Drama queen, thy name is liberal.
In an interview with South Dakota’s Argus Leader newspaper in May 2008, Hillary explained why she was not dropping out of the Democratic primaries, despite angry demands from MSNBC hosts that she do so. She said: “You know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”20
A normal person would read that and see that Hillary was pointing out that primaries had often continued well into June, citing her husband’s case as well as a famous historic event that everyone would remember happened during June primaries.
Liberals would have been happier if a Republican had said it, but Hillary would do. It was just the provocation they had been waiting for, giving them an opening for another gusher about the dire threat facing a black man running for president in America. (One would think that Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian nationalist who shot RFK, would more likely be a campaign contributor to Obama than his assailant.)
There were hundreds of articles about Hillary’s monstrous gaffe, although she had said the same thing a few months earlier to Time magazine without anyone raising an eyebrow. But this time, the Obama campaign struck, wailing about fears surrounding his historic candidacy. Within hours, Newsday cited an Obama staffer saying Hillary was “done” and reported that Obama’s supporters interpreted the Clinton remark “as a suggestion the Illinois senator was a potential target.”21 Obama spokesman Bill Burton said Hillary’s remark, was “unfortunate and has no place in this campaign.”22
The New York Times’s Bob Herbert said the comment was “tasteless,” “purely self-serving” and sent “a shiver of dread through millions.”23 Also in the Times, Roger Cohen called Hillary’s innocuous reference to the date of Kennedy’s assassination, “stomach-turning.”24 The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson called her remark, “ungenuine, unprincipled and insane.”25
Hillary was forced to apologize and, best of all, her remark led to a “special comment” from the gigantic fruit, suitable for framing.
KEITH OLBERMANN: She actually said those words.
Those words, Senator?
You actually invoked the nightmare of political assassination?
You actually invoked the specter of an inspirational leader, at the seeming moment of triumph for himself and a battered nation yearning to breathe free, silenced forever?
You actually used the word “assassination” in the middle of a campaign with a loud undertone of racial hatred—and gender hatred—and political hatred?
You actually used the word “assassination” in a time when there is a fear, unspoken but vivid and terrible, that our again-troubled land and fractured political landscape might target a black man running for president? Or a white man. Or a white woman!
You actually used those words, in this America, Senator, while running against an African-American man against whom the death threats started the moment he declared his campaign?
You actually used those words, in this America, Senator, while running to break your “greatest glass ceiling” and claiming there are people who would do anything to stop you?
You!
Senator—never mind the implications of using the word “assassination” in any connection to Senator Obama—
What about you?
You cannot say this!
There is no good time to recall the awful events of June 5th, 1968, in Los Angeles, of Senator Bobby Kennedy…
There is no good time to recall this.…And certainly to invoke it three days after the awful diagnosis, and heartbreaking prognosis, for Senator Ted Kennedy is just as insensitive, and just as heartless.26
With less melodrama, this was also the position of the same mainstream media that had been pushing the Obama assassination scenario from the moment he announced his candidacy.
And on it went, until finally, on December 3, 2009, the head of the Secret Service provided the one element that had been missing from all these maniacal reports: actual facts. At a Homeland Security hearing, Secret Service director Mark Sullivan was forced to cough up the truth while being browbeaten by Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton about the unique danger facing President Obama:
REP. ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON: Let me tell you what my concern is, Mr. Sullivan. It is well known, it has been in the press over and over again that this president has received far more death threats than any president in the history of the United States, an alarming number of death threats. I am not going to ask you for the details on that. But here we had the first state dinner, not of just any old president, but of the first African American president. Was there any attempt to increase security, given all you know, which is much more than we know, about threats to this president of the United States?
MR. SULLIVAN: Ma’am, no matter who the president is—
MS. NORTON: I am asking about this president, and my question is very specific. Given death threats to this president, was there any attempt to increase the security at this event? Yes or no?
MR. SULLIVAN: I cannot talk about that. Number one, I will address the threats. I have heard a number out there that the threat is up by 400 percent. I am not sure where that number—
MS. NORTON: Is it up at all? We are not asking for the—
MR. SULLIVAN: I think I can answer you, ma’am. It is not at 400 percent. I am not sure where that number came from, but I can—
MS. NORTON: Well, please don’t—
CHAIRMAN THOMPSON: Just a minute. We can’t hear the gentleman.
MS. NORTON: Please don’t assign to me a number in my question. I just asked you if the threats were up. Are the threats up?
MR. SULLIVAN: They are not. The threats right now, the inappropriate interest that we are seeing, is the same level as it has been for the previous two presidents at this point—
MS. NORTON: This is very comforting news.27
The threats against Obama were not up. He was getting the same number of threats as presidents Clinton and Bush had.
It appeared that the principal source of false information about the rise of racist hate groups in response to Obama was Mark Potok of the SPLC.28 Every few months, he would issue the same news bulletin about increased chatter from white hate groups regarding Obama, and the mainstream media would run all-new stories about racism on the rise against the first black president.
