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| Seattle PI (carrying an AP feed), this link. |
Clinton, Janet Reno who was Hilary's pick for AG, and now Hilary wants to be president again. The FBI in a supporting role. The ATF being the instigator, after having instigated the Randy Weaver siege in Idaho with it not enough for them. That rogue agency should have been cut from Treasury, rolled into Homeland Security, and then the pack of them fired as surplus and dangerous. I never did see any credible story that the Davidians did anything really wrong - certainly nothing meriting a federal agency's arson.
It was disgusting then. It remains disgusting still.
We had Ashcroft as AG in intervening time, something helping us to forget how awful Janet Reno was as AG, Ashcroft being in a class by himself, but Reno if anything was badge heavy to a fault. Except for the drug trade out of Florida, which was ongoing when she was local prosecutor there and continues to this day, she had a heavy badge in all else.
Neither party can be very proud of their presidents, since Roosevelt, and some contest his quality. That includes Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy as perhaps the better of the batch.
Since the Kennedy assassination, it has been uninspiring. Gerald Ford, all time worse for having pardoned the biggest crook of high stature in the history of the nation. Worse in that sense than the crook he pardoned.
But ATF, likely to justify its congressional budget allocations, caused the Randy Weaver debacle, and then burned down the Waco church - largely to prove they could.
It was not a proud moment in our nation's history. It was not respectful of live and let live. Randy Weaver as a disengaged Vietnam vet wanting to live in the woods away from most others was no threat to anyone. He was confronted by an aggressive governmental agency with a chip on its shoulder. Then Waco. Latest SNAFU, same agency, the gun trafficing into the Mexican drug cartels, and how adroitly that situation was handled.
If any part of the federal government needs downsizing, it is ATF, and twenty years ago would have been a good time for it to have happened. Remember WACO.