Guilty (43 page)

In early 2008, there were nearly seven times as many documents on Google for “Obama” and “assassination” as there were for “Bush” and “assassination.” This is despite the fact that (1) Bush had been president for the past seven and a half years, and (2) liberals had actually produced books and movies about their fantasy of Bush being assassinated.

I wouldn't mention it, but as long as liberals are going to keep acting as if they are under constant threat from right-wing assassins, I note that 90 percent of the political assassins in this country have been liberals. Most of the rest were random nuts. There was only one white-racist nut—and that was four decades ago. Based on history, Sean Hannity is at greater risk of being shot than Obama is.

Every presidential assassin in the history of the nation has been a liberal—or has had no politics at all. None were right-wingers.

Actor/activist John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, because he was opposed to Lincoln's Republican war policies. Booth, the Tim Robbins of his day, left a letter with his family explaining his actions, saying he loved “peace more than life” and denouncing Republicans for foisting the war on the South.
¹²²
He may have even used the word “quagmire” to describe Gettysburg.

Charles J. Guiteau, who shot President James Garfield in 1881, had a long relationship with a utopian commune called the Oneida Community, where free love and communal child-rearing were practiced.
¹²³

Leon Czolgosz, who killed President William McKinley in 1901, was a socialist and anarchist (okay, that's redundant) who was captivated upon hearing a speech by radical socialist Emma Goldman the year he shot McKinley.
¹²⁴
If memory serves, Goldman's inspirational speech had something to do with “hope” and “change.”

John Schrank, who shot and wounded Teddy Roosevelt in 1921, seemed to have no political beliefs other than a strong opposition to third terms—which Roosevelt was then serving.
¹²⁵

Giuseppe Zangara, who narrowly missed shooting President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, was consumed by envy of the rich and sought to “make even with capitalists” by killing the president. According to the FBI files, even on the way to the electric chair (he had mortally wounded Chicago mayor Anton Cermak) “Zangara was cursing and railing against capitalists.”
¹²⁶
Earlier, Zangara had plotted to kill Republican president Herbert Hoover, because both Hoover and Roosevelt were “capitalists.”
¹²⁷
Yes, you heard me right: This would-be assassin was to the
left
of FDR.

Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, had been a stone-cold Communist ever since he read a Communist pamphlet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as a teenager. Incensed by racial discrimination in America, he defiantly rode in the black sections of buses as a child. Oswald studied Russian and moved to the USSR in his late teens, hoping to avoid the rush. When his application for Soviet citizenship was declined, he slit his wrists. Oswald eventually returned to the United States with his Russian wife and child, where he continued to plot an escape to a socialist paradise such as Cuba or Red China.
¹²⁸

Ginned up by publications of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party—
The Worker
and
The Militant,
respectively—Oswald first tried to kill Major General Edwin A. Walker, a John Bircher. Ten days before shooting at Walker—and missing—Oswald had posed for a photograph holding his guns and copies of the socialist publications denouncing Walker.
¹²⁹
Some of you will recognize this photo as Randi Rhodes's screen saver.

Oswald next plotted to kill former vice president Richard Nixon, but got distracted the day Nixon was in Dallas. He spent the next several months passing out “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets. In between “You never take me anywhere!” arguments with his wife, Oswald tried to talk her into helping him hijack a plane to Cuba so he could fight in defense of the revolution.
¹³⁰

When he was arrested for shooting Kennedy, Oswald immediately placed a call to John Abt, lawyer for the American Communist Party, planning to ask Abt to defend him so he could use the trial to
showcase his Marxist beliefs.
¹³¹
He never got the chance, thanks to Jack Ruby.

Sirhan Sirhan, who shot Democratic presidential candidate Senator Robert Kennedy on June 5, 1968, was a Palestinian extremist angry with Kennedy for his support of Israel.
¹³²
For more on this worldview, see the works of Noam Chomsky.

