Death Threats Against Bush at Protests Ignored for Years

Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 9:13 am

[If you just want to see the evidence and not read the introduction, simply scroll down to the photos, or click here to jump directly to them.]

On Wednesday, August 12, a man holding a sign that said “Death to Obama” at a town hall meeting in Maryland was detained and turned over to the Secret Service which will likely soon charge him with threatening the president.

As well they should. I fully and absolutely agree with the Secret Service pursuing this case, since anyone who threatens the president is breaking the law and should be prosecuted. It doesn’t matter that Obama was not at the meeting nor that the man was unarmed: the threat all on its own is a federal crime, according to the United States Code.

I support the arrest and prosecution of any person who threatens Obama or any president of the United States.

Bush was threatened frequently — but no arrests

But the story of this arrest got me to thinking: Why was no one ever arrested for threatening President Bush at protests, when they displayed signs in public that called for his death?

Many readers may naively think, “The answer is obvious: no protester was ever arrested for threatening Bush at a protest because no one ever threatened him at a protest. Who would be that stupid? I certainly never heard of any such threats.”

Alas, if only it were that simple. Because the bald fact is that people threatened Bush at protests all the time by displaying menacing signs and messages — exactly as the anti-Obama protester just did in Maryland. Yet for reasons that are not entirely clear, none of those Bush-threateners at protests was ever arrested, questioned, or investigated (at least as far as I could tell).

Don’t believe me? Then keep reading. Because this essay exists for one reason only: To prove beyond any doubt that explicit and implicit threats to Bush’s life were commonly displayed at public protests throughout his term as president. Below this introduction you will find dozens of examples of such threats — unaltered photographs from a wide variety of sources, along with links verifying their authenticity.

Just show us the pictures already!

If you want to get straight to the action and not bother with reading the rest of this introduction, simply scroll down a short way to see the pictures right now. But if you’re outraged by the very existence of this report, or curious about my motivations for publishing it, then please take a few minutes to read the following explanation.

Why am I doing this?

Let me make this perfectly clear:

I am not publishing this essay in order to make excuses for anyone who has threatened President Obama, or who plans to threaten him in the future.

This is not some wrongheaded attempt at a tu quoque logical fallacy; in other words, I’m not trying to claim that death threats against Bush in the past justify threats against Obama now. Not at all. What I’m saying is that present-day threats to Obama at protests should be investigated — yet previous threats to Bush at protests weren’t investigated, which I think is inexcusable. Threats to the president aren’t excusable now, and weren’t excusable in the past — and yet death threats against Bush at protests seem to have been routinely ignored for years (and readers who have any evidence showing that the threateners depicted below were ever prosecuted for threatening the president, please tell me and I’ll update this essay with the new info). Why the discrepancy?

Am I calling the Secret Service incompetent?

No — I am not calling the Secret Service incompetent. In fact, I’m pointing the finger of blame in an entirely different direction. I’m quite sure that the Secret Service always dutifully investigates any threat to the president of which it becomes aware. But that’s the key right there: of which it becomes aware. The Secret Service has only a limited budget and a limited number of investigators, and so can’t be present to witness every potential threat as it appears. Often, the Secret Service is only alerted to a possible threat by reports in the media. And the media is the weak link.

I contend that the media is aggressively reporting on, highlighting and pursuing any and all possible threats to President Obama — and even hints of threats — but they purposely glossed over, ignored or failed to report similar threats to President Bush. Why? I believe it is part of an ideological bias: most mainstream networks and newspapers tried their best during the Bush administration to portray the anti-war movement as mainstream and moderate; whereas now they are trying to portray the anti-tax and anti-health-care-bill protesters as extremists and as fringe kooks. To achieve these goals, they essentially suppressed any mentions of the violent signage (including threats to Bush) at anti-war rallies, but have highlighted anything that could even conceivably be construed as a threat at anti-Obama events.

I believe this partly accounts for the 400% increase in reported threats against Obama over those against President Bush. Part of that reported increase in investigated threats is undoubtedly due to an increase in actual threats; but part of it is almost certainly due to an increase in threats which get reported by the media and are therefore brought to the Secret Service’s attention.

(This is similar to the famous paradox about rape awareness programs. Researchers were long mystified as to why incidents of rape in a city or a social group seemed to invariably rise after rape awareness campaigns drew attention to the problem in order to help solve it. The answer turned out to be obvious: It’s not that the number of actual rapes went up — it’s that the number of rapes which got reported went up, as women had more awareness and less shame about reporting the crime.)

The end result is that more threats to Obama are being reported. After scanning the pictures below of death threats against Bush, ask yourself: Holy cow — why was I never aware of these at the time? The reason: Because the media intentionally failed to report on them. Which is why both the average American and the Secret Service never became aware of many of these protest threats.

So now when a single protester shows up at an anti-Obama rally displaying a death threat, he is immediately pounced upon by the media and the Secret Service. Whereas in the past when protesters by the dozen threatened Bush, the media turned a blind eye, and the threateners got off scot-free.

Double standard?

Is there a double standard? Seems to be.

Every threat to Obama is now vigorously pursued, trumpeted and dissected by the media and the blogs, and roundly condemned. And I condemn such threats as well.

But in the past, whenever someone threatened Bush at a protest, there was a deafening silence on the part of the media and the left-leaning blogs, and consequently very little (if any) follow-through on the part of the Secret Service. Which I find quite distressing. I was condemning those threats in the past (as best I could, by drawing attention to them on my blog) — but few people were joining me in my condemnation.

I am NOT (repeat: NOT) defending anyone who threatens a president’s life. That’s the whole point. I say that anone who threatens Obama should be arrested and/or investigated. All I am saying is that threats to Bush should have been similarly pursued — but weren’t.

And the only reason I’m publishing the essay is that many Obama supporters — to my astonishment — now claim that Bush was never threatened at protests. Before we can have a rational discussion on this topic, we need to have a shared factual basis. The evidence below will establish that basis.

