Last week, Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard wrote a lengthy post about what he is calling the “War Against Conservative Opinion (WACO)” -- a purported government effort to take away the guns and liberty of law-abiding citizens. The Waco tragedy, of course, has been used as a rallying cry for right-wing activists in the past. Timothy McVeigh, for example, blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City out of anger over Waco. So it is at least creepy, if not dangerous, for Sheppard to run around shouting “Waco!” over and over, all the while promoting the fiction that the Obama administration has a secret plan to seize guns.

But today, Sheppard is back at it, referring to a Department of Homeland Security assessment of the growth of right-wing extremist groups as a “scary document” and asking: “Is the Obama administration now fueling the fire of the Left's War Against Conservative Opinion?" Sheppard concludes his post: “Want to talk about the WACO?"

Glenn Beck's recent stunt in which he doused a guest in gasoline while saying “Maybe I'm alone, but I think it would be just faster if they just shot me in the head. ... President Obama, why don't you just set us on fire?” can also be seen as an invocation of Waco -- 76 people died in the fire that destroyed the Branch Davidian compound, ending the siege.