Fifteen years ago today, an extreme right wing terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, with Terry Nichols, bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building in what was the worst terrorist attack in our history, and remained so until extreme religious right wingers flew airplanes into the twin towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Republicans, in the guise of their Teabagger lackeys, are celebrating McVeigh today with Second Amendment demonstrations in and just outside of Washington, DC. Since the seditionist lies that GOP party leaders like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Michelle Bachmann, and many others seem designed to inspire violence against the US government, I have labeled April 19 as GOP Day to recognize their vision for America: War, hatred, greed, racism, homophobia, and intolerance.
Also today, Rachel Maddow is narrating a special: “The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist” at 9 PM EDT on MSNBC. I suspect she will properly link McVeigh to today’s extreme right. She has made the MSM quite nervous.
It’s hard to read faces, but voices are even harder to gauge. Timothy J. McVeigh, the anti-government extremist who killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, had a calm, almost reassuringly matter-of-fact way of speaking. He could have been a building inspector, a driving instructor or a Persian Gulf war veteran, which, of course, he was, having earned a Bronze Star before he went completely off his head.
“See, with these tapes, I feel very free in talking ’cause I know you’re using the information appropriately,” McVeigh told a journalist in a prison interview. “Here, I’m just letting it all come out.” The reporter, Lou Michel, co-author of “American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing,” shared 45 hours of those taped prison interviews to MSNBC.
“The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist,” which will be shown on Monday, the 15th anniversary of the bombing, comes at a time when right-wing militia groups are on the rise, or at least more audible, and heightened anti-government talk is heating up anti-anti-government fervor. McVeigh’s descent into violence is presented as much as a cautionary tale as a commemoration.
“Nine years after his execution we are left worrying that Timothy McVeigh’s voice from the grave echoes in a new rising tide of American anti-government extremism,” is how the MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow, who narrates the film, puts it in her introduction.
But strangely, this film, which claims to be the first ever to present McVeigh in his own words, blunts its impact by relying on stagy computer graphics, and even an actor whose looks are digitally altered, to re-enact McVeigh’s movements. Scenes of this domestic terrorist in shackles during a prison interview or lighting a fuse inside a rented Ryder truck look neither real nor completely fake, but certainly cheesy: a violent video game with McVeigh as a methodical, murderous avatar…
Inserted from <NY Times>
Not having seen it (yet), I can’t say, but I have never seen anything she did that was not superior in quality. Watch it if you can.
In the meantime, happy GOP day to you all. Try to keep yourselves sane by avoiding Teabuggery in all its forms. I hope that the Republican base (all that’s left, really) will be content to hunker down for some Faux Noise and commit no more atrocities.
