But the scene above took place four years before Monica, in 1994, long before Clinton handed his enemies a scandal on a platter that seemingly made such references acceptable. It was not at a Republican caucus or Christian Coalition meeting, but at a gathering of right-wing “Patriots” who had come to hear about forming militias and common-law courts and defending their gun rights — indeed, their families — from the New World Order. They numbered only a hundred or so and only half-filled the little convention hall in Bellevue, Washington, but their fervor saturated the room with its own paranoid energy. And the speaker, who could have passed even then for a local Republican public official — actually, he was nominally a Democrat — in fact was one of the nation’s leading Patriot figures: Richard Mack, then sheriff of Arizona’s mostly rural Graham County. As a leader in the fight against gun control (his lawsuit eventually led to the Supreme Court overturning a section of the so-called Brady Law), Mack was in high demand on the right-wing lecture circuit as he promoted the militia concept to his eager acolytes. He usually sprinkles his “constitutional” gun-rights thesis with his theories on church-state separation — it’s a “myth,” he claims — and “the New World Order conspiracy.”

This is one of the leaders of the “movement” with which respectable conservative voices and some Republican politicians allied themselves over the last two weeks. Personally, I think that the reason you didn’t hear from any of the prospective “human shields” here is that Mack didn’t have the guts to ask them.

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