The media so dearly wanted to believe Potok’s reports that they never bothered running a simple Internet search to see if they were true. It was like the explosion of heterosexual AIDS we kept hearing about in the 1980s. It was always right around the corner, but thirty years later, we’re still waiting for that big heterosexual outbreak.
Steve Gilbert of the Sweetness & Light blog tracked the media’s endless repetition of Potok’s claims throughout Obama’s candidacy and presidency, running their articles next to charts showing that hate group activity on the Web had grown not one iota. Thus, in June 2008, the Washington Post reported that Obama’s clinching of the Democratic primaries had “sparked an increase in racist and white supremacist activity, mainly on the Internet,” citing the SPLC.
While the Post went the extra mile to interview the racist leaders boasting about their rising popularity, the newspaper didn’t trouble to check their actual Web site traffic. Sweetness & Light did, and it turned out that in addition to being racist nuts, white supremacists are liars.
There was no spike in traffic to their Web sites. In fact, Stormfront’s traffic had been on the decline in the months before the Post was reporting a burst of activity. 29 As Gilbert said, “according to Google Trends online, interest from regular users in ‘white supremacy’ has remained about the same over the last year, [i]n contrast to our news media, whose references to ‘white supremacy’ have spiked twice.”30
A few months later, in October 2008, USA Today claimed: “Supremacist groups are on the rise.” It, too, cited the Southern Poverty Law Ce
nter.31 Sweetness & Light again posted charts from Alexa showing absolutely no growth in hate group activity on the Web—at least for all those Web sites big enough to be ranked at all.
Then again, in January 2009, CNN reported that: “Hate crimes experts and law enforcement officials are closely watching white supremacists across the country as Barack Obama prepares next week to be sworn in as the first black president of the United States.”32 SPLC’s Mark Potok was cited for the claim that “leaders of these groups are frustrated by Obama’s win.”
Although CNN acknowledged that there was “no known organized effort to express opposition to Obama’s rise to the presidency,” it said that the Ku Klux Klan had called for members to wear black armbands. As many as one household did so.
Unaware of the many Internet traffic tracking Web sites, CNN reported that it was “difficult to pinpoint how many people subscribe to white supremacist views, because the Internet allows people to follow the movement under the cloak of anonymity.” Again, Sweetness & Light posted Alexa charts showing the white supremacist Web sites flatlining.
In June 2009, Potok was on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, again warning about increasing white supremacist activity. “We’ve seen a lot of activity,” he said, “really in the last just half year or so. I think the election of Obama has definitely spurred some people to become very angry. I think it’s fairly clear, in fact, that this shooter at the Holocaust Museum was angered in large part because of Obama’s election.”33
The Holocaust Museum shooter was James von Brunn, who hated Bush, hated McCain and hated “neoconservatives.” He was a 9/11 “truther” and detested Christianity as much as what he called “the Holocaust religion.”34 He is what is known in professional law enforcement circles as a “nut.”
Most of the hate group Web sites repeatedly cited by Potok—and recycled in the mainstream media—didn’t even have enough visitors to register on Web site trackers. The two that did—Stormfront and the Ku Klux Klan—remained steady or declined since Obama first announced his candidacy.
With so many reporters poring over the hate Web sites, it’s amazing the media themselves hadn’t created a spike in their readership.
When it comes to claims of racism, empirical evidence is irrelevant. It’s not the number of racist Web sites that’s important, but their mythopoetic resonance with the master political narrative of the day. If blacks murder more whites than whites murder blacks, it doesn’t matter because that’s not the story. As racism becomes less of a factor in American life than agoraphobia, the media work overtime to find illustrations—true or not—of their larger thesis.
Even after the head of the Secret Service had stated under oath in December 2009 that there had been no increase in threats against Obama compared to previous presidents, Potok was back on NPR, warning of the rise of white supremacist groups opposed to Obama. “It is worth remembering that while Obama was still a candidate,” Potok said, “before he had even, you know, actually been elected, there were two different racist skinhead plots to assassinate him—one in Denver, one in Tennessee.”35
The Denver “plot” consisted of three methheads with long criminal records driving around Glendale, Colorado, in a rented car, high as a kite, with guns, methamphetamine, wigs and bulletproof vests. They had no agreement, no plan, no schedule and no capacity to get past a 7-Eleven clerk, much less past security at the Democratic National Convention. But one of the delinquents told the arresting officer they planned to shoot Obama when he gave his acceptance speech at the Convention. As the Denver U.S. attorney described it to the New York Times, “It was one methhead talking to another about life.”36
The “plot” in Tennessee involved two unemployed petty criminals who told police they planned to kill 102 black people, decapitating 14, and then assassinate Obama from a speeding car, while dressed in white tuxedos and top hats. The plot didn’t get very far inasmuch as they were arrested after shooting out windows in a black church and putting racist graffiti on their car.37
I think we’re all in favor of locking up deranged criminals (except liberals), but are we now counting the dream journals of druggies and deadbeats as “assassination attempts”?
