Watching a PBS documentary called "Oklahoma City" on Netflix.
168 people were killed in the bombing.
The death penalty . . . is that some kind of oxymoron? It's not a penalty, it's an escape.
True enough, in its way, as the Romans well knew.
But it's a useful deterrent, an unmistakable affirmation of society's maximum condemnation, and the only completely effective way of ensuring the punished person poses no further threat of any kind to anyone.
And despite efforts of courts to make it prohibitively expensive it remains way cheaper than incarceration for life.
They think, killing me, that they've won. They haven't won. The way I see it, it's 168 to 1.
He denied it was about race and focused his story on lies about what the feds had done at Ruby Ridge and Waco.
But his bible was The Turner Diaries and he palled around with the Aryan Brotherhood, and his spiritual, ideological soulmates were neo-Nazis, skinheads, Klansmen, and the like.
But, just like them, he knew how to wrap his hatred of non-whites and Jews and the so-called "Zionist Occupation Government" in the flag, to dress it up in the 2nd Amendment, in the Constitution, and in a totally fraudulent love of country.
He was arrested in a T-shirt bearing a picture of Lincoln and the words, "Sic Semper Tyrannis," the motto of John Wilkes Booth.
Anybody who has ever read The Turner Diaries knows all that white militia patriotic stuff is complete bullshit.
Guys like him hate America with a savage hatred.
What they love is an imaginary America, an imaginary world, ruled by imagined and admired Nazi racists who make the actual Hitler seem like a cub scout, in which loyal and single-minded white soldiers exterminate every last nonwhite on the planet.
A side note.
Not every crime motivated by hate, not every crime of violence against the government or its agents, is an act of terrorism.
Yes, McVeigh called himself a terrorist.
But he called himself a patriot, too.
Wrong both times.