Arthur Bremer, who shot and paralyzed Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace on May 15, 1972, was enraged by Wallace's support for segregation. A search of Bremer's apartment turned up Black Panther literature and a diary with entries such as “My country 'tis of thee, land of sweet bigotry.” A quarter of a century after he shot Wallace, Bremer expressed no remorse, saying he should be paroled because shooting “segregationist dinosaurs” was not like shooting a person. “They are extinct,” Bremer wrote, “by an act of God.”
¹³³
This mention of God was the only blemish on Bremer's otherwise impeccable liberal credentials.

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who pointed a loaded gun at President Gerald Ford on September 5, 1975, was part of Charles Manson's countercultural hippie cult. She pulled the gun on Ford because she was incensed about the plight of the California redwoods.
¹³⁴
(Who can ever forget Ford's famous vow to cut down every redwood on earth?)

Sara Jane Moore, who tried to kill Ford seventeen days later, was a five-time divorcée who, like the Code Pink gals, turned to revolutionary politics in her forties. Moore said she wanted to assassinate Ford because “the government had declared war on the left.” Sounding like Seymour Hersh with a better editor, she said Nixon and Ford were waging “a continuing assault on America.” She tried to kill Ford in order to “allow the winds of change to start.”
¹³⁵

I know what some of you are thinking: What about would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley, who shot the president not for political reasons but hoping to impress a girl? Although Hinckley would seem to be an exception to the rule that all presidential assassins have been liberals, recall that a jury later found Hinckley to be “not guilty by reason of insanity,” which is as good a definition of liberalism as I've heard.

To be sure, Martin Luther King, though not a presidential candidate, was a major political figure and he was killed by a white racist. I'D put that in the liberal column, but in deference to
New York Times
sensibilities, I'll make it a draw. Oh, what the heck—conservatives are so far ahead, I'll let liberals call the racist a “right-winger.”

But if we're going to get into assassinations of nonpresidential political figures, there was also Malcolm X, who was killed by Black Muslims. And there was the massive political violence of the Left throughout the seventies and beyond carried out by such radical organizations as the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and the Black Liberation Army—or Obama's “kitchen cabinet.”

Thus, another nonpresidential political assassination was the 1981 murder of Waverly “Chipper” Brown, then the only black officer on the Nyack, New York, police force. The much-loved Brown had served his country in the Air Force during the Korean War and had two daughters who followed him into the Air Force. He worked with black schoolchildren, telling them to stay off drugs and make something of themselves. He personally bought turkeys for a dozen poor neighbors on Thanksgiving. But liberal “revolutionaries” with the Weathermen and the Black Liberation Army who claimed to be fighting “white oppression” killed the only black officer on the police force after their robbery of a Brinks truck in 1981—along with Nyack police sergeant Edward O'Grady and Brinks guard Peter Paige.

Then there was Robert Fassnacht, a physics graduate at the University of Wisconsin who was killed in 1971 by a car bomb set by antiwar protesters that did more than $6 million in damage to university buildings. Liberals operating under various radical umbrella groups planted bombs or attempted to plant bombs at an Army dance hall at Fort Dix, New York City police headquarters, the Harvard international-studies center, various corporate offices, National Guard headquarters, the Pentagon, and the Capitol Building. A string of cops, prosecutors, lawyers, and accountants were killed, maimed, and paralyzed in the seventies and eighties by these peaceful liberals.

The Democratic Party has closer ties to these violent animals than the Republican Party does to Bob Jones University (a Christian college
that terrifies liberals). Most notable are Barack Obama's close connections to Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were directly involved in bombing the Pentagon and the Capitol. They were so close to two of the Weathermen involved in the 1981 Brinks robbery, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, that they took custody of the convicted terrorists' child. And, of course, Obama held his first political coming-out party at the home of Ayers and Dohrn.

In addition to Obama's cozy relationship with these left-wing terrorists, Bill Clinton pardoned a former Weatherman, Susan L. Rosenberg, who was arrested in November 1984 with 740 pounds of dynamite, a submachine gun, and other weapons in her car. Rosenberg also harbored a getaway driver from the Brinks robbery that cost three men their lives.

