Posted on 09/12/2009 2:00:46 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
It's been a long time since we Americans have gunned down one of our leaders, but we seem to be gearing up to do it again.
Nearly three decades have passed since President Ronald Reagan and his press secretary were shot in the nation's capital following a speaking engagement there. A few years earlier, President Gerald Ford survived two near-miss assassination attempts. Thirteen years before the Reagan shooting, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated in the course of a very troubled few months in 1968.
That was, of course, just five years after we lost a young president who had inspired both hope and fear in a population that always gets anxious when change is afoot. We shot a few other leaders in that decade, too, all across the political spectrum - Medgar Evers, George Wallace, Malcolm X, George Lincoln Rockwell.
When we get anxious, it gets dangerous, and we're nearly always anxious. But we get particularly anxious when race is brought into play, and when change is in the air. We're armed to the teeth, and guns sales have skyrocketed since President Obama took office.
Fearing changes in gun laws from the new administration, background checks for people buying firearms jumped 42 percent in the last quarter of 2008, and gun dealers were running low on stocks of ammunition in the most popular calibers. Mix in the incendiary rhetoric and paranoia pumped out by Fox News and a legion of talk show agitators and you've got the cultural equivalent of a fully loaded hair-trigger weapon, with the safety off, cocked and ready to fire.
A cataclysm is looming, and the inevitability of something really bad happening is in the air, the kind of public mood that makes impending violence almost palpable, a hard metallic scent on the wind as mass hysteria builds and insanity breaks its leash.
Some of that insanity was on display up in Idaho where a Republican gubernatorial candidate joked about issuing tags to hunt President Obama. On the fringes of our consciousness, we barely take note of the shootings at health clubs and office buildings, the common-enough bloodlettings that have come to seem "normal." We accept the notion that heavily armed nut jobs can open up in schoolyards, mowing down children at play. We shrug off the inner-city gun deaths that have turned neighborhoods into free-fire zones, and we now seem altogether too sanguine about men showing up at presidential appearances bearing semi-automatic weapons. That's why it's entirely irresponsible for public officials like Wally Herger to praise guys who call themselves "proud right-wing terrorists," and crown them with the encomium of "great Americans."
In response to a column in this paper supporting Herger's recent comments, one reader wrote: "I hate the United States of America because it's become the ACORN COMMUNIST STATES OF OBAMA. We have to work locally to get our states to leave the USA dictatorship. Stay armed! Stock up on ammo! VOTE REPUBLICAN AS IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT!"
And daily, more chambers get loaded, and the cylinder gets spun again as we play a national version of American roulette. Talk radio loads the gun with the daily demonization of the president, and the thinly-veiled racism that undergirds it, all while stoking the worst kind of mob mentality, empowering the least stable and most frightened people among us.
The irresponsibility of American media outlets should have shocked us, but it hasn't. Daily, we hear the globally popular leader of our nation called a socialist, a communist, a hater of white people, a Nazi, and the modern equivalent of Hitler. We are told by the fear-and-hate mongers that Obama has plans to take away just about everything Americans hold dear, and all that hatred gets churned in millions of comments and threads on thousands of blogs and websites. Some of the craziest and most irresponsible talk gets echoed by elected leaders in the House and Senate, men and women who would use the hatred and hysteria for political gain. A congresswoman in Kansas talks about the Republican search for a "great white hope" to beat Obama, and immediately the comments emerge, with some of the worst racists saying that the nation's real great white hope is "sickle-cell anemia."
Meanwhile, the legitimate news media have virtually ceased reporting, ceased fact checking, and decided that all that is necessary is to present two opposing viewpoints by two talking heads, and that fulfills their obligation to inform the public. This makes all political views equal, no matter how insane those views might be. Even a guy who says it would be better if every person who attended a town hall meeting carried a firearm is treated as though such an idea could be entertained by anyone not currently under lockdown in an asylum.
Beyond the incendiary rhetoric that taps into a river of fear and hate, there's the reinvigorated racism being evoked by men like Glenn Beck and others, appeals to race animus that set the stage for an assassination attempt on the popularly elected leader of this country. And the number of threats against the life of President Obama is staggering, a huge cause for alarm.
The last time we killed a sitting president, school children in Dallas cheered his death, and right wingers could barely contain their glee. Those happy Texas kids had been told by their parents that President Kennedy was a socialist, that he was going to impose government-run health care, that he was soft on communism, and that he was a race mixer, and a meddler in the affairs of private enterprise. In the words of Yogi Berra, our current climate seems like "déjà vu all over again."
All that looming menace, and still the rhetoric escalates, the paranoia increases, the divisions harden. We've loaded up the national revolver and the cylinder is spinning. It will take extraordinary good fortune if it does not stop on a loaded chamber.
I didn't realize RFK and MLK, Jr. were presidents. I need to go back to school, I guess...
The leftist in the country are flipping SICK, they want something to happen to Obama, I honestly believe the long for him to be the target of an assassination attempt.
Just like the who gun control crowd they long for school shootings to further their agenda.
I fear the far left actually wants harm to befall our President.
man I wish we had the ability to edit pots for grammar...
pot=posts... good grief...
Medgar Evers was never a leader of any sort.
What an absolutely slanderous, POS article. Where’s the calls for the Paradise Post to quit spreading hateful rhetoric that could result in violence against conservatives? Once again, the left’s praying right in the open for Obama to become a martyr.
Also, if racism were so widespread wouldn't you think they would, by now, be able to catch Beck or Limbaugh making an overtly racist statement? So far all they have is some statements that they claim are "thinly veiled" racism. I see no racism in any of this, simply love of country and hatred of socialism.
Once The Messiah is more valuable to his handlers as a martyr than he is as a teleprompter-reader, he’s doomed.
The left would be ecstatic if what is suggested in this article were to actually happen.
They would use the opportunity to shut down talk radio, ban and confiscate firearms and ammunition and impose martial law.
Their wet dream come true.
At first I thought this article was irresponsible, but now I’m convinced this author is insane.
The RATS can’t afford to have him in until 2010 much less 2012. They’ll be on the losing end of a lot 80/20 races, way it stands now.
I am in total agreement w/you !!! this is truly a POS article!
Don’t tell me it’s one of Janet Napolitano’s freaky wacko websites again and from the looks of it ~~~~ it most certainly is.
I'm beginning to believe that myself. It's like they need a martyr for their principles, and it borders on desperation. If you think about it, what they desire is not too different from what Judeo-Christianity already has, and in which they lack.
These people are very, very dangerous.
It does smell like a setup. All the ingredients are there.
These folks are acting as provocateurs of the worst possible scenarios. Liberals crave victims; now they want Obama; and as well; themselves; up on a 'cross' of their own making.
We see similar MO or variation of; by those who by their own hand (i.e.painting a swastika on their own door, while screaming racism. . .) make themselves the center of the controversy and drama; insure their victimhood; while jeopardizing 'good people' everywhere.
This is so sick; and clearly a 'scream for attention' - and worse.
Only think missing from this story is the 'please' won't you do something!
'Sick is; as 'sick' does. . .
More on the author. Pay special attention to the last paragraph above the comments.
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/02/18/the-old-crock
They like to forget that JFK was shot by a communist...
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