Interesting statement from a BATFE flunky

David Codrea's Gun Rights Examiner column yesterday prompted me to take another look at the Southern Preposterous Lie Center's "The Second Wave: Return of the Militias" report (pdf file). In doing so, I came across a quote I had somehow missed before, that I find kinda interesting (my emphasis added).

“You’re seeing the bubbling [of antigovernment sentiment] right now,” says Bart McEntire, who has infiltrated racist hate groups and now is the supervisory special agent for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Roanoke, Va. “You see people buying into what they’re saying. It’s primed to grow. The only thing you don’t have to set it on fire is a Waco or Ruby Ridge.”

The eternal optimist in me looks at that and wants to believe that the string-pullers at the Department of "Justice" have read and heeded Mike Vanderboegh's "No more free Wacos" letter to AG Eric Holder, and thus are aware of the danger of "set[ting] it on fire" (a rather unfortunate choice of words in reference to Waco), and will behave with at least a modicum of self-restraint.

My more realistic side wonders, on the other hand, if the federal thugs want to "set it on fire," and thus provoke something akin to the 1995 Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing, and thus guaranteeing a huge boon to agencies like the BATFE, in terms of power and funding. That power and funding would then, the fed thugs might be thinking, be used in the War on Patriots (the SPLC perversely uses the word "patriot" as a pejorative).

As with that bombing, no actual evidence linking Constitutional militias to any new attacks would be necessary. The SPLC report, for example, describes OKC bomber Timothy McVeigh as being "steeped in the ideology of both militias and hate groups." What the report does not mention is that whatever McVeigh was "steeped" in, he was not in a militia.

Yet Dees and Stern build their books around the claim that the militia/patriot movements are unindicted co-conspirators in the Oklahoma City murders. The link between accused bomber Timothy McVeigh and the militia movement is based mainly on two pieces of information: First, he and his friend Terry Nichols attended two Militia of Michigan meetings--which, significantly, they were told to leave because they were advocating violence. Second, allegedly Mark Koernke, a short-wave radio personality who runs a mail-order business that sells militia gear, was seen with someone who looks like McVeigh. In addition, a Michigan talk show host supposedly said (he denies it) that the host's Rolodex listed McVeigh as a contact for Koernke. This evidence does not come remotely close to showing that militia members encouraged McVeigh to do anything illegal, let alone to perpetrate one of the most vicious mass murders in history.

The SPLC, with its talk of McVeigh's supposed militia "steep[ing]," implies a connection between militias and McVeigh, but even they have backed away from openly asserting something as demonstrably false as a claim that McVeigh was a militia member.

Here's the thing, though--as Mike said, there will be "no more free Wacos." The question for the feds won't be how to exploit the backlash from the next Waco or Ruby Ridge--it will be how far they have to run, how deeply they have to bury themselves, to survive that backlash.

Here's a tip, feds: the answer is "farther than you can run, and deeper than you can bury yourselves."