If you truly, truly cared about presidents’ lives being threatened, you would be just as incensed by people threatening Bush’s life at protests as you are about (the far less frequent instances of) Obama’s life being threatened at protests.

Some Bush threats followed up as expected — but protest threats ignored

Were any people ever arrested or questioned for threatening to kill Bush during his term in office? Of course. Every president is the target of numerous threats, and many of them do get investigated. Examples include:
- A man who in 2008 made verbal threats towards Bush at the White House fence where he left a suspicious package;
- A student who was quoted in a 2007 school publication as saying, “I would like to shoot George W. Bush, because in my opinion he is the worst president ever. After that was accomplished, I would be known as a national hero”;
- A mentally deranged man who threatened to blow up the White House in January of 2009;
- A graduate student who posted online threats against Bush in 2006;
- A guy who was turned in to the authorities by his own girlfriend after he threatened to kill Bush during a phone call;
…and so on.

However, all these instances of Bush-threateners being arrested happened outside of a protest setting. This article is about protesters with threatening protest signs — not about all threats in all settings.

The key question is: Were any protesters ever arrested or questioned for displaying threatening messages about President Bush at a protest? And the answer is: No, not as far as I could tell. In the very few instances that I could uncover, the incident was either misconstrued by the media, or the protester was at an actual presidential appearance (where there are special security concerns) — or people were detained for other reasons totally aside from their protest messages.

The most famous case was that of Brett Bursey, who was arrested in 2002 outside a Bush speech. The media dishonestly implied that he was arrested simply for carrying a sign that said “No War For Oil” — a message which was commonplace and nonthreatening. Turns out, though, that he was arrested not because of his sign but because he refused to leave a restricted area cordoned off by the Secret Service under Title 18, Section 1752(a)(1)(ii) of the U.S. Code. In other words, it was not his sign which got him arrested, but rather his presence in a restricted area and his refusal to move. (Even in a puff piece article about Bursey in the New York Times, the only “evidence” offered that his sign led to his arrest was the later uncorroborated statement of Bursey himself.) And note that some of the same politicians feigning outrage over the recent health-care protests actually defended Bursey’s right to protest in this manner (quoting from the link above): “A few weeks ago Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank and 10 other members of Congress wrote a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft condemning the arrest. They wrote: ‘This prosecution smacks of the use of the Sedition Acts two hundred years ago to protect the President from political discomfort. It was wrong then and it is wrong now. We urge you to drop this prosecution based so clearly on the political views being expressed by the individual who is being prosecuted.’ ”

In another case, a woman with a t-shirt that read “President Bush You Killed My Son” was removed from a speech being given by Laura Bush. But once again, it was not her message which got her arrested, but the fact that she disrupted the speech and refused to leave when asked — leading to a charge of trespassing. Yet the media falsely implied that she was arrested simply due to the nature of her t-shirt message.

An artist who painted a series of postage stamps showing Bush being shot had Secret Service agents inspect his art at one gallery opening and had the painting taken down by administrators at another — but he was never arrested or questioned. So once again, that is not an example of someone being arrested for a protest message against Bush.

Facts and corrections (if any) welcome

I’m open to facts: If anyone can find evidence that ANY of the protesters shown on this page threatening President Bush were ever investigated or arrested, please post the evidentiary links in the comments section below; I will update this post accordingly. Until then, we must assume that the perpetrators went unpunished.

Please also note that at the bottom of this essay I have a “Counter-Examples” section showing the tiny handful of incidents in which Obama threateners were ignored and “got away with” threatening the president — the scarcity of such examples only further strengthening my contention.

At last: The pictures

Sorry for the long introduction, but I felt it was necessary because this is such a sensitive and highly charged subject. But now that we’ve gotten that out of the way — it’s time for the evidence. Below you will find pictures of death threats made by protesters against President Bush during his term. Most of the pictures were taken at anti-war and anti-Bush protests; but lower down on the page are additional threats made in other settings that also seem to have gone uninvestigated. Wherever possible, I link to the source of the photo and give the location and date of the protest; however, in a handful of cases some details are missing.

Important note, just to make things perfectly clear: I did NOT make any of the signs depicted on this page, nor do I approve of them, nor do I have any information about any of the people who made them. I am reposting these images not in order to threaten Bush but rather to express my disappointment that such threats seem to have never been investigated.

Threats against Bush at public protests

A protester with a sign saying “Kill Bush” and advocating that the White House be bombed, at the March 18, 2007 anti-war rally in San Francisco.
(Source: zombietime. Click picture to see the image in context with other pictures from that day.)

“Save Mother Earth, Kill Bush” says this sign from a November 20, 2003 protest.
(Source: Innovative Minds.)

A recommendation that Bush should hang, from an October 27, 2007 protest in Los Angeles.
(Source: Ringo’s Pictures.)

“Bush is the disease, Death is the cure,” says this protester at an anti-war rally in San Francisco.
(Source: People’s Cube.)

“I’m here to kill Bush (shoot me)” reads this protest sign (location unknown).
(Source: I found this image several years ago in an online report about an anti-war protest, but I unfortunately failed to note down where or when the protest happened, and the Web site that originally hosted the report is now defunct.)

Two different pictures of the same sign saying “Bush — the only dope worth shooting,” at the March 15, 2008 anti-war rally in Los Angeles.
(Source: photo on the left from Ringo’s Pictures; photo on the right reposted on michellemalkin.com.)

A sign showing Bush being shot in the head, at the March 15, 2008 anti-war rally in Los Angeles.
(Source: Ringo’s Pictures.)

Remember the guy in our first picture? Here he is again, with another explicit death threat against the president, this time calling for “Death to…Bush” at the October 27, 2007 anti-war rally in San Francisco.
(Source: zombietime. Click picture to see the image in context with other pictures from that day.)

