the national tone at the moment of the OKC bombing

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

I remember this well...

Violent-minded wing-nuttery had been building every day since Clinton was elected. It was palpable.

News crossed of the OKC bombing. Even though the World Trade Center had been bombed by muslim radicals the previous year it was obvious that OKC was some sort of RW tax-protester anti-government thing because 1) no muslim terrorist given a truck full of ammonium nitrate would drive it to a federal building in Oklahoma City, and 2) the RW had been talking about striking violently against the federal bureaucracy for a solid year.

Terror bombing targets are symbolic. A drab federal office building in the very middle of American backwardness has little symbolic value to anyone except Turner Diaries devotees.

But the news media quickly gravitated to the 'obvious' answer that Saddam Hussein had done it. Granted, it was believed at that time that he had tried to kill Bush I, but my nose still stings today from the Coca-Cola that erupted through it from laughter when I first pictured Saddam Hussein in the war room dramatically stabbing his finger at Oklahoma City on a map. "And here is where we will break them..."

But the media took it as the obvious working theory... despite the fact that America's most popular radio shows talked about little other than that somebody probably out to execute some federal bureaucrats. (Always 'joking' of course.)

But for the first day of coverage it was Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. As a result I got to learn that Oklahoma City had "a large Iraqi population." That was mentioned ad naseum the day of the bombing.

The OKC bombing was solved through one of the niftiest and fastest investigations in the history of the FBI. And they were able to move so sure-footedly partly because Bill Clinton and Al Gore were not underfoot at FBI headquarters ordering people to link the OKC bombing to Iraq.

Notice two patterns associated with 9/11 that were actually in place years before:

1) Americans think muslim terrorists are keen on attacking the dregs of heartland America. To this very day fears of muslim terror are higher the smaller and more isolated the locale. Look at all the money we spent after 9/11 terror-proofing landfills in Kansas and such.

2) The assumption fifteen years ago was the same as the assumption on 9/11... that even though we knew who did it because it's all they talked about (militia-types and Al Queada respectively) the 'smart' insider assumption was that it was Iraq. Just because.

And some of the crackpots who blamed Iraq for 9/11 (minor figures like the Vice President of the United States) did so partially based on their ongoing conviction that Iraq had indeed been behind the OKC bombing! Even after McVeigh was executed Cheney believed Iraq had been behind OKC. After 9/11 Cheney was giving people in the halls of power copies of that mad-woman's book claiming the Saddam-McVeigh connection.

On the OKC anniversary Friday Dick Cheney will be watching FOX and congratulating himself for having solved and avenged the crime via arranging the premature deaths of about a million people in Iraq who had never heard of Oklahoma.

It's like the last scene in the movie UNBREAKABLE.