Guess we should've known he'd poke his head up...

...sooner or later:

Former President Bill Clinton warned of a slippery slope from angry anti-government rhetoric to violence like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, saying "the words we use really do matter."
The two-term Democratic president insisted he wasn't trying to restrict free speech, but in remarks Friday he said incendiary language can be taken the wrong way by some Americans. He drew parallels to words demonizing the government before Oklahoma City.
...
He also alluded to the anti-government tea party movement, which held protests in several states Thursday. At the Washington rally, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota railed against "gangster government."
Clinton argued that the Boston Tea Party was in response to taxation without representation. The current protesters, he said, are challenging taxation by elected officials, and the demonstrators have the power to vote them out of office.

I have yet to see any language from anyone affiliated with the Tea Party calling for, say, blowing up federal buildings. Come to think of it I haven't seen them calling for any kind of violence, and it's beyond the pale for Bill Clinton to come out and try to link the Tea Party protesters to people like Timothy McVeigh. The only calls for any kind of unrest I've seen here aren't even for violence against people, and that particular segment of protesters -- which, by the way, is NOT affiliated with the Tea Party -- hammers the point home over and over that it doesn't want armed conflict and that it will not be firing the first shots. Pretty funny how he tries to triangulate here, talking about the conservatives reminding us that we all are responsible for our own actions, while out of the other side of his mouth he's more or less saying that if there's anything like the OKC bombing in the future the Tea Partiers' rhetoric is going to be responsible for it.

Also, "anti-government tea party movement"? Wow. I guess it really does take the Authorized Journalists to see that the movement largely does comprise anarchists. All this time I've been watching the coverage of it, even BEEN to a tea party protest, and never once did I see the dominant theme being "Down with Government!" Anti-big, strong centralized government, sure, but anti-government? Really, AP?

And try as I may, I still fail to see anything wrong with the "gangster government" remark Clinton excoriated. Nancy Pelosi may not have had a posse of Tommy gun-equipped thugs backing her up, but I would still love to find out how many of those "offers you can't refuse" she had to make to Blue Dog Democrats to get them to vote for the health care bill.

I gotta quote one of the commenters here, though, because said commenter sums the leftists' whole viewpoint up pretty well, as far as I'm concerned:

"I guess speech like 'smaller government, limit spending and lower taxes' is hate speech to Democrats."

UPDATE: And so it is "hate speech" to Clinton, as Concerned American at WRSA points this out in the transcript of his remarks:

...But I think that all you have to do is to read the paper every day to see how many there are who are deeply, deeply troubled. We know, now, that there are people involved in groups -- these 'hatriot' groups, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the others -- 99 percent of them will never do anything they shouldn't do. But there are people who advocate violence and anticipate violence.

Wow, both name-calling AND lying! Where has either of those groups actually gone out and advocated violence? Like the sidebar at Borepatch's place says:

"Dissent the highest form of patriotism? Not any more. Shut up and fall in line, hater."