And here he comes again with a third message, this time brazenly calling for “Death to…Bush” at the March 18, 2007 anti-war rally in San Francisco.
(Source: zombietime. Click picture to see the image in context with other pictures from that day.)

A protester with a sign showing Bush being beheaded.
(Reposted on michellemalkin.com; original source unknown.)

Bush being beheaded by a guillotine, at an Obama campaign rally, Denver, October 26, 2008.
(Source: Looking at the Left.)

Bush’s head in a basket after being decapitated by a guillotine, at an Obama campaign rally, Denver, October 26, 2008.
(Source: Looking at the Left.)

A sign saying “SMITE BUSH” at the June 5, 2004 anti-war rally in San Francisco.
(Source: zombietime. Click picture to see the image in context with other pictures from that day.)

Protesters call for Bush to be beheaded with a guillotine, at a protest against Bush’s second inauguration, January 20, 2005, in New York.
(Source: Fred Askew Photography.)

An effigy of Bush being killed, at the April 10, 2004 anti-war rally in San Francisco.
(Source: zombietime. Click picture to see the image in context with other pictures from that day.)

Bush being burned in effigy, at a November 3, 2004 post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco.
(Source: zombietime. Click picture to see the image in context with other pictures from that day.)

There are literally hundreds of videos currently viewable on YouTube of Bush being burned in effigy. I’ve posted a screenshot of one above, but rather than clog up this post with several embedded YouTube videos (which slows down the page loading), I’ll simply post links to several of the videos here:

Bush getting burned
bush you liar we’ll set your ass on fire
Burning George Bush
George W Bush burns in effigy (Washington DC)
And for a little variety: Bush getting smashed

(On the “Related videos” sidebars for all of these you can find many additional burning-Bush-in-effigy videos.)

In case you feel that burning Bush in effigy “doesn’t count” — just imagine the outcry there would be if even a single instance of Obama being burned in effigy was filmed (claims of “lynching,” etc.).

Bush being lynched by an American flag at a rally in New York on September 19, 2006.
(Source: Fred Askew Photography.)

A protester with a shirt that said “Death to all posers” with a picture of Bush superimposed, at the October 27, 2007 anti-war rally in San Francisco.
(Source: zombietime. Click picture to see the image in context with other pictures from that day.)

This sign from a protest in Chicago says “Lee Harvey, where are you?” at the bottom, referring to JFK’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
(Source: Chicago Indymedia.)

A protester in Denver calls for Bush to the get the Louis XVI treatment — i.e beheaded by a guillotine.
(Source: Looking at the Left.)

Woman holding a puppet of Bush being hung by the neck, from a March 17, 2007 protest in Hollywood, California.
(Source: Ringo’s Pictures.)

Fantasy of Saddam Hussein killing Bush, from an October 27, 2007 protest in Los Angeles.
(Source: Ringo’s Pictures.)

A sign implying Bush should be killed for being a war profiteer. From an October 27, 2007 protest in Los Angeles.
(Source: Ringo’s Pictures.)

A child holding Bush’s tombstone, at the February 16, 2003 anti-war rally in San Francisco.
(Source: zombietime. Click picture to see the image in context with other pictures from that day.)

Threats in other settings (i.e. not at protests)

Bumper sticker implying that Bush should be hanged.
(Photo by Last Mohican.)

As far as I can tell, no one was ever stopped or investigated by the Secret Service for displaying this bumper sticker. Compare that to what happened to a man in Oklahoma on February 12, who had a sign in his car saying “Abort Obama Not the Unborn” — which not only caused the police to pull him over and confiscate the sign, but which eventually led to the Secret Service searching his house looking for evidence that he was a threat to the president. Double standard? You decide.

Wider-angle shot showing the bumper sticker above in context, with a pro-Obama sticker on the same car, proving that the sticker was displayed by a Bush detractor, not a supporter.
(Photo by Last Mohican.)

The anti-Israel conspiracy site nogw.com hosts this pdf file which describes a mock trial and execution of George Bush for a bizarre litany of purported crimes; included in the document is this image of Bush being hanged at the trial.

A promotional photo from the mock-docmentary film “Death of a President,” showing Bush being killed. You can watch a short clip of the film’s assassination sequence here on YouTube.
(Source: USA Today.)

Threats against Bush by celebrities which were never investigated

John Kerry

The picture above shows John Kerry as he was being interviewed by Bill Maher in October of 2006 on the HBO show Real Time. As can be seen in this video exclusively on the ongoodmove blog, starting at about one minute into the clip Kerry says what can only be interpreted as a threat to kill Bush:

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.

Full transcript of the interview here.

Was John Kerry ever questioned or investigated for making a threat against Bush? No.

(Source: National Review.)

Betty Williams (Nobel Peace Prize winner)

On July 11, 2007, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Betty Williams gave the keynote speech to the International Women’s Peace Conference in Dallas, Texas, and said (to laughter and applause from the audience):

“I mean right now, I could kill George Bush, no problem. No, I don’t mean that. I mean — how could you nonviolently kill somebody? I would love to be able to do that.”

You can hear the audiotape of her threat on Breitbart.TV. Despite the fact that threatening to kill the president is a crime, the Secret Service refused to question her or detain her; according to the Dallas Morning News, “Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren in Washington declined to comment, but a Dallas agent said Ms. Williams had not been questioned and there were no plans to do so.” However, the people who emailed the conference in anger about her threats — they were the ones investigated: “Conference organizers reported that a Dallas police detective was working with hotel security to review about 40 hateful e-mails received in response to Ms. Williams’ speech.”

Earlier, Betty Williams said essentially the same thing in a speech in Australia on July 24, 2006, proving that this was not just a slip of the tongue but something she thinks about frequently:

“I have a very hard time with this word ‘non-violence,’ because I don’t believe that I am non-violent…. Right now, I would love to kill George Bush…. I don’t know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize, because when I see children die the anger in me is just beyond belief.”