So spare us the fantasies of right-wing assassins targeting the blessed Obama. Inasmuch as he is the most far-left president the country has ever had, his base is composed of the very groups from which political assassins are generally drawn.

In a country where the vast majority of the population is patriotic, God-believing, and capitalistic, it's telling that nearly all presidential assassins have been left-wing zealots—pacifists, communitarians, Communists, anarchists, Palestinian extremists, and countercultural hippies. It's bad enough that liberals keep producing the nation's assassins. Can they at least stop pretending to believe they are living in a country bristling with right-wing murderers? In return, we'll all pretend to believe that it's brave every time a Hollywood actress comes out against global warming.

It's also interesting that all presidential assassins or would-be assassins are almost all white people—white folks and one Arab. At any one time, there are surely more blacks in the United States than Communists, Palestinian activists, and Weathermen. So why are white liberals always threatening Republicans with black violence? During the 2004 presidential campaign, Al Gore advised black voters in Jacksonville, Florida, not to “turn into angry acts or angry words.”
¹³⁶
That same day, Elizabeth Edwards warned that there might be riots if John Kerry didn't win. In 2008, Sandra Bernhard's act included the warning
that if Sarah Palin
¹³⁷
came to Manhattan, she'D be gang-raped by black men.
¹³⁸
The
Philadelphia Daily News
columnist Fatimah Ali cautioned, “If McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race and class war.”

Liberals are constantly trying to plant subliminal suggestions with blacks to engage in violence against conservatives. They try to make blacks afraid of Republicans, telling them that Republicans are trying to oppress them—and even plotting to murder Obama! Throughout the 2004 presidential campaign, Democrats told blacks that Republicans had denied them the right to vote in the famous 2000 Florida election. This, despite the fact that a year-long investigation by the Civil Rights Commission could not produce one single black person who was prevented from voting in that election.
¹³⁹
But Soros-funded Americans Coming Together put out a flyer in Missouri warning blacks that Republicans were trying to prevent them from voting, saying, “They put phony cops at polling places…. They make African American voters stand in line for hours, then turn them away from the polls…. They did it in St. Louis, they did it in Florida, and now they're trying to do it again.”
¹⁴⁰

Trying to get blacks to do their fighting for them doesn't seem to be working for liberals, since it's always white liberals engaging in acts of violence. Every attack on a conservative speaker at a college campus has been committed by white assailants. In the 2004 election, a Madison, Wisconsin, homeowner with Bush yard signs found an eight-foot swastika burned into his grass with weed killer. (Madison: 4 percent African American.)
¹⁴¹
A Bush-Cheney campaign office in Bellevue, Washington, was burglarized and had computers and confidential get-out-the-vote files stolen. (Bellevue: 2 percent African American.)
¹⁴²
That same year, Bush-Cheney headquarters in Orlando, Florida, were ransacked by union protesters with the AFL-CIO. (A sensible, bipartisan gun-control law would prohibit liberals from owning guns.)

In 2008, two white liberals, Daniel Meinecke, twenty-nine, and Cara Hindman, twenty-six, walked into a McCain campaign headquarters in Galax, Virginia, and belligerently demanded “Obama-Biden” yard signs, clinging to the hope that an Obama presidency would usher in a new era of civility. Told the Obama campaign office was up the street, they began yelling and cursing, and accused the office workers, two married couples
in their seventies, of stealing Obama yard signs. Besides the rush of excitement that comes with being a victim in modern America, liberals insist on playing the victim to provide a justification for their own insensate violence against conservatives. The office manager responded that they had stolen no signs and ushered the profanity-spewing leftists out the door. Once on the street, the lovely Cara Hindman—protected by a layer of grease and dirt resulting from weeks of scrupulously not bathing—maced the office manager and opened the door to spray Mace back into the office, hitting five McCain staffers in all.
¹⁴³