Stuever offered a preview of the left-wing propaganda to be unveiled tonight in the Maddow hour:
"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," Maddow says at the outset of her MSNBC special Monday night called "The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist."
She's talking, of course, about the latest news about militias, weapons stockpiling, "tea party" anger and the perception of rising unrest in those who seek to reclaim an America supposedly lost to federal control: "On this date, which holds great meaning for the anti-government movement," Maddow says, "the McVeigh tapes are a can't-turn-away, riveting reminder."
Despite this line-drawing , Stuever claimed "Maddow and company wisely decline to draw too straight a line from 1995 to 2010, but, as she indicates, it might be helpful in crazy times to study this sort of crazy head-on."
When Bush was in the White House, comparing him to Hitler and using terms like "totalitarian" was patriotic dissent. Now it's "crazy times." To the media elite, one side's protesters are psychotic, and the other's is patriotic.
The audio MSNBC is using come from prison interviews McVeigh gave to Lou Michel, a reporter from the Buffalo News, contained in Michel's 2001 book "American Terrorist."
Since audio is presumed to be too boring, "MSNBC hired an actor to play McVeigh and used a computer animation effect to make the actor resemble McVeigh....The effect is jarring at first, feeling a bit like a fanatic's version of Grand Theft Auto video games." But it works, Stuever claimed.
On page 3 of Monday's Post, reporter Ann Gerhart reported on protests planned for today by gun-rights and militia groups. Here are a few spots where Gerhart gets passionate:
[Three-tour Iraq veteran Daniel] Almond plans to have his pistol loaded and openly carried, his rifle unloaded and slung to the rear, a bandoleer of magazines containing ammunition draped over his polo-shirted shoulder. The Atlanta area real estate agent organized the rally because he is upset about health-care reform, climate control, bank bailouts, drug laws and what he sees as President Obama's insistence on and the Democratic Congress's capitulation to a "totalitarian socialism" that tramples individual rights.
A member of several heretofore little-known groups, including Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership and Oath Keepers -- former and active military and law enforcement officials who have vowed to resist laws they deem unconstitutional -- Almond, 31, considers packing heat on the doorstep of the federal government within the mainstream of political speech.
Others consider it an alarming escalation of paranoia and anger in the age of Obama.
....When they stand on the river banks Monday and preach an activism that sounds to some like sedition, the armed demonstrators will have the full support of the federal government they fear, carefully detailed in the 26-page event permit, complete with the gun regulations of both Virginia and the Interior Department and a commitment to provide fencing, barricades and bike racks for the event.
