If you include any right-wing domestic terrorists in “Tea Partiers” (which makes at least as much sense as labeling any foreign or dark-skinned terrorist “Al Queda”), then there are a lot of people in Oklahoma City and families of ob/gyn doctors who would disagree strongly that violence from Tea Partiers is only potential.
Yep, I thought the same exact thing when I saw those pictures. The only thing missing from his getup is an Ed Hardy shirt and a PBR tallboy.
I live in OKC, and I haven’t even seen a Tea Partier, and I certainly know of no violence, potential, or otherwise, from them. Can you elaborate on what they have done, violent, anywhere, or OKC?
Best wishes,
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Many Tea Partiers expressed sympathy with Joe Stack, who flew a plane into a government building, killing an IRS worker. However, he wasn’t a party member, the guy was less than stable, and had issues with more than just the IRS (capatilism in general).
Then there’s this guy, who stockpiled weapons. And the people who wanted to carry guns to party rallies; I’m not sure how that ended up going down, but it was an issue.
Leaders of the movement are (wisely) quick to distance the violent outliers. However, the sheer amount of anger I saw at town hall meetings before the health care bill and at Tea Party rallies aimed at tax-and-spend government, makes it easy to imagine some of the less-stable in their ranks may want to take matters into their own hands. There’s also a sense of helplessness in the anger that is unsettling.
That is one of the stupidest and most obnoxious things I’ve read in a long time. Please provide a cite that any Tea Party member has been involved in either the Oklahoma City bombing or any attack on an abortion center. Or, more important, that any significant number of Tea Partiers has supported violence as a means of political expression.
IIRC, he used “Silver Salute” firecrackers as detonaters.
These look the powerful firecrackers of yore, but if they’re anyting like the “M-60” firecrackers I bought a few years ago, they have no more powder in them than an ordinary Black Cat. Plus some confetti.
Here’s a link about the firecrackers he used:
http://articles.mcall.com/2010-05-06/news/all-a1_mc-fireworks-bomber-nyc.7264427may06_1_fireworks-experts-silver-salute-firecrackers
I wonder if there might not be any competent explosives experts left to train new terrorist recruits. Perhaps we’re winning the War on Terror after all.
Except there’s been a huge number of successful bombings in Pakistan in just the last year. So apparently the Pakistani Taliban is still pretty capable of whipping up explosives. Which is why I question why they weren’t able to give this guy enough of a clue to at least put something plausible together. I mean, what’s the point of risking life and limb to get to a terrorist training camp and then apparently not learning how to be a terrorist.
I’m thinking the actual successful bomb makers may be too afraid of drone attacks and so don’t go near the training camps. That would leave only the lower level terrorists who don’t know what they’re doing running the camps. And this guy was American after all, that may have set off some warning signals to them. I’m pretty sure the Pakistanis have access to actual explosives, not just firecrackers and fertilizer. Still, it’s a very puzzling case, I’m just not sure who the actual idiots are in this case: Faisal Shahzad or the men who trained him.
And this is why this guy is obviously a dupe of a classic false flag operation. He *may **think *he is some kind of militant, but the people running him from Pakistan who instructed him to build his “bomb” wanted to make damn sure that it was something that would play well in the US media, but couldn’t actually do any real damage.