Frank Rich describes
the Republican leadership and Tea Partiers as “goons” hurling
“venomous slurs” — including racist epithets and even death
threats — at Democratic congressmen who voted for ObamaCare. He
takes particular exception to Sarah Palin’s call for a “reload”
— as though she were summoning the Tea Party knuckle-walkers to
take up firearms. Such verbal incitement, he warns, could quickly
lead to actual assassination attempts.
I agree that there is no place in our politics for ugly
threats; but I don’t agree with Rich that such murderous language
is exclusive to Republicans or Tea Partiers. Quite the contrary:
assassination threats against the opposition were first
introduced into contemporary discourse by the many “progressive,”
usually Democratic commentators, politicians, and bloggers caught
up in the “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” There was no penalty for
openly indulging such fancies, and so left-wing commentators and
bloggers were liberated to indulge Orwellian “two-minute
hates,” and to dream up innovative ways to impeach, jail, and
even kill president Bush.
Below, a small sampling of the more lurid calls in the
media and in street demos, during 2007-‘08, to do away, both
physically and politically, with George Bush:
This statement, by New York State Controller Alan
Hevesi, was made in the summer of
2006 during his commencement address at Queens College in New York: “Senator Charles
Schumer is a man to put a bullet between the president’s
eyes.”
The following exchange in October 2006 took place on Bill
Maher’s Real Time. It suggests that John Kerry is, at
the very least, a sore loser.
MAHER: You could have went to New Hampshire
and killed two birds with one stone.
KERRY: Or, I could have gone to
1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one
stone.
Bush’s
Assassination, a novella by Alien Cultist,
was published in 2004 by Fiction Press and was listed as Fiction:
Adventure/Parody:
I moved my aiming reticles back on Bush’s head. Ugly
little bugger. Then there was one click of the flashlight
slowly, then a second, and a third, from which I then pulled
the trigger. The noise of the shot was completely muffled by
the crowd’s applause for an idiot son of an asshole. Applause
was quickly shifted to screams as the bullet rippled through
his eye, and out the back of his head. He laid sprawled, and
slightly twitching in his left leg, in his own pool of blood
and brain tissue….”Pawn down,” I smiled.
Some comments on the above:
“hahah very sexy story eric i love the way bush is all
twitchy.”
“Death to George Bush!”
“Glad to find another Bush Hater, and a story of his
assignation (sic) is just plain delicious”
“heh this is good. i hate bush. BUSH SHOULD DIE”
In the novella
Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker, published
in 2004, a character fantasizes about killing Bush:
Bush is an unelected F—ing drunken OILMAN who is
“squatting” in the White House and muttering
over his prayer
book every morning…. Bush is
one dead armadillo…. I’m going to
kill that
bastard.
Charlie Brooker, a Brit
columnist, wrote the following
in an October 2004 op-ed in the
Guardian newspaper:
Bush will probably win the Nov. 2 election despite the
prayers of the entire civilized world, thus proving that God
does not exist. The world will endure four more years of
idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent
deity to watch over and save us… John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey
Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need
you?
Lethal Bush-hatred soon metastasized beyond the print and
electronic media, to be represented in the graphic arts: At
Chicago’s Columbia College, a curated exhibit included a sheet of
mock postage stamps bearing the words “Patriot Act” and depicting
President Bush with a gun to his head.
Assassination chic has also taken cinematic form, as in
Death of a President, a recent movie about the murder of
George Bush. Written and directed by British filmmaker Gabriel
Range, this pseudo-documentary, which premiered at the Toronto
Film Festival, opens with images of Bush being picked off by a
sniper in a Chicago hotel in October 2007. The film Photoshops
the president’s face onto the head of the actor playing him, so
that the mortally wounded target seems, quite convincingly, to be
Bush himself. Noah Cowan, a festival co-director, has played down
the film’s “harrowing” aspects, and instead
describes Death of a President as “a classic
cautionary tale.” The flick is really about “how the Patriot Act,
especially, and Bush’s divisive partisanship and race-baiting has
[sic] forever altered America.”
Finally, at the height of any vogue there is a buck to be
made; hence, the predictable merchandising spin-offs, and
Bush-Assassination fashion statements, such as the “KILL BUSH”
T-shirts that were flogged by CafePress, an online
retailer.
Many Bush death-wishers chose not to hide behind their
blogging pseudonyms, but marched — presumably under the eyes of
the police — carrying placards that openly declared their
violent sentiments. The producer of “Zombie-Time,” who
records left-wing marches around the country, has photographed a
host of these provocative placards. Here are some of the most
expressive examples of the genre:
“KILL TERRORISTS. BOMB THERE HOUSE (sic). KILL BUSH. BOMB
HIS F—-IN HOUSE”
“SAVE MOTHER EARTH. KILL BUSH”
“HANG BUSH FOR WAR CRIMES”
“BUSH IS THE DISEASE. DEATH IS THE CURE.”
“I’M HERE TO KILL BUSH. (SHOOT ME.)”
“BUSH IS THE ONLY DOPE WORTH SHOOTING.”
“DEATH TO EXTREMIST TERRORIST PIG-BUSH”
“THE WORLD NEEDS MORE PEOPLE LIKE YOU: KILL
BUSH!”
A mobile guillotine was paraded with the sign, “BUSH
WHACKER,” hung over a basket containing the president’s severed
head.
There were at least five years of such open, public
hate-speech. Reading through it, I was struck by two things: the
evident lack of response from either the public or the Feds, and
a perhaps related phenomenon — the “ordinariness” of such
extreme rhetoric. Given the hectic climate of the times, such
over-the-top babble, the voice of the lunatic fringe, was now
just part of the crowd noise in the newly liberated,
exhibitionistic America. The lunatic fringe had not changed, what
had changed were the platforms from which its members
could shout their paranoiac, homicidal messages. No more
soapboxes in Union Square; now they performed in Carnegie hall.
The cuckoo-bird Lunatic Fringe had moved into and replaced the
cultural center.
And who had invited them into the Holy of Holies? Who had
celebrated them, as the viceroys of The Age of Aquarius? Who had
sneered at their detractors, calling them “Life-Hating” War
Hawks, Male Chauvinists and Homophobes? Those who had de-toxified
and legitimized the language of the fringe were the same radicals
who now squeal indignantly when Sarah Palin uses the word
“reload.”