Was Betty Williams ever questioned or investigated for making a threat against Bush? No.

(Source: wikipedia.)

Craig Kilborn

On August 4, 2000, when Bush won the Republican nomination (but before he was president), Craig Kilborn on CBS’s The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn ran a graphic of the words “SNIPERS WANTED” under George Bush as he gave his acceptance speech. Although CBS belatedly apologized five days later, Kilborn was never investigated, questioned or punished, and continued to host the show for four more years.

Was Craig Kilborn ever questioned or investigated for making a threat against Bush? No.

(Source: The Smoking Gun.)

Also see:

New York State comptroller, Alan Hevesi said during a June 1, 2006 speech that Senator Charles Schumer “will put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it.” Hevesi later apologized for the statement.

Death threat t-shirts

Look at the two pictures above. Which do you find more offensive? Which is more obviously a threat to kill or disrespect a president?

If you’re an Obama supporter, the answer seems to be, “The picture on the left,” because that’s the picture that has caused storms of outrage across America. But both these images are of t-shirts currently available for sale on zazzle.com, the user-generated customized product site:

Obama as The Joker, by thelibertytree

We don’t need to impeach Bush. We need to execute him!, by Gay_Art

The outrage over the Obama Joker shirts and posters has reached a fever pitch; whereas there has been a deafening silence about the “execute Bush” shirts. Why is that? Critics point out that the designer of the Joker shirt goes by the name “thelibertytree,” which some critics are claiming might be seen as a menacing reference. And critics also claim that portraying Obama as the Joker from a recent Batman film reeks of racism. (Though those critics have suddenly fallen mute now that it has been revealed that the person who made the original Photoshop was a Palestinian-American.) But in both these aspects the offensiveness is very subtle and requires interpretation, and can’t be said to be an overt threat. But look at the shirt on the right: “We don’t need to impeach Bush. We need to execute him!” Can you get any more overt than that?

Where is the outrage? If people really and truly cared about threats to the president, then they’d be complaining about shirts like the one depicted on the right, not just the one on the left. But it’s obvious many Obama supporters don’t really care about the threats — they just want to score political points.

For a while, CafePress allowed violent anti-Bush paraphernalia (such as this “Kill Bush” shirt) to be sold by users on its site, but after they were publicized by the Drudge Report, they were pulled offline; though, as far as I can tell, the designers were never investigated by the Secret Service.
(Source: Lifelike Pundits.)

Another “Kill Bush” shirt that didn’t get nearly as much publicity as the one above.
(Source: mirrorgirl.)

“Wanted” posters

Wild-West-style “Wanted” posters about Bush were commonplace at rallies as well. Since historically these posters usually implied (or overtly stated) that the target was “Wanted — dead or alive,” such posters were often the equivalent of a death sentence for the person named, at the hand of vigilantes. Because of this, I regard these “Bush Wanted” posters as implicit threats. Only a few examples are given here, since these were so common at anti-war protests during the Bush era.

Protester carrying a “Wanted” poster for Bush, at the G-8 summit in Sapporo, Japan, July 5, 2008.
(Source: AP, via topplebush.com.)

One of the many Bush posters that wanted him “dead or alive.”
(Source: spacehijackers.)

A basic no-frills “Wanted” poster.
(Source: ^Berd.)

Yet another “Wanted” sign for Bush, from a rally in Los Angeles.
(Source: Ringo’s Pictures.)

Prototypical Bush “Wanted” poster at a protest, with a bonus Hitler mustache.
(Source: National Review.)

A different “Wanted: Dead or Alive” poster from a supposed humor site.
(Source: The Spoof.)

One of many Bush “Wanted” posters that proliferated after the invasion of Iraq.
(Source: evergreen.edu.)

The most detailed “Wanted” poster of the bunch.
(Source: Let Us Talk.)

Graffiti

Graffiti is inherently anonymous, so there’s no way to “investigate” who wrote these threats; but even so I thought I’d give a small sampling of some of the extreme graffiti that could be seen during Bush’s term in office.

“I will kill Bush” says this graffiti spotted on the New York Subway “C” Train in 2005.
(Source: Jackie Clarke Loves Graffiti blog.)

This wall-art poster reads “The World Needs More People Like You: Kill Bush.” Location unknown.
(Source: Flickr.)

Graffiti that says “Kill Bush!” At 19 Eliza St., Newtown, Australia. (Yes, that’s a foreign country, which leads us to our next category….)

Other Countries

Threats to Bush made in other countries are obviously not germane to this essay, since the Secret Service has no jurisdiction outside the United States. Even so, I accidentally ran across a few during my research, so for completeness’ sake I’ll include links to them here. (Excluded from this section are protests in places like Iran and Gaza, where calling for Bush’s death is too commonplace to merit notice.) (You may want to turn off your computer volume before clicking on the first three links below, as the pages have annoying embedded music.)

“Kill Bush Before He Kills You” reads this 2005 protest banner in Greece.

“Kill Bush” graffiti in Italy, 2004.

More “Kill Bush” graffiti in Italy, 2004.

“Morte ao Bush” (”Death to Bush”) says this very casual Brazilian protester.

Bonus Links

“Press Largely Ignored Incendiary Rhetoric at Bush Protest” is an article recounting a violent protest at a 2002 Bush appearance — including death threats — which was almost entirely ignored by the numerous mainstream media reporters present.

Michelle Malkin has a roundup of a few uninvestigated threatening images about Bush.

Smash Mouth Politics also reposted a few “Kill Bush”-type images that seem to have aroused very little notice when they first appeared.

Gateway Pundit has the story of a video made by a child threatening to kill Bush; it was removed from YouTube, but still can be seen here.

