The excerpt is from “Maddow, McVeigh And The Militia,” now on WND.COM:
“Rachel Maddow’s gayness (and goggles) is the most interesting thing about her. What I’m trying to say here is that the MSNBC TV host has a mundane mind, which, rest assured, will insert and assert itself during an upcoming special presentation, “The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist.” ….
A far more interesting choice for presenter of the forthcoming MSNBC feature on McVeigh would have been the brilliant belletrist Gore Vidal.
Like Maddow, Vidal (aged 83) is a gay leftist. Unlike Maddow, he manages to dazzle with his original insights. (Unfashionably, Vidal has also poked fun at assorted anal activists and at all manner of “vulgar fagism.”)
Vidal “became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh,” and considers McVeigh “a true patriot, a Constitution man.”
Gore Vidal is rare in recognizing the legitimate federal insults to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that motivated McVeigh to commit his crime. He is also unique, on the Left and Right, in acknowledging that McVeigh was not a rube, but a thoughtful man who had fought for his country and was familiar with its foundational principles and documents.
As the most able counsel for the defense (McVeigh’s), the iconoclastic octogenarian would have given his viewers something to mull over; mundane Maddow will not. …
The complete column is “Maddow, McVeigh And The Militia.” Read it on WND.COM.
Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.
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Update (April 16): Inferring motivation, or psychologizing about the reason Vidal respected some of McVeigh’s arguments are species of ad hominem. I avoid them, for the most; I don’t take them seriously when others make them. In fact, that’s MSNBC’s stock-in-trade; impute motivation (“racism” always) to your foe and attack him based on assumptions about his inner workings, rather than deal with the facts and merits of his argument.
So, our (much-welcomed) commenter claims Vidal had a homoerotic fixation with McVeigh, and therefore everything he claimed to respect in McVeigh is not credible. That line of reasoning is illogical.
A quote from McVeigh:
I think it all has to do with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the misconception that the government is obliged to provide those things or has the jurisdiction to deny them. We’ve gotten away from the principle that they were only created to secure those rights. And that’s where, I believe, much of the trouble has surfaced.
I agree with that. And if a “stormtrooper” agrees with the above statement, then consider that a stormtrooper, McVeigh and I agree about the statement. Other than to argue in circles, so what?!