Billy Jeff 1992 Redux.

All that’s missing is Janet Reno and an FBI sniper with a penchant for pregnant women. In 1992 the militia phenomenon was growing in reaction to Bill Clinton’s Presidency. Clinton moved quickly to marginalize and demonize the militia movements. He and Hillary repeatedly tried to tie the movement to Timothy McVeigh. The ‘main stream’ media had been working overtime to link McVeigh to the militias as well… but Billy Jeff’s fixation with the militia movement went back farther than that.



Bill Clinton didn’t take criticism gracefully and one way to shift some of the heat away from himself, and what was going on inside his White House, was to latch on to the militia movement as an example of right wing extremism. From there it’s easy to lump Conservatives together with the militias and paint us all with that brush the left loves to use.

Ruby Ridge 1992, Waco 1993, Elian Gonzalez 2000. All massive abuses of power and misuse of the law. A runaway Justice Dept. being run by Janet Reno, who reportedly was impaired a good deal of the time. The Government’s willingness to take the lives of its own citizens chilled the nation. Clinton laid off the militias some in his second term, but by then he had a lot more to worry about than what he saw as a bunch of rednecks running around the countryside with pickup trucks and rifle racks.



Now Billy’s back and damned if what he’s saying isn’t almost exactly what he was saying in 1992, when he ‘discovered’ the bane of his existence… Rush Limbaugh and Conservative talk radio. The internet was beginning to be a factor also.

I can’t help get the impression listening to Clinton that he’s ‘fishing’ for something by chumming the waters and then waiting for the suckers to bite. I thought I had as much of Billy Jeff as I ever wanted and here he is popping up again. The rhetoric is identical, but it came from a false premise then as does it now. He was wrong then. He’s wrong now.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2010