I can't stand listening to Bill Clinton talk. The man turns my stomach, and never more than in the self-righteous speech he delivered at Michigan State University's commencement ceremony May 5. ``There is nothing patriotic about hating your country or pretending that you can love your country but despise your government,'' Clinton told the Michigan graduates. Where does this dishonorable clown get off presuming to lecture other Americans about their patriotic duty? Just a couple of weeks ago he was preening himself that Robert McNamara's new book justified all the skulking around Clinton did as a young man to keep himself out of harm's way in Vietnam. At the time, despising the government and shouting down your opponents were quite in favor among the anti-war activists Clinton favored with his company. They thought themselves quite the patriots, and some of them were. There were fearless and principled people on both sides of the Vietnam War controversy, although that fact was not obvious to most of the partisans. There were also a great many whose only motivation was self-interest and whose opposition to the war lasted just as long as the risk that they would have to go fight it. I was teaching at a college in the Midwest in the late '60s, and it was remarkable that large-scale campus protests almost vanished as soon as the draft ended. While they were going on, though, the anti-war protests were marked by an extreme intolerance for the expression of dissenting views. Clinton isn't over it yet. When he's stung by criticism and loses his temper, he accuses the critics of disloyalty. ``If you appropriate our sacred symbols for paranoid purposes and compare yourselves to Colonial militias who fought for the democracy you now rail against, you are wrong,'' Clinton said, addressing paramilitary groups ``and others who believe the greatest threat to America comes not from terrorists from within our country or beyond our borders, but from our own government. ``How dare you suggest that we in the freest nation on earth live in tyranny? How dare you call yourself patriots and heroes?'' I'm not a paramilitary type, but you can count me among those ``others.'' Whether America is the freest nation on earth is arguable, but what shouldn't be arguable is that it's a lot less free than it was 30 or 40 years ago. Before the Oklahoma City bombing, how many Americans had been killed by domestic terrorism? So few that people didn't even have to think about it as one of the risks they faced every day. How many Americans have been killed by government terrorism? Randy Weaver and his family in Idaho. Donald Scott, a rancher in Malibu, who was shot dead early one morning by one of the dozens of armed officers who invaded his home on suspicion that he was growing marijuana. None was ever found, but if there had been any, all of the agencies that participated in the raid would have shared in the profits from the sale of his very valuable property. An elderly couple in Minneapolis who died in a fire started by police who blasted into their apartment in a drug raid. Sorry, wrong address. As Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., said in 1981, ``If I were to select a jackbooted group of fascists who are perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today, I would pick ATF'' (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms). Timothy McVeigh may have been weird for a long time, but what pushed him over the edge into violence was not talk radio. It was Waco. And what responses are the government proposing to the Oklahoma bombing? One is a counterterrorism bill that would limit the constitutional protections enjoyed by citizens who have never contemplated violence, let alone been convicted of it. Anti-war protesters thought the FBI was infiltrating them. They may have been paranoid, but they were also right. So now the country is to have more surveillance, more infiltration? If so, it will have more violence as well. I don't justify that, any more than Clinton does; I am merely predicting that it is inevitable. More gun control is on the agenda, but gun control is always on the agenda. An unjust government has good reason to fear an armed and irate citizenry, but what is the relevance to Oklahoma? That was a bomb, not an assault rifle. Sen. Ted Kennedy has already called for more surveillance of the Internet, claiming that information on how to make bombs is readily available online. He's probably right, but so what? I have no inclination to make bombs, but if I wanted to I have no doubt everything I would need to know is also readily available in any modestly well-equipped library, Is the next step to round up all the books, and put guards at all the library doors? There is a spirit of rebellion abroad in the country. Dozens of counties in the West have claimed jurisdiction over federal lands within their borders, and numerous lawsuits have been filed. Disputes between local elected officials and federal employees have several times turned into confrontations. Recently the Supreme Court took a tiny trim in the power Washington has arrogated to itself under the Commerce clause by invalidating a federal law regulating possession of guns near schools. ``There is no right to resort to violence when you don't get your way,'' Clinton said in Michigan. ``There is no right to kill people who are doing their duty, or minding their own business, or children who are innocent in every way.'' Well said. And no right, either, when people are minding their own business, to arrest them for protests, or put them in jail, or pump tear gas into their compound or confiscate their property on suspicion. The militias may be paranoid, too, but they're not the ones doing those things.