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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Clark: Judge gets final word on twisted ‘creativity’

So Kevin W. Harpham makes a remote controlled bomb, lacing the heavy internal projectiles with rat poison.

Then he puts the thing in a backpack, which he deposits on a bench along the Unity March route last Martin Luther King Jr. Day in downtown Spokane.

Now, however, the self-avowed white supremacist wants us to believe that what he did was not an act of deadly domestic terrorism, but a “creative” protest against the so-called evils of multiculturalism.

Spare me.

I’ve heard a lot of crazy crap over the years.

But no self-respecting gibbon would hurl the feces Harpham unloaded in federal court Tuesday as he made a last-minute attempt to withdraw his guilty plea and face trial.

Thank Justin Quackenbush for knowing ($%!#!) when he sees it.

Shedding no tears, the U.S. District Court judge ordered Harpham to prison for the next 32 years, the maximum allowed under the plea deal Harpham’s defenders struck with prosecutors.

“It’s beyond my comprehension that you would stand there and not accept responsibility for what you have done,” Quackenbush reportedly told Harpham prior to dropping the hammer.

My apologies to the Jolly Old Fat Man.

Santa Quackenbush gets my vote for delivering the goods this holiday season.

I give the judge credit for not gagging during Harpham’s spiel.

“As long as it was clear,” Harpham explained, “I was going to fire this thing off into the side of the building. It’s a big billow of smoke, very loud. The whole point of the building was to add effect… just a statement of protest.”

Just one big, loud billow of smoke.

Really?

And what statement was Harpham trying to make with the RAT POISON?

Check yourself into the nearest psych ward if you can’t answer that.

Actually, Harpham’s malarkey is quite educational.

It tells me this guy is a sociopath who takes the rest of us for fools.

Protest is the right of every American, sure. But if protest was really on his mind, Harpham could have donned the telltale sheet and dunce cap and made like a Klansman as the Jan. 17 marchers passed by.

But experts say this lone wolf from the rural Addy area assembled his bomb to be detonated from as far as 1,000 feet away.

Think about what this means.

Bombs don’t grow on bushes. Harpham devoted hundreds of hours to planning, designing and building his device.

Each one of the thousands and thousands of seconds that ticked by represented a golden opportunity for Harpham to stop and reconsider the terrorist act he was about to commit.

Screw that. Harpham stayed the course, making what one FBI agent dubbed as a device “constructed with a clear, lethal purpose.”

Dozens of innocents could have been killed or maimed had this bomb not been discovered, almost providentially, by three contract workers.

Or you can believe the sociopath, who described what he did as “no different than a Christian person out there protesting gay marriage.”

Too bad Quackenbush couldn’t give Harpham 132 years.

This racist piece of trash deserves no less.

Doug Clark can be reached at (509) 459-5432 or dougc@spokesman.com.