Clinton: A Warning Inside a Warning

When President Clinton warns the world about rising extremism in the US, you should listen. After all, this is the man who practically invented secret right-wing conspiracies out to destroy him.

The message is a little weird to have delivered on the anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma City terror incident, and at first, it reads fairly innocuous: there is a lot of hateful talk out there, and it doesn’t take much to set some loopier folks off.

But this is by no coincidence. Who was President in 1995? You got it—a big government liberal. And who is President today? Another big government liberal. What President Clinton fails to include in his warning is that crazy, anti-government stunts—committed by people on the Left as often as people on the Right—tend to happen when big government liberals come to power.

Another interesting coincidence is that big government liberals tend to be voted out of office. Clinton survived mostly because he quickly changed his tune when the Republicans got put into power: a consummate reader of polls, Clinton may be unique among Democrats in actually taking today’s likely voter dissatisfaction seriously. Congress sure doesn’t seem to be getting the message. And President Obama is still dismissing the Tea Partiers as a bunch of ingrates. Wrong message, Clinton realizes: violent extremism is a logical but unwelcome conclusion to big government policies. Clinton’s message to tone down the message is not a warning to us all, but a fairly clear warning to the Democrats.