This additional photo on Ringo’s Pictures contains a roundabout semi-threat against Bush. To follow the complicated argument: Bush Sr. said that outing a CIA agent is treason that should be punishable by death; liberals claim that Bush Jr. was ultimately responsible for outing Valerie Plame (a charge that was never proven); therefore Bush Jr. deserves the death penalty. Yes, this is rather vague, which is why I didn’t include it in the main essay.

Also see my previous essay about the ubiquitous comparisons between Bush and Hitler:

Bush as Hitler, Swastika-Mania: A Retrospective

Counter-Examples

There are two different kinds of possible counter-examples which would incrementally weaken my two-pronged contention that a) Protesters threatening Obama are almost always detained or questioned by the police or Secret Service (or at least are widely publicized by the media), and b) Protesters threatening Bush almost always got off scot-free, with no investigation and no media outrage. The first type of counter-example would need to show protesters whose threats to Obama were ignored; and the second type of counter-example would need to show protesters who actually were arrested for threatening Bush.

Let’s look at both types:

Threats to Obama at Protests that Seem to Have Gone Uninvestigated

Obama supporters originally claimed that only Obama gets threatened at protests, and no previous president ever experienced this level of hostility. However, this essay has proven otherwise. In fact, the opposite of their claim is true: It is Bush who got threatened frequently at protests, whereas Obama not nearly so much. Furthermore, just about every overt threat to Obama by protesters seems to be properly followed up by the authorities.

Still, to be as even-handed as possible, I present this section to document threats to Obama at protests which were never investigated by the Secret Service and which were ignored by the media (as were all the threats to Bush documented above). And although I’ve now gone to a great deal of effort trying to track down such examples of ignored Obama threats, I have only found a very very few that qualify — which only serves to further confirm my point.

If you are an Obama supporter who knows of any other examples of death threats to Obama at protests which were ignored, then please post them in the comments section below and I will add them here if they qualify.

This is the one example I could find of what seems to be an actual threat toward Obama which went uninvestigatd by the Secret Service and ignored by the media. The picture can be found on Flickr and was taken at a “tea party” protest in Tucson on July 4. The protester was showing solidarity with the Iranian democracy protesters who were at that time carrying signs that said “Death to the Dictator,” referring to Ahmadinejad. This guy appended the words “Theirs and ours,” a likely reference to Obama, presumably (as being “our dictator”). Even so, Obama is never actually named on the sign, as Bush is in all the exmaples I gave above (”Kill Bush,” etc.).

The only other semi-possible counter-example I’ve been able to find is this sign which appeared in
a Daily Kos report about nasty right-wing protest signs; this one apparently from Sacramento, California. Look at the sign carefully to see how, if you really concentrate, it could sort of be construed as a death threat to Obama. Kinda. Maybe.

But aside from those two signs, I have not been able to find any more solid examples. (Readers are encouraged to post links to any additional examples in the comments section.) Most of the other supposed “threats to the president” really stretch the definition past the breaking point. A few of the stronger examples:

• Abrasive Los Angeles shock-jocks “John & Ken” have been championing a libertarian anti-tax campaign misguidedly dubbed “Heads on Sticks,” the theme of which (unsurprisingly) is to visualize politicians’ heads on sticks as punishment for favoring tax increases. On the John & Ken Website are graphics showing basically everybody’s heads on sticks. But their favorite target is the Republican governor of California, Arnold Schwartzenegger, whom they rail against constantly; at a recent rally in southern California, John & Ken egged on their followers to tear off the head of a cardboard Schwartzenegger stand-up, while other people in the crowd carried around Arnold’s head on a stick. John & Ken also repeatedly insulted the Republican Party, and urge their followers to not donate to Republicans or vote for them.

Why am I mentioning this? Well, at that same rally, people were also carrying other politicians’ head on sticks, among them a young woman who held two heads, one of Obama and the other apparently either of John McCain, George Bush, Joe Biden or Arnold Schwartzenegger — it’s not clear. (And it also looks like the heads were made and handed out by John & Ken staff members, since they were all of a similar design.) This has lead to furious charges from Obama supporters that John & Ken’s followers at the rally were threatening Obama’s life.

Does this count as a threat, equivalent to the threats depicted at the top of this report? I’ll let you decide.

• In 2007, back when Obama was still just a Senator, Ted Nugent said during a show that Obama should suck on his machine gun and included Hillary Clinton in his rant as well. But that’s proably the least offensive thing Ted Nugent has said on stage over last 20 years. Anyway, Obama was not the president nor even the Democratic nominee for president yet, just one of many hopefuls hoping to run for the Democratic Party nomination. Was Nugent’s rant unbelievably stupid, ignorant, hateful and horrible? Certainly. But it doesn’t count as a threat to the president or even to a presidential nominee because it was made in mid-2007.

Please note: Incidents in which perceived threats to Obama were investigated by the Secret Service don’t count as “uninvestigated threats,” so are not relevant to this report. But, for completeness’ sake, here is one of the more well-known ones:

• A woman in Redondo Beach, California put up a tasteless violent Halloween display on her home showing Obama in a horror-movie scene with a meat cleaver stuck in him — but this led to widespread media coverage, protests outside her house, and a visit from the Secret Service.

Threats to Bush at Protests that Were Investigated or Widely Publicized

The other side of the coin is: Threats by protesters against Bush which were investigated by the Secret Service. As with the other type of counter-examples, there seem to have been very very few (if any) examples of this, but the closest one I could find is presented here:

• In 2004, a couple was arrested for trespassing at a Bush appearance in West Virginia; although they claimed that their mildly anti-Bush t-shirts (”Love America, Hate Bush” and “Regime change starts at home”) were the cause of their arrest, the police said the charge was about trespassing, not threatening the President. (The charges were later dropped anyway.) So even if they were removed from the event unfairly, this was not about a death threat, but rather about campaign managers not wanting any protesters in a photo op, as the article mentions. Hence, this doesn’t really count as an arrest of a death-threatener against Bush at a protest, since they neither threatened Bush nor were they accused of threatening Bush.

