When is a war crime not a war crime?  When the criminal is a Democrat.

When is open murder, even of women and children, not a crime?  When the murderer is a Democrat, especially a Senator or an Attorney General.

Well then, when is blind terrorism a terrible crime?  When the perpetrator is a right-winger, of course.

Ahh...., well, there we have it:  If you kill the enemies of a Democrat or a Democratic cause, you're a hero.  If you're not a Democrat, then your victims are virtually beatified and you're evil.

This is no empty or frivolous charge.  Disgraceful as it may seem, in America we decide whether our political murderers are heroes or villains based on the degree to which we either demonize, vilify, praise or pity their victims.     

To understand this process, we must investigate the excuses and justifications which swirl around former Senator Bob Kerrey's startling revelation of the mass murder (of more than 20 women, children, and old men) he committed on Feb. 25, 1969, at Thanh Phong in Viet Nam (he later reported them as 'Viet Cong,' was awarded a Bronze Star for his 'Heroism,' then kept the truth secret for three decades while he condemned his political enemies for being "against the rights of women, children, and the elderly").  Then we'll compare them to some other similar crimes to see just how the condemnation or forgiveness is applied according to the shifting respect we have for the victims.  We will see that any degrees of separation between the victims of Waco, Oklahoma City, Thanh Phong, Ruby Ridge, and Birmingham's black church bombing are mere fiction, each a deliberate political artifice, offered for the distinct purpose of creating heroes out of Democratic murderers and villains out of Right Wing murderers.            

Many of Kerrey's defenders say, "Hey, it was 30 years ago, it's long over, just forget about it."  Well, then let's just forget about the 30 year old Alabama church bombing too, and set Thomas Blanton free.  "Oh no no, Blasphemy!!" they cry.  "Those four little black girls were innocent victims of white evilness.  We can't overlook that!"  Yes, but Kerrey's white, our presence in Viet Nam was evil, and the kids he killed were both innocent and not white, so what's the difference?   "Oh no way, those Vietnamese kids might well have been killers!  They weren't innocent.  Kerrey was saving lives by killing them!"  So it's okay to kill Vietnamese kids because of what they might be, because of what they might do?  Maybe those four little black girls in Alabama would have gone on welfare and bred 60 or 70 thieves, drug addicts, and killers.  How many lives were spared by Thomas Blanton's bomb?  "That's absurd!  Those darling young black girls were innocent, and those horrible Vietnamese children were killers!"

There we have it again:  Innocent civilian children can be divided into 2 groups, one good and one evil, and it's okay (even imperative) to kill the evil ones.  Of course, if Kerrey had been a Republican, both sets of kids would have been 'good.'  Never mind that the Vietnamese civilians were fighting an invading aggressor, America.  They met the enemy and he was US.  Now we demonize them to protect the murderous likes of Machine Gun Bob Kerrey and his band of Merry Pranksters.               

Another excuse is:  "War is awful.  Terrible things happen.  What can you do?  It was a kill or die situation.  He was just a young kid doing what he was told to do."  

The Viet Nam War wasn't a war at all, it was a police action, a law and order action, like the armed FBI/ATF assaults on the church at Waco or the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge.  But beyond that, the "Young Punk with a machine gun, just following orders to kill innocent civilians" defense was defeated at Nuremberg.  There, it was determined that even young death camp guards were guilty of mass murder because any soldier, when given an immoral order, is required to refuse it.  If not, he shares in the crimes of his superiors.  But our American Domestic War criminals are called HEROES when they follow the murderous orders of Janet Reno and burn more than 80 innocent Christians to death, or kill Randy Weaver's wife, 14 year old son, and his dog for no reason.

And why exactly don't we insist that Bob Kerrey, Janet Reno, and the FBI/ATF assassins are "Nazis," prosecute them for murder, then put them to death?  Because the Democrats' Government propaganda machine had pre-demonized their victims.  Certainly the Johnson administration told us that the Vietnamese people were deadly and evil, but it was left to the Clinton administration to spin the most outlandish lies as a cover for their own attacks on American Citizens!!

Clinton and Reno told us that David Koresh and his church members were illegally stockpiling weapons to start a holy war.  Even worse, they were offering up their children as victims to be sexually molested, cruelly raped by Koresh himself.  The Davidians were called an "evil cult" in the complicit Liberal Media.  Even though the charges were false, the full force of physical and psychological warfare was applied to a religious retreat.  2000 years after Christians were burnt to death in the Roman Arena, Janet Reno did the exact same thing.

To this very day, the pitiful few survivors of Waco languish in Federal Prisons, guilty of nothing more than defending themselves (like Vietnamese women and children) against a deadly aggressor, US.  

The manipulative stories that Reno spread about the Weaver family were no less absurd.  The Federal authorities insisted that Randy Weaver was a dangerous White Male Supremacist, White Separatist, Right Wing Christian extremist racist and terrorist, whose hillside property was a maze of underground tunnels filled with illegal firearms, homemade weapons, and White Hate Group Literature.  Weaver himself was a bad, angry lunatic; yet an important figure in the shadowy world of Secret White Terrorism.  A sure architect of future political violence, he was a potential murderer, a politically incorrect super criminal.  It was absolutely essential to kill him, or he'd have surely overthrown the entire country.  And so the assassins, absolved from guilt by Weaver's own villainy, aimed and fired at the nasty ol' demon, his wife, his young son, and the evil family dog.

