It's always 1994

So much of what's frustrating me about this story is laid out well by Josh Marshall here. For whatever reason, people like to pretend that we haven't been through this exact same thing before or that there's something somehow new or worse about right wing nuts that hasn't always existed.

Put simply, as they made clear in the lead up to the 1994 election and then in congressional hearings before and after, the more radical wing of the Gingrich GOP was quite solicitous of the militia movement, though certainly not supporting its actual violence - which in any case was mostly threatened rather than carried out. 

Most of those militia fellow travelers in elected office went to ground very quickly after the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995. But even after the bombing, the newly Republican controlled Congress held a series of hearings on the militia movement in which "militia" leaders were brought up to Capitol Hill to preach their claims about federal tyranny and the need for their militias to provide a counterweight to federal tyranny and overreach.

Remember, this is the era when the NRA's Wayne LaPierre - just a month before the Oklahoma bombing - sent out a fundraising email to 3.5 million NRA member, calling federal law enforcement against "jack-booted government thugs" who "in Clinton's administration [think] if you have a badge, you have the government's go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens." Even after Oklahoma City, LaPierre defended this inciting rhetoric. This kind of incitement was generating increasing support on the right and indeed has become increasingly normalized over the years.

Worse than just people not remembering the 1990s, though, it's more like a deliberate attempt to unlearn past lessons in order to continue excusing the same mistakes.

This, in fact, pretty much describes all of the Obama Presidency to me. We've been treated to a long unbroken run of conservative Democrats forever pretending that if only they could be ever so slightly more conservative, then the hard-line right wingers will finally "work together and get things done" with them.

But that never works out because hard-line right wingers are freaking crazy and being a conservative Democrat in Washington is worse than not even being there in the first place. And we learned all of this before.. several times over.

Also this.

And when we compare how white militants are handled compared to non-whites, we shouldn't assume that we should be killing more people camping out in a Wildlife visitors center but that we should have some more consistent policy and simply avoid killing a lot of people where possible.

Over and over again I read comments from so-called liberals whose idea of justice in this case is more not less killing. I'll never understand these people.