In Memoriam

Today is the anniversary of two terrible events:

On April 19, 1993, the end of the standoff at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas occurred when David Koresh and his followers set their dwelling, themselves and their children on fire. The beginning of the standoff occurred 51 days earlier, when Koresh and his followers brutally murdered four ATF agents executing a search warrant. Every death that occurred at the Waco compound in February and April 1993 is the responsibility of Koresh and his followers, and no one else.

On April 19, 1995, terrorist Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, murdered 168 men, women and children when McVeigh detonated a truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Contrary to the claims of fantasists like Laurie Mylroie and Janya Davis, the bombing was the product of home-grown racists and bigots, not Saddam Hussein. (Sadly, some of the survivors and victims' families have bought into that tripe.)

On April 19, 2004, news coverage of the anniversaries is minimal. There's some news about the state trial of convicted terrorist Nichols, but almost nothing on the child-molesting sociopath Koresh, whom the wingnuts and Congressional Republicans tried to rehabilitate as some sort of latter-day Davy Crockett. I hope that those who still seek to excuse these crimes or shift or spread the blame will give a second's thought to the murdered ATF agents, the public servants who were killed in service of this country, and the children who were Koresh's holy sacrifices and McVeigh's "collateral damage." For the sake of their own humanity.