Rachel Maddow went on the "Daily Show" Tuesday night to promote Monday's MSNBC special on Timothy McVeigh, and she told Jon Stewart that she's capable of killing Osama Bin Laden.
Maddow told Stewart that McVeigh "saw himself as triumphant" in the Oklahoma City bombings despite his eventual execution.
"He said at one point, 'I look at it in the crudest terms and see 168-1. You can kill me and I'm still ahead,'" she told Stewart.
"My problem with everything is -- intellectually, I feel like, how can human beings kill other human beings?" Stewart said. "But viscerally, you just wanna be in that room and pull his throat out through his face. It's very difficult for me to reconcile those two aspects of my persona.
"I feel the same way about Bin Laden," Maddow responded. "I believe that I could kill Osama Bin Laden with a spoon. I would enjoy that, because he's a cold blooded killer."
Maddow acknowledged that McVeigh's anti-government sentiment is alive today.
"The dark side of it is that [McVeigh] really did see himself as part of an anti-government movement in the United States," she said. "We have that to a greater or lesser degree over time in the US, and right now I think we are experiencing an upswing again in anti-government extremism. That's not to say that the next Timothy McVeigh is out there, but it is to say that people should be not encouraging violence against government institutions and people."
"The Timothy McVeigh Tapes," airs on MSNBC on Monday April 19 from 9-11PM. The special, which comes on the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, will bring viewers McVeigh's confession and explanation of the bombing in his own words for the first time.
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