The Wages of Assassination

It's not a question of giving people ideas any more - the idea is widespread among the townhall hooligan racists, and manifesting itself in loaded weapons carried to presidential events.

I have great faith in the Secret Service, not least because they know Barack Obama is the ultimate test for them: fail this one, and the nation will eliminate the service in favor of mercenaries carrying flame-throwers.

But it's appropriate to call attention to what murderous right-wing violence against presidents has accomplished in the past.

Phoenix Woman at Firedoglake explains:

This is what I tell wingnuts who I suspect of fantasizing about committing grievous bodily harm against President Obama, Democrats, or non-wingnuts in general:

Remember how we got the Great Society? Aka New Deal II?

That was when JFK got martyred in a city known to be a hotbed of right-wing racist extremism. The guy who took over for JFK turned out to be much more progressive than JFK ever was, much to the dismay of the right-wing nutjobs who’d put up all those “WANTED for TREASON” posters all over Dallas in the first weeks of November, 1963.

Remember how Bill Clinton got re-elected in 1996, two years after the Republicans — backed by a media that they or their arch-conservative financiers had increasingly bought up, bought off or scared off from honest reporting?

That happened when some of your buddies in a right-wing Michigan militia thought it would be a neat idea to murder 168 government employees and their children by blowing up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

Do you all really want to go for the trifecta here?

Heck, we could even go back to when the ultimate wingnut, John Wilkes Booth, ruined the chances of his beloved South's making a smooth adjustment to a post-slavery world when he put a bullet in the head of the man who advocated generosity, "with malice towards none and charity for all", towards the foe he had just vanquished. This is why key leaders of the Confederacy, people such as Generals Robert E. Lee and Joseph Johnston, were horrified at the news of Booth's murder of Lincoln: Because they knew that the near-universal shock and revulsion generated by Booth's act had opened the door to the South's being treated as a captive province for the next few decades.

A word to the wise, wingers: Is this really what you want?

Read the whole thing.

At Crooks and Liars, David Niewart has a great piece on what's bringing the Obama-hating nuts out now, and who is their likely unprotected target.

What's far more likely, in fact, is that some innocent bystanders in his vicinity will be harmed -- or, moreover, that the crazies will decide that instead of harming Obama, they will take out their hatred on his supporters.

This was the thinking, after all, of Jim David Adkisson, the Knoxville church shooter. Recall this passage in his manifesto:

This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.

The right-wing crazies popping up almost daily, thanks to right-wing fearmongers, are very real cause for concern about Obama's safety. But we should also be concerned about our own.

Read the whole thing.