Mugged (38 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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
.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 insulate 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,
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communists,
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Palestinian activists,
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crazed environmentalists
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and run-of-the-mill leftists
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—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.
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There is no purpose to publicizing a public figure’s address other than to help deranged crackpots plot a physical confrontation. But liberals only worried about racists when it came to left-wing blacks. The imaginary racists populating liberal imaginations vanished from their memories when it came to conservative blacks.

None of these threats were of the slightest interest to the media. Not liberals’ publicizing Republicans’ home addresses, not mock decapitations, “Kill Bush” T-shirts, effigy burnings, “Assassins Wanted” on a late-night comedy show, a decapitated Bush head on an HBO program, an award winning
movie about President Bush’s assassination or liberals’ constant assertions that they’d like to kill Bush.

But during the 2008 presidential campaign, there was a hair-on-fire story about an alleged heckle against Obama at a Sarah Palin rally. The
Scranton Times-Tribune
claimed that someone in the audience shouted “Kill him!” after Palin mentioned Obama’s name.

ABC, MSNBC and CNN, among many others, repeated this claim from the
Scranton Times-Tribune
. It was reporter David Singleton’s moment in the sun!

This was just the sort of thing the racism hunters had been expecting! A rumored shout at a Palin rally allowed them to shift their terror over Obama’s safety to rage at the Republican Party for inspiring violence with their anti-Obama rhetoric.
We are running this wonderful man for president and it’s really frightening to hear him criticized.

In fact, it was so perfect, you’d think liberals had made it up. Which, it turned out, they had.

Even before the Secret Service thoroughly debunked the allegation, it was highly implausible. The non-Fox media were scouring the Earth for dirt on McCain. The
New York Times
had put four reporters on gossip about a McCain affair, and when they turned up nothing despite months of looking, the
Times
printed a front-page story on the affair anyway, quoting the speculation of anonymous staffers.
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It seems highly unlikely that people were shouting “Kill him!” at McCain-Palin rallies and the
New York Times
decided not to mention it to spare McCain the embarrassment.

Reporter Singleton evidently didn’t realize the Secret Service takes such remarks extremely seriously. This time, one of his little pop-offs in the
Scranton Times-Tribune
was going to be fact-checked with a complete Secret Service investigation.

The agents interviewed law enforcement officers, reporters and ordinary citizens who were at the event. Not one supported Singleton’s story. A dozen Secret Service agents had been spread throughout the audience, but none of them had heard it, either. Nor could Singleton produce anyone else who heard it or describe the person who had supposedly yelled it. After a massive manhunt, David Singleton remained the only person who claimed to have heard “Kill him!” shouted at the Palin rally.
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(It’s really a shame that reporters can’t be outfitted with some sort of recording device capable of capturing such moments.)

Consequently, the Secret Service concluded that it never happened. “We had people all over,” agent Bill Slavoski said, “and we have yet to find
anyone who said they heard it.”
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As Alex Koppelman wrote in the very liberal Salon.com, “the Secret Service takes this sort of thing very, very seriously. If it says it doesn’t think anyone shouted ‘kill him,’ it’s a good bet that it didn’t happen.”
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Thanks to more bogus reporting by the
Washington Post
’s Dana Milbank, the Secret Service was also required to investigate his claim that someone in the crowd at a Palin event in Clearwater, Florida, had yelled—in an amazing coincidence!—“Kill him!” at the mention of domestic terrorist Bill Ayers’s name.
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After listening to tapes, the agents determined that Milbank had heard “Tell him!” not “Kill him!”
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If liberals are so worried about Obama’s safety, maybe they should stop wasting the Secret Service’s time by forcing them to investigate imaginative press reports about nonexistent heckles at Republican rallies.

Dozens of newspapers, TV networks and magazines had breathlessly told the original story about someone yelling “Kill him!” at a Palin rally. The story was repeated hourly on MSNBC. But apart from Fox News and CNN’s Lou Dobbs, very few news outlets ever corrected the false report.

It wasn’t just excitable journalists who were carrying on about the “Kill him!” hoax. It was repeated by the next president of the United States, even after he knew it was false. During the third presidential debate, McCain complained that Obama supporter, no-longer-a-hero Representative John Lewis, had compared the McCain campaign to “segregation, deaths of children in church bombings, George Wallace.”

Obama defended Lewis and raised the issue of the Sarah Palin rallies, “in which all the Republicans, reports indicated, were shouting—when my name came up—things like ‘terrorist’ and ‘kill him,’” and “your running mate didn’t mention, didn’t stop, didn’t say ‘Hold on a second, that’s kind of out of line.’”
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