So — do the counter-examples listed above damage to any significant extent my contention that Obama threats are being pursued more vigorously in general than were Bush threats? I’ll let you come to your own conclusion.

Audio

Columnist and author Mark Steyn, while appearing on the August 20, 2009 Hugh Hewitt radio show, discussed this essay on air. You can hear a short mp3 of the one-minute clip by clicking here (392kb mp3 file) or listen to the full half-hour show here. Here’s a transcript of the interview:

Mark Steyn: “We’ve had people now, since about three month before the Iraq invasion, we’ve had people marching every week through American cities, with signs saying “Kill Bush” — explicit threats to kill Bush. Pictures of Bush with a bullet, a red blood bullet hole through the center of his forehead. Zombietime, the Web site zombietime has just collected dozens and dozens of these pictures from marches of ordinary Americans demanding the execution of their president, that were going on as I said from early 2003 right up to the end of Bush’s term. None of these guys were ever prosecuted. None of these magazines — people made films, there was an award-winning film made about the assassination of the president. Nicholson Baker wrote a novella about the death of Bush, about killing Bush. And nowhere, Newsweek I don’t recall — not that I ever listen to the Newsweek podcast, I think they had it in those days — but I don’t recall anyone in Newsweek expressing concern about films, novellas, and marches explicitly fantasizing over the death of President Bush, week in week out for five years.”

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the following people for help with this report:

Chicken Kiev, Ringo the Gringo, El Marco, Gus 802, horse, iceweasel, Jimmah, kynna, kansas, Last Mohican.

Submissions

Do you have any more photos, links or evidence that you think should be included in this report? Simply post them in the comments section below, and I’ll consider them for possible inclusion when I periodically update this essay.

401 Responses to “Death Threats Against Bush at Protests Ignored for Years”

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1lawhawk on Aug 19, 2009 at 9:24 am:

Urban Infidel has a couple of photo essays from various places around NYC:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/83951787@N00/sets/72157600007667780/show/

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2Anonymous on Aug 19, 2009 at 9:45 am:

Well, the problem is the non hyper partisans remember the deference shown bush until he evaded Iraq.

After 9-11 all but the hyper moon bats got behind bush. Once the Iraq war started killing our troops and the WMD vanished into thin air Bush’s approval stared to tank and the vitriol intensified.

I know once Malkin declared “Death of a President” treasonous most ‘conservatives’ avoided it, however, had you actually watched the movie you would feel foolish including it in your report.

The movie was clearly castigating the extremist rhetoric with a ‘be careful what you wish for” theme loudly echoing throughout.

You posted this on lgf looking for comments so I hope you didn’t expect dittos.

The rage and fury directed at Obama just seven months in rings hollow to moderates and independents. Sure the left called Bush/Hitler, sure the left tried to turn everything Bush did into a scandal. But it is intellectually dishonest on several levels to compare the two situations.

It is also folly to suggest these extremists on the left had any effect on Bush’s popularity or the Democrats ability to win back congress.

BDS began in 2003, the extremists voices plagued the Dems in 2004 and it wasn’t until pelosi put them in a box were the moderates and independents willing to hand over the gavel to the Democrats.

Remember “impeachment is off the table?”
Remember the fury on the left?

Right now articles like this, and the general hostility emanating from the right will repel the very voters we need to retake the house.

Despite moderates and independents having policy issue with the Dems and Obama they will never vote the extremist into power.

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3sjh on Aug 19, 2009 at 10:22 am:

Zombie has once again done a service for all who think critically by pointing up the hypocrisy of the left in an objective, thoughtful and logically unchallengeable manner. Good work.

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4Anonymous on Aug 19, 2009 at 10:35 am:

/It’s good thing none of these people were haters.

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5charles_martel on Aug 19, 2009 at 10:42 am:

I think this is well done and should be released to the public. This is not hostile as the poster above suggests, but it clearly highlights the blatant and pervasive media bias against conservatism. We need more examples of this horrendous bias with evidence, as we have here. I don’t know what can be done about the media’s extreme bias, but we must keep pointing it out again and again.

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6CattusMagnus on Aug 19, 2009 at 10:47 am:

#2 Anonymous,

So wanting to kill Bush is a bit more understandable than wanting to kill Obama?

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7Anonymous on Aug 19, 2009 at 10:54 am:

Honestly, some of your shots look photo shopped.

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8Anonymous on Aug 19, 2009 at 10:57 am:

Thanks for your efforts, zombie. My response to your LGF post is below.

1. Fyi, the piece reads like a blog post, not like a journalist’s report. My writing skills are weak, so I unfortunately I can’t make constructive suggestions.

2. The analogy with rape awareness could use a hyperlink or two.

3. I may be wrong, but doesn’t the Bursey case impinge on the issue of so-called “free speech zones” with which politicians of both parties have tried to limit legitimate dissent?

4. After this is posted/published, why not follow up by writing to the Secret Service and ask why they didn’t investigate? Why not ask the major media why they didn’t report the threats to Bush? You wouldn’t be swamped with replies, but even their absence would be informative.

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9J.S. on Aug 19, 2009 at 11:13 am:

I recall a CNN report about a girl who also received a visit by Secret Service personnel, after she made some remarks about George Bush…I believe the girl was a high school student in California (?). Anyway, iirc, the CNN report seemed to suggest that it was an overblown response by the Secret Service and, basically, uncalled for…

(I did a quick search using a “news” database. There was a German fellow, Czechanowsky, who was deported back to Germany, after emailing a death threat to the President in 2004. Other than that, zip…protesters appear to be immune…maybe it’s due to Free Speech laws?)