In 2012, Potok was still at it. MSNBC’s Web site on March 7, 2012, said: “The election of President Barack Obama in 2008 triggered an explosion in the number of militias and so-called patriot groups in the United States, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported in its annual tally of such anti-government organizations.”38
In response, Sweetness & Light again posted the latest Alexa graph, which again showed zero increase, even a slight decrease, in racist Web site activity, as “previously noted.”39
Liberals have got to calm down. All presidents are in danger and all decent people are horrified at the idea of any president being assassinated. Although liberals could be a little more horrified.
When Bush was president, there was both a book and movie fantasizing about his assassination. The book was reviewed in the New York Times and the Washington Post.40 The Post’s Linton Weeks calmly stated: “It’s a work of the imagination and no attempts on the president’s life are actually made.” Would that be enough if the fictional assassin’s target had been Obama?
The 2006 mock documentary depicting President Bush’s assassination won six awards, including the Prize of the International Critics at the Toronto Film Festival. How would that go over if it were about President Obama? Lots of awards?
In 2012—years after Bush had left the presidency and the world was safe under our hero Obama—the HBO show Game of Thrones contained scenes with Bush’s decapitated head on a pike. The producers claimed it was just a cost-cutting measure because they happened to have Bush’s head lying around.41
Throughout Bush’s presidency, liberals were openly joking about assassinating him.
In 2006, Senator John Kerry responded to Bill Maher’s comment that he could have “killed two birds with one stone,” by saying, “Or, I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.”42
At the International Women’s Peace Conference in Dallas, Texas, on July 11, 2007, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Betty Williams told an audience of about a thousand people: “Right now, I could kill George Bush. No—I don’t mean that. How could you nonviolently kill somebody? I would love to be able to do that.” She got a standing ovation. Fewer than a dozen newspapers, mostly in Texas, mentioned her wildly applauded statement that she’d like to kill President Bush.43
The night George Bush gave his keynote address at the 2000 Republican National Convention, Craig Kilborn on CBS’s The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn ran a photo of Bush speaking over the caption, “SNIPERS WANTED.”44
Though completely ignored by the media, during Bush’s time in office, his effigy was hung, decapitated and burned at large public gatherings. T-shirts, bumper stickers and posters demanding his assassination were plentiful at anti-Bush rallies, including “Kill Bush” bags, buttons and stamps, as well as heartwarming pictures of Bush with a gun to his head. Hundreds of photos of these macabre protests were put on the Internet by citizen journalists, at sites such as Zombietime.com.45
When Alameda, California, resident and obsessive Bush e-mailer Michael McDonald put a life-size cardboard cutout of George Bush—with a knife in his head—on his front lawn, the local newspaper wrote a fawning editorial on this “patriotic artist.” The newspaper said he just wanted people to see his work and to “engage them in thinking.”46
If an effigy of the blessed Obama were ever hung, stabbed or decapitated at a Tea Party or other conservative event, it would receive more explosive coverage than a Romney fund-raiser in the Hamptons.47
The left’s fantasy of an attempt on Obama’s life was more than the usual liberal preening about how they were blacks’ special protectors against racist America. Even liberals couldn’t have believed Obama was at any greater risk of assassination than President Bush—probably a lot less, in fact.
It was to insu
late a left-wing president from criticism.
Why keep burbling about racists in America and forcing people to admit there are still racists? Of course there are racists in America. What isn’t there in America? It’s a big country. There are also foot fetishists, trans fat–phobics and people who think a tree is more valuable than a human being.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a racist in 1968. But more recently, in 1975, an actual president of the United States, Gerald Ford, was nearly assassinated by a tree-loving lunatic, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme—to stop Ford from cutting down the redwoods. Weeks later, bland, inoffensive Ford was again shot at by another crazed liberal, Sara Jane Moore, because, she said, “the government had declared war on the left.”
More recently still, President Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, a kook trying to impress the actress Jodie Foster.
The historical record suggests that presidents have less to fear from white supremacists than socialists,48 communists,49 Palestinian activists,50 crazed environmentalists51 and run-of-the-mill leftists52—who have been responsible for all presidential assassination attempts since at least 1900. Islamic terrorists surely pose a greater danger to any U.S. president than white supremacists, who loom large only in liberal imaginations.
Of course, all public figures have a heightened risk of physical attack in a nation of 300 million people, some of whom are crazy. Presidents are in the most danger of all. But there was absolutely no reason to suppose Obama was at greater risk than any other presidential candidate. Even the Ku Klux Klan—which was being closely monitored by every media outlet from the moment Obama declared his candidacy—had only called for the wearing of black armbands to protest Obama’s election. To call racism the main problem in America would be like calling cholera the main health concern. The less we have of it, the more journalists claim it’s a crisis.
Liberals didn’t seem terribly worried about the risk of assassination to other prominent black political figures, such as Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Herman Cain or Allen West. To the contrary, they seemed to rather like the idea, with crazy CODEPINK women charging Rice at a congressional hearing and mainstream liberals eagerly publicizing slanderous, racist caricatures of Thomas and Cain. In 2012, Democratic operatives began a campaign to publicize the home addresses of Republican congressmen and their families, including black House Republican, Allen West.53