example, new limits on firearms and some explosives that were opposed by the National Rifle Association — had “an underlying political purpose,” Morris wrote in 2004 in another book about Clinton, Because He Could. That purpose was “to lead voters to identify the Oklahoma City bombing with the right wing. By making proposals we knew the Republicans would reject…we could label them as soft on terror an imply a connection with the extremism of the fanatics who bombed the Murrah Federal Building.”
It was a political strategy crafted while rescue and recovery efforts were still underway in Oklahoma City. And it worked better than Clinton or Morris could have predicted.
Democrats would repeat that playbook in 2011 after an apolitical lunatic shot Gabrielle Giffords, and the entire DNC-MSM nexus immediately blamed Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.
UPDATE: Sarah Palin Gets Another Crack at Making the New York Times Pay for Reckless Article.
MORE: John Nolte: Oklahoma City Bombing Review: Compelling Netflix Doc Takes Us Back to a Dreadful Day.