Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC special on Timothy McVeigh this past Monday night did not come a moment too soon. As Maddow explained in the introduction to her show: “Nine years after his execution, we are left worrying that Timothy McVeigh’s voice from the grave echoes in the new rising tide of American anti-government extremism.”
After months of hysterically warning viewers that cheerful, well-dressed tea partiers carrying “I Can See November From My House” signs could suddenly erupt into wanton violence, MSNBC finally had proof: Timothy McVeigh.
How about a special on the KGB to help us understand what makes Henry Waxman tick? We’re just trying to seek answers …
On her April 14 show, Maddow gave a “War of the Worlds” report on gun rights activists whom she claimed were planning tributes to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. “On the anniversary of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh,” she said, “there will be two marches on Washington.”
After reminding viewers that McVeigh was “an anti-government extremist with ties to the militia movement” (his only “ties” being that he tried to join the Michigan Militia, but was rejected Maddow said one of the groups, the Second Amendment March, had “been holding armed rallies at state capitols from Kentucky to Montana to Virginia—anti-government marches and rallies at which participants are encouraged to wear and display their guns.”
So if I have this straight, the pro-Second Amendment marchers were both armed … AND displaying guns!
Having received an “A plus” from the Department of Redundancy Department, a deadly earnest Maddow continued: “Also on the occasion of the Oklahoma City bombing anniversary,” there would be an Open Carry rally.
Participants, she said, “are being encouraged to bring guns” (you know, just like the guns Timothy McVeigh used to shoot up the federal building in Oklahoma City).
True, April 19 is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. It’s also the anniversary of Lexington and Concord.
Once upon a time, the skirmish that sparked the Revolutionary War was a date that every schoolchild knew. When British soldiers moved to seize the gunpowder and arms of voluntary militias, armed citizens defended themselves, firing upon the British in “the shot heard ‘round the world”—as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in his “Concord Hymn.”
Hmmm, I wonder if the gun rights activists chose April 19 for their rallies because it was the anniversary of Lexington and Concord—or because it was the anniversary of Oklahoma City?
Unless the organizers of the Second Amendment March and the Open Carry rally specifically told Rachel, “Oh no, we picked April 19 to honor the bombing in Oklahoma City—gosh, we had no idea it was date of Lexington and Concord!”, I’m pretty sure they picked April 19 because that was the day armed patriots defended themselves from British troops.
Maddow’s idiotic attempt to ascribe the date of the gun rights marches to Oklahoma City rather than Lexington and Concord is so Olbermanic that—to paraphrase Truman Capote—it is now apparent that you lose a point of your IQ for every day you spend at MSNBC.
We have enough U.S. history by now that there’s not a day on the calendar that isn’t the anniversary of something. In fact, the very day that Maddow was attacking gun rights groups on her show—April 14—was the 235th anniversary of the founding of the first anti-slavery society in America!
It is also the anniversary of an anti-war actor’s murder of a crusading, anti-slavery Republican president. (In addition—like I have to tell any of you—it was National Restless Leg Syndrome Awareness Day, but I don’t think that had anything to do with Rachel’s report.)
Oh sure, Rachel may claim she that she had no idea what April 14 was the anniversary of, and that the date of her attack on our constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms was just a coincidence. But given the long and ugly history of gun control laws in America being used to keep guns out of the hands of free blacks, it was a shockingly insensitive date for Maddow to engage in such extremist anti-gun rhetoric.
What’s curious about the left’s current obsession with Timothy McVeigh is that it proves that—despite a frantic search for 15 years—liberals have come across no better evidence of burgeoning “right-wing extremist” violence than a drug-taking, self-described “agnostic” who was thrown out of the Michigan Militia and who proclaimed, “Science is my religion.”
That sounds more like Bill Maher than Rush Limbaugh.
• High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (1998)
• Slander:Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002)
• Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003)
• HowTo Talk To Liberals (If You Must) (2004)
• Godless: The Church of Liberalism (2006)
• If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans (2007)
• Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America (2009)
• Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America (2011)
•Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (2012)
•Never Trust a Liberal Over Three-Especially a Republican (2013)
•Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (2015)
•In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! (2016)
•Resistance Is Futile!: How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind (2018)
She also writes a popular syndicated column every week published at Breitbart, DailyCaller, Townhall, FrontPage, Yahoo, Takimag, VDare, and dozens of newspapers. (As well as the eponymous, AnnCoulter.com!)
Coulter has been a major media personality for more than 20 years, after starting on MSNBC their first day on air in July 1996.
She has appeared on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, PBS’s Frontline, The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Early Show, The Tonight Show, Good Morning Britain, Yahoo News, and a slew of other U.S. and international TV shows. She was the cover story of Time magazine on April 25, 2005, and has been profiled in scores of other publications, including TV Guide, The Guardian (UK), the New York Observer, National Journal, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Elle magazine. In 2001, Coulter was named one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner.
A Connecticut native, Coulter graduated with honors from Cornell University School of Arts & Sciences and received her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, where she was an editor of The Michigan Law Review.
After practicing law for a few, very long years in New York City, Coulter moved to Washington to work for the Senate Judiciary Committee, where she handled crime and immigration issues for Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan. From there, she became a litigator with the Center For Individual Rights in Washington, DC, focusing on free speech, congressional power, and race discrimination cases.
Within a year, Coulter took a short leave of absence from her law firm to write her first New York Times bestseller, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton.
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