True, but you have reached the wrong conclusion. In 1995, the leftists were weaker, and were in danger of being steamrollered by conservatives. Today, the power balance is reversed -- but today's leftist central government has learned from OKC -- and is preemptively planning to use any conservative uprising to draw folks like you to their side -- as they (obviously) just did:
"I don’t find this warning unreasonable at all. It is actually responsible government action and if they didn’t act on this, I would consider it incompetence or laziness. Ignore history, condemned to repeat...or something like that?"
The most insightful analysis of the 1995 situation was done by a Brit, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. Do as i did, and Google [Pritchard+Clinton+"Air Force One"+"Oklahoma City"].
I was amazed to learn that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's book is being serialized online -- starting this very day:
Relaxing on Air Force One after the 1996 elections, Bill Clinton told a pool of reporters that he owed his political revival to the Oklahoma bombing. He was in a reflective mood, looking back at the ups and downs of his turbulent presidency. As so often, his thoughts lingered on those first painful months after the Republicans captured both Houses of Congress for the first time in almost two generations. It had been a stinging rebuke for the White House. But then that bomb went off. "It broke a spell in the country as people began searching for our common ground again," he said.{SNIP}
President Clinton's analysis cannot be faulted. The bombing had a catalytic effect, abruptly changing the chemistry of American politics. One has to think back to the mood in Washington in April 1995 to understand what Clinton meant. The Republican Congress was completing its one hundred-day march; the Contract with America was being rushed through the House at breakneck speed; and the world was kneeling in obeisance before Speaker Newt Gingrich, even as President Clinton spoke plaintively of being "relevant."
I was intimately involved in the engineering analysis of the collapse of the Murrah Building. The physical evidence left me with lingering doubts re the government's published explanation of the collapse. However, the malfeasant behavior of every branch of federal bureaucracy with which I came into contact left me with zero doubt that the evidence had been manipulated and misrepresented by the very agencies which should have been exposing the truth for us -- at the direction of a leftist Executive Branch.
I am no particular fan of WND; I would not have known about their re-posting had I not Googled to find Clinton's heartless statement re OKC. However, A E-P's book is well worth reading. I advise everyone to avail themselves of this online opportunity to do so.
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You are correct: history is repeating. You are wrong: this is not "responsible government action". It is a blatant preemptive move to turn any action by conservatives into another claim of assault by "a vast right-wing conspiracy" on this much-farther left central government.
If anyone thinks that "demonization of the opposition" was confined to the Clintons, you ain't seen nothing, yet!
You know what all this outrage comes down to? We lost and elections matter.
Instead of ranting and raving like paranoid schizophrenic lunatics that think their every right is being infringed upon, how about we instead rewrite the Republican platform, become the party of successful ideas, run a grass roots effort with this platform as a backbone like 1994 and get some damn Republican victories in 2010 and 2012.
We lost and it is supposed to sting like a b$tch and piss us off but I hate how it makes loonies out of some people.
If Obama signed the Patriot Act instead of Bush, I can guarantee the threads here would be lit up with “end of the world” scenarios. I know because the DUmmies were the outsiders then and they ranted and raved with paranoia and silliness identical to this thread.
Lets not confuse losing an election with the imminent threat of tyranny. I heard this same stuff during the Clinton years when Janet Reno’s storm troopers, funded by Mena Airport drug money, were going to coral all of us up and send us to the Amtrak concentration camp in Beech Grove, IN.
Until an actuall constitutional right is seen to be infringed and deemed so by our courts, lets all just calm down and look at Obama political moves with sober eyes.
In the meantime, lets concentrate on redifining our platform and win some damn elections next time around.