When Timothy McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City's Federal Building, the Liberal Government and its dependable toady, the Liberal Media, pilloried him for having slain "all those innocent children!"  While McVeigh thought of himself as a soldier waging a one-man war against an out of control murderous Federal Authority, no one else saw it that way.  He was a villain because his victims were innocent.

Here's a clever and provocative thought experiment:  What if Bob Kerrey bombed the Murrah Federal Building and Timothy McVeigh murdered innocent people in Viet Nam? 

Since Kerrey's a Democrat, he'd be a hero.  We'd hear politicians and pundits claim that the people in the Federal Building were bad people, evil people, people who had planned out and directed horrible attacks on American Citizens!  On American soil, no less!  They'd tell us that Kerrey saved other people from the future evils that these monsters might perpetrate.  (We'd even have to round up the survivors and put them in jail like the survivors of Waco)

These assertions are all too familiar.  They're McVeigh's own claims: that the massacres at Waco and Ruby Ridge were designed and implemented in the Murrah Federal Building; that there were no innocent people in the building; that the dead women, children, and old men were merely accidental collateral damage, just like Kerrey's own incidental Vietnamese victims.

In other words, if Kerrey blew up the Murrah Federal Building, we would (as a country) have had to accept the very same motivations that we rejected from Timothy McVeigh!          

And by the same twisted logic, we'd condemn McVeigh by praising his Vietnamese victims.  "Oh, those poor patriots, defending their homes and property from the likes of the Monster McVeigh!  Noble Asian Folk, resisting the forces of Illegitimate Colonialism, just like America's own Revolutionaries.  Fighting the Good Fight.    

And so the balance is maintained: Kerrey is still good and McVeigh is still evil; Janet Reno is good, David Koresh was bad; the FBI/ATF is good, Christians are evil.  Thirty year old Democratic crimes are forgiven, thirty year old Right Wing crimes are prosecuted endlessly.  Why?

The answer is surprisingly simple:  American politicians and pundits believe that Democrats alone can wield Death for the correct reasons: they kill out of nobility whereas Right Wingers kill out of innate evil.  From Ted Kennedy to Ted Kozinski (poor misguided, insane Ralph Waldo Emersonian, Henry David Thoreau-like Liberal Unabomber) to LBJ, Bob Kerrey, and Janet Reno, their crimes are overlooked, hushed up, explained away, rationalized into noble acts, or openly applauded as the work of heroes.  But from Lee Harvey Oswald to Sirhan Sirhan to Thomas Blanton and James Earl Ray, Right Wing killers are smeared and condemned without end, used by the Leftists to portray all Republicans as ruthless, insensitive, mean-spirited and deadly.

But two obvious facts will always remain:  All the victims are equally dead; and they're all used, as positive or negative forces, by our Leftist propagandists to further Democratic political goals, and the truth be damned.

Here's a few of those damned truths: There was no maze of underground tunnels filled with illegal weapons and White Hate literature under Weaver's land (that claim was only one of many outright lies spread about Weaver to provide a package of reasons to kill him and his family).  The Christian congregation at Waco was not a child molestation cult, not one former adult or minor member ever supported the accusations of rape or pedophilia (more lies designed to make the public hate Koresh, and thereby support the inevitable assault on his church).  In fact, both Weaver and Koresh could have easily been picked up at the grocery store.  But the deadly Clinton/Reno team didn't want an easy time with either of these men.  They wanted a public execution, not just to kill the men but also to kill the ideas and ideals they represented, just like Bob Kerrey's public slaughter of those Vietnamese patriots who might've opposed the American Democratic Party's International Imperialist policies.               

It should be obvious by now who are the criminals and who are the innocents, and on this Memorial Day 2001 it's incumbent upon us to stop listening to the voices of the killers and their supporters, and start hearing instead the voices of their victims.            

Ignore Bob Kerrey's excuses and justifications, listen only to the voices of the innocent civilians he shot, whimpering and gurgling to death in the heap where he left them for the buzzards and scavengers to find.                

Ignore Janet Reno's vicious lies and listen instead to the sound of Waco's burning women and children, screaming in undeserved agony, pleading for God's deliverance from the murderous, Democratic persecutors at their door.  Listen to the last few breaths of Randy Weaver's family, innocent lives evaporating in the service of Reno's mad plan to purge America of Straight White Men.

It's about time we did SOMETHING to set all this straight in some way, time to do what little we can to recover our national honor in these awful matters:  We must free the imprisoned survivors of Waco, sentenced to 30 and 40 years for having the temerity to defend themselves from an insane lesbian sociologist Democrat, and then jail Bob Kerrey, Timothy McVeigh, Janet Reno, Thomas Blanton, and all the FBI/ATF assassins in their place.  

Maybe then our national apology to the innocent civilian victims of America's political killers can begin.