On Monday, the 15-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Rachel Maddow ran a two hour “exclusive” detailing the actions of Timothy McVeigh on MSNBC. Using 45 hours of audio of McVeigh describing in his own voice his actions to Lou Michel, co-author of the McVeigh biography, American Terrorist, Rachel Maddow prefaced each monologue by McVeigh with an unfeeling narration.
Imagine watching MSNBC on September 11th this year and seeing the lives of each of the terrorists who plotted and participated in 9/11 played out in front of you, complete with dramatic cinematography and brilliant editing with an accompanying narrative by Rachel Maddow. Imagine listening to Khalid al-Mihdhar list the intricate details of how he planned every step of the process, his thoughts upon entering pilot school, reflecting on his foreshadowing thoughts of how he wasn’t really interested in landing portion of the course. Imagine if you listened to a tape of Marwan al-Shehhi say with total callousness, being completely devoid of feeling and vocal fluctuation, “The victims need to get over it. You’re not the first mom to lose a son and you’re not the first grandparents to lose grandchildren… I was going for a high ‘body count’ – the technical term.”
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That was what the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing were exposed to on the anniversary of the death and destruction that changed all of our lives (at least here in Oklahoma City) permanently. According to MSNBC, McVeigh’s life before beginning the planning of the Murrah building was guns. They showed a lot of fake b-roll of “him” playing with guns in his back yard. Painting him as a sympathetic guy with rough parent/home life, with only a gun and his grandpa, who taught him how to use guns, as his only friends. They showed him as a disturbed veteran who was against what happened in Waco. It was said multiple times that the fact that he went to “gun shows” and met people who thought like him, who were affiliated with “militia and patriotic movements” enabled him.
Yet, the program never showed how any of these people he met at these evil gun shows encouraged or helped him in any way with his plans for Oklahoma City.
He was a loner by all accounts. He had two accomplices who in the end tried to bail on him multiple times.
In all of the audio played by MSNBC, McVeigh was very calculated and articulate. Yet never once did they play an ending “rant,” for lack of a better term. MSNBC portrayed that McVeigh with all of his articulate planning, his endless detail and thought into what he was doing, the hours of contemplation on where and how he came to that point in his life to plan and execute the Murrah bombing, MSNBC told us that he didn’t have one final philosophical rant against the government. There was no final charge to the government to change its ways (which is what the bombing was supposedly about).
Frankly, I don’t believe it. McVeigh was well spoken and articulate. For him to have merely parts of ideology and no articulated creed does not fit into how MSNBC (or other sources over the years) have portrayed McVeigh. MSNBC chose very carefully what to play of McVeigh’s audio because they wanted to make sure that it appeared he did that atrocious act for the reasons they want him to have done it, so that MSNBC might make a stencil of hate speech toward the government and lay it over the Tea Party movement and say, “See? It’s McVeigh in the making!”
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I have never seen anything so disrespectful to those who are survivors or mourners of a catastrophic event. MSNBC showed nothing but a cold and callous eye to those of us here in Oklahoma, and it’s because they hate Oklahoma and our ideals that we stand for (which are remarkably similar to the rising Tea Party movement). We picked ourselves up, without the federal government. All counties voted red in the last election. We have a church on every corner. We epitomize everything MSNBC hates: conservatives who live and work for themselves, who give generously to their fellow man, and have a fear of the Almighty. We don’t sit around after ice storms and tornadoes waiting for a government bureaucrat to come by and help us out. We look to our neighbors first, our churches second and our government last. A people like that can’t be controlled with liberal nanny-state ideology and we don’t want to be.
In the wake of the MSNBC program about McVeigh anyone who could even be considering doing something as atrocious now has motivation. MSNBC and Rachel Maddow will have a two-hour special about his life — diving deep into his psychological core and his troubled past. MSNBC (and the left) are so desperate for violence from the right that they exhumed the corpse of Tim McVeigh and used it as a part of their own sick game to try to incite it. Despicable.
Rachel Maddow and MSNBC promoted the special by saying it was a reflection of what could happen if “hate speech” against the government is left unchecked. Instead of using the tragedy as an opportunity to pay tribute and celebrate the life of the survivors of the bombing, MSNBC instead paid tribute to McVeigh’s life and legacy. What’s worse, on the 15th anniversary of the bombing, MSNBC chose to give Timothy McVeigh the last word. He might as well have said: “You’re not the first mother to lose a son, or a grandparent to lose grandkids. I know this is harsh and cold but really, you just need to get over it.”
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