Legal Commentary

I find David Kopel's posts at the VC weirdly compelling.  (Feel free to quote me if you're looking for blurbs.)  Today, he has a short post excoriating former President Bill Clinton for running an op-ed in the Times on the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.  Kopel writes that Clinton is "back to practicing one of his core competencies: exploiting the 1995 mass murders in Oklahoma City for political advantage in order to suppress criticism of himself and his political allies."   

Well, that sounded perfectly dreadful, so I surfed my way over to the op-ed -- even though I don't normally read op-eds, especially by politicians, because they are usually uninformative and platitudinous.  But who doesn't want to see someone hard at work practicing one of his core competencies?  Reader, the op-ed was . . . uninformative and platitudinous.  There is an entire sentence devoted to Clinton patting himself on the back for advocating anti-terrorism legislation, which can be read as self-serving, or, I suppose, even exploitative, although my understanding was that it is not uncommon for public officials to respond to mass disasters by addressing them through law, and that this is sometimes accidentally called "responsiveness" rather than "exploitation."  As self-serving remarks go, the sentence is about as remarkable in a politician as a pulse.  The rest of the op-ed consists of general and unobjectionable, if uninformative and platitudinous, statements, along the lines that we should be free to dissent but shouldn't allow our temper to lead us to seek to kill government employees and children in a daycare center.  Outrageous!

Kopel apparently mostly wishes to use the post as an occasion to refer readers to a "101 page article" he published in 1996 objecting to Clinton's anti-terrorism measure.  Thanks for the tip; but there are so many overlong law review articles being published every day that the overlong 14-year-old article will have to wait.