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10shortshirft on Aug 19, 2009 at 11:14 am:

This is an excellent report. Does the Secret Service or FBI publish statistics of arrests made and for what crime? The weak part of the article is lack of data on this. You rely on media reports - or lack thereof - of indictments. The same media that was happy to photograph mass protests against Bush (as proof of his unpopularity and the illegitimacy of is election), was probably not as interested in following up arrests unless they could be tied to police-state tactics. Otherwise, the point you make that there should be equal treatment (both by media and security forces) of death threats to any president is excellent, but you will find that it comes up against the idee fixe of the truthiness of Republican evil, and the essential non-violence of leftists.

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11Fenris on Aug 19, 2009 at 11:15 am:

I think that’s “Death to all Posers,” not “Losers.” Same fundamental message, anyway.

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12Dane on Aug 19, 2009 at 11:17 am:

I find pieces like this extremely valuable.

If you can get folks to ask “why was this never shown?” or “why was this reported in such a biased way?” about one specific topic, then they’ll start to look critically at everything in the media.

Good stuff.

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13Anonymous on Aug 19, 2009 at 11:17 am:

Thank you for pulling all of this together, clearly a lot of work and thought went into it. Along the same lines, I was troubled at the time that the Iraqi journalist hurled his shoe at Bush that his detractors took such glee from the event. To your point, if the same thing were to happen now, to Obama, would his supporters, or the world, find it so amusing?

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14Anonymous on Aug 19, 2009 at 11:32 am:

Magnifecent work. Truth will prevail.
LT

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15Anonymous on Aug 19, 2009 at 11:37 am:

Comment #2:
“BDS began in 2003″

BDS began election day 2000. After 9/11 it let up for maybe two whole weeks.

“Intellectually dishonest,” indeed. Your whole comment reeks of it.

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16Fenris on Aug 19, 2009 at 11:41 am:

Just my take, but calling the wanted posters death threats seems like a stretch. The last one posted bears semblance to the otherwise nonthreatening posters you’ll find at a post office.

The one above it seems even more euphemistic: “Do not approach him…act responsibly and contact the nearest police station.” It gives it roughly the same subtlety as the Obama Joker poster.

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17Anonymous on Aug 19, 2009 at 11:49 am:

Great post Zombie. We can also thank Hillary Clinton for getting the BDS ball rolling when she stated “What did he know and when did he know it!”

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18shortshirft on Aug 19, 2009 at 12:15 pm:

Thinking further from my post at #10, and looking at the thread at LGF, I think that in the end this is not security issue, but a media issue. Ultimately what you are saying and demonstrating is that the media is biased. But as you will have noticed from the thread, the need to find more anti-Obama death threats, and the discussion as to what is a death threat, the bias issue is always transformed into the truth issue. “The media reports what is out there. There are more anti-Obama haters than Bush haters.” Most conservatives might be happy with a 50-50 compromise, or your plea for equal treatment, but there are some among them who wish to join the left in seeing a greater threat from the right than the left, both in quality (they have guns!), in quantity (corporate funding and organizing) and in penetration of the populace (brainwashed old people). They have simply internalized the self-contradictory memes of the left - the mob pursuing social justice is entitled to anger and threats (they are revolutionaries!- change!) and that is justified if the goal is peace and non-violence (hope!).
What very few people are saying is that demonstrations against government are in themselves a threat. They are not debates. They are a massing of disgruntled people. A show of force. A gathering of a host. But they are not war. Individuality is not important. Individuals in choosing to go on a demo, have submerged their own nuanced thoughts and opinions in the collective message. They often do not care who is marching beside them (ANSWER banners next to truther banners,” no tax” banners next to gun zealot slogans). The medium is the message. That is why so much of media coverage of demonstrations is necessarily about numbers, not slogans. One might argue that anyone prepared to be part of a mob is not a classic, individual-liberty, conservative . After all, the American revolution was not, unlike the French, a blood-bath for equality, but a war for freedom from a remote tyrant.

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19Ringo the Gringo on Aug 19, 2009 at 2:06 pm:

I love the way the guy in the first picture has no qualms about writing “Kill Bush” on his sign, but is very careful not to use the F-word. There are children at these protests after all.

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20zombie on Aug 19, 2009 at 2:19 pm:

#11 Fenris
“I think that’s “Death to all Posers,” not “Losers.” Same fundamental message, anyway.”

Good catch. Fixed.

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21zombie on Aug 19, 2009 at 2:22 pm:

#16 Fenris
“Just my take, but calling the wanted posters death threats seems like a stretch.”

I realize that — which is why I segregated them off into their own section, at the bottom. Marginal, but still indicative of a trend.

It’s just that if I didn’t include them, I guarantee I’d get a hundred people emailing me to say that I forgot about the “Wanted” posters!

Ya just can’t win.

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22Fenris on Aug 19, 2009 at 2:34 pm:

#21 Zombie

I can see the direction here. Thanks for pointing that out.

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23John on Aug 19, 2009 at 2:44 pm:

Thank you for posting this.

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24MostlyRight on Aug 19, 2009 at 4:15 pm:

Look…angry mobs! (but legit angry mobs, dressed like hippies, anarchists, homeless and children)

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25Phil on Aug 19, 2009 at 5:09 pm:

“Kerry says what can only be interpreted as a threat to kill Bush … ‘Kill the real bird with one stone’”
Well, I kind of interpreted Kerry as not leaving the realm of metaphor.
And thus, all the rest of your post is bunk.
Naah, just kidding. Your research was fantastic, and shame on anyone who might point out one flaw in it, real or imagined, in order to reject the rest.

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26KGB on Aug 19, 2009 at 5:14 pm:

Zombie, with regards to the “One down, TWO to Go!” poster, it’s clearly a reference to the Spanish election held a few days before that photo was shot. Jose Maria Aznar is crossed out, with Bush and Blair to presumably follow. It should probably be removed from this article as there are no violent implications.

