Addressing that issue though, it is not illegal to simply discuss the assination of a president. It is illegal to make threats. This comic did not imply a threat, and as he said, it treated it as a bad thing.
Look, Sullivan and some freepers have acted overly-sensitive about this, as if the comic was suggesting that shooting Bush was a good thing. It simply did not do that. We do ourselves no credit by seeming to be unreasonable. It's like the boy who cried wolf. It undermines our credibility when we have a legitimate gripe.
Oh, I never meant to imply that was Sullivan's take on it; I'm just saying it's my take.
Addressing that issue though, it is not illegal to simply discuss the assination of a president. It is illegal to make threats. This comic did not imply a threat, and as he said, it treated it as a bad thing.
Well, I still disagree about the last sentence; as I've already posted, the dialogue in the cartoon is vague enough that one can make either argument:
1) That the part she "liked starting out" was the entire first three panels, where Bush said something that went against his "controllers" and got shot, and the part she considered the "nightmare" was merely when Bush woke up from his own dream of being shot and decided "Today I will gut the Bill of Rights!"
2) That the part she "liked starting out" was only the first two panels, where he was using his bully pulpit to urge Americans to use less oil, and the nightmare was the entire rest of it before she woke up.
As to the illegality of what she wrote/drew: Yes, it's only illegal to make a credible threat. However, the reality is that the Secret Service practices "zero tolerance" for such things, and also that angry liberals of all stripes took advantage of this fact constantly during the Clinton years, including Saloners themselves. We all remember how the occasional psychotic newbie used to show up on FR and say something stupid about how he "wished Clinton were dead" or somesuch. Of course, these people had their posts yanked and were banned almost instantaneously. But the Salon Table Talk crowd was filled with people who were obsessed with FR, and they would scan FR threads 24/7 looking for just those sorts of posts. We used to be amazed at how they managed to discover, save, and then publicize these sorts of threatening posts even when they were live for less than two minutes, so it had to be some sort of loose organization to it on their end. Mainly they just wanted to be able to falsely tar all Freepers with the label of "extremist" - standard-issue Clintonian politics of demonization tactics - but they also almost invariably called in the Secret Service on those people as well, even when the "threats" were as vague as in this comic. Even though, to my knowledge, there has never been a single post on FR that the Secret Service considered a truly SERIOUS THREAT, or anything at all more than empty blathering. But they got visits, because the Secret Service doesn't take chances. If you talk about it, they have to check you out to make sure it's just talk.
And yet now, when Salon itself does the exact same thing, they suddenly play the "freedom of speech" card. Only the little people are subject to the Secret Service's zero tolerance, not Members of The Media. And I say to hell with that.
We do ourselves no credit by seeming to be unreasonable. It's like the boy who cried wolf. It undermines our credibility when we have a legitimate gripe.
I understand your point. It's just that given that Salon's own credibility is nil, and that there are so few of them left (both in terms of Salon staffers and readers, and in terms of angry Bush-haters), I think the need for equal treatment under the law trumps the need for us to keep from looking like we're "crying wolf," even if you're absolutely right about the cartoon's meaning and I'm totally wrong. It just doesn't matter to me if a couple dozen people that already despise us with every fiber of their beings end up hating us a little bit more. They shouldn't be allowed to escape the scrutiny that any one of us would absolutely have gotten if we'd done such a thing myself. If I ran my own little web site blog, and I drew a cartoon that was word-for-word the same as Carol Lay's, I absolutely 100% believe the Secret Service would have ended up paying me a visit. And I believe Salon's editors know this, actively considered it, and decided, "Well, we're famous journalists putting out a well-known, respected publication. So the feds will know we don't really mean it." And I despise that elitist attitude, and believe it should be fought whenever and whereever possible.