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27average_guy on Aug 19, 2009 at 5:20 pm:

#7

They don’t look photoshopped to me.

Sheesh……

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28WaltzingMtilda on Aug 19, 2009 at 5:21 pm:

So, does putting “My Opinion” in tiny little letters at the top of your “Kill Bush” posters (as the protester shown three times does) exempt your death threat from being a death threat? Juuuust curious!

Great post Zombie.

Spread it far and wide, people!

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29Joe on Aug 19, 2009 at 5:46 pm:

Liberals protests always make me think the authorities just released a bunch of inmates from the insane asylum and gave them a bunch of posterboard and markers…

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30Ringo the Gringo on Aug 19, 2009 at 6:19 pm:

#26 KGB

Good call. I was wondering about that one.

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31Longplay on Aug 19, 2009 at 7:01 pm:

“One might argue that anyone prepared to be part of a mob is not a classic, individual-liberty, conservative . After all, the American revolution was not, unlike the French, a blood-bath for equality, but a war for freedom from a remote tyrant.”

First of all, the conservative rallies of recent weeks are not “mobs”, and second, wasn’t there some actually bloodletting done by large groups of people (arnies) in that war for freedom?

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.” Thomas Jefferson

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32Roscoe on Aug 19, 2009 at 7:48 pm:

First link is to an article, with picture, about a local Alameda artist who displayed a picture of Bush with a bloody knife in his head. It is headlined “Patriotic Artist Gets Read the Patriot Act.”

Second link is to an editorial run by the same paper after some people got upset about the first article. It reads in part….

“….In no way are we against the Secret Service doing their job by thoroughly investigating a reported threat against the president’s life or are we against citizens acting on reasonable suspicion and calling the Secret Service. What alarmed us was that the three residents who called in the tips chose to report McDonald to the Secret Service rather than first talk to him. McDonald is not an aggressive man….”

http://alamedasun.com/index.php?Itemid=17&id=1139&option=com_content&task=view

http://alamedasun.com/index.php?Itemid=8&id=1125&option=com_content&task=view

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33zombie on Aug 19, 2009 at 8:06 pm:

#26 KGB
“Zombie, with regards to the “One down, TWO to Go!” poster, it’s clearly a reference to the Spanish election held a few days before that photo was shot. Jose Maria Aznar is crossed out, with Bush and Blair to presumably follow. It should probably be removed from this article as there are no violent implications.”

Ah, you’re probably right. When I update the post, I’ll remove that one (not a bad idea since I have several new ones to add anyway.)

Thanks for noticing that.

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34Anonymous on Aug 19, 2009 at 8:30 pm:

well done and keep up the good work, z. as always, good stuff.

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35Scott on Aug 19, 2009 at 8:59 pm:

You forgot One. Randi Rhodes once commented that President Bush should have been shot just like Fredo in “The Godfather, Part II”. The audio can still be found on Ace of Spades and Cynical Nation.

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36ALLEN on Aug 19, 2009 at 9:10 pm:

“I believe this partly accounts for the 400% increase in reported threats ”

So my question is: What accounts for the other part(s)?

It could be that credible versus not credible protester threats has a lot to do with hippies with placards vs right wingers emptying out gun stores and ammunition and showing up with those guns at health care rallies in Arizona and New Hampshire.
Might be a little more credible a threat and explain another part of that 400% increase. Don’t know for sure.

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37AY on Aug 19, 2009 at 9:17 pm:

Tim Rutten at the LA Times has the vapors again about all the vitriol against Obama. Don’t remember him ever being offended by those suffering from BDS:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rutten19-2009aug19,0,3225096.column

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38Squanto McButterpants on Aug 19, 2009 at 9:29 pm:

Zombie, before working yourself up into an indignant lather, shouldn’t you find out what the guy was actually arrested for? After all, you excuse the arrest of anti-Bush protestors by saying they were actually arrested for trespassing or being disorderly. Maybe this guy was arrested for the same reason.

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39zombie on Aug 19, 2009 at 10:00 pm:

#36 ALLEN
Holy God, will you people stop harping on about these gun incidents? It’s the topic-du-jour in the left-o-sphere, but it’s not what this post is about.

Explain to me how the gun incidents (all two of them) could have been a component in the 400% increase if they happened AFTER the report came out. Hmmm?

More importantly, show me one single link where the people who brought guns to the rallies made overt threats against Obama. You can’t, because they didn’t.

You’re hyperventilating about a couple of incidents in which no threats were made. If you’re interested in that topic, go read a blog post on that topic. This blog post is about a different topic.

Furthermore, to whatever extent you want to draw some kind of connection between the gun incidents and my post, perhaps you should take into account that they only prove my point even more — i.e. that the media obsessively focuses on perceived (or even imagined) threats to Obama, but ignored brutal and overt threats against Bush.

Now that you’ve shot yourself in the foot several times with your own metaphorical gun, please go trolling elsewhere.

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40zombie on Aug 19, 2009 at 10:08 pm:

#38Squanto McButterpants

What guy? What are you talking about? Without a referent, your comment is incomprehensible.

If you perhaps are talking about the guy in the first sentence of the post who was arrested for threatening Obama: Read the articles about him. Lo and behold, he was arrested for threatening Obama! Who could have guessed?

If these random, off-topic, flailing and pointless pseudo-objections are the best my detractors can come up with, then I feel more confident that my post has hit home. Thank you for restoring my conviction in the unassailability of my post with your impotent attempt at a rebuttal.

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41Squanto McButterpants on Aug 19, 2009 at 10:50 pm:

Zombie, stop playing dumb — you know exactly what I’m talking about.

There are numerous examples of protestors with anti-Bush signs being arrested. You explain these away by saying that they were actually arrested for something else, such as trespassing or disorderly conduct.

I was pointing out that the man that leads off your story might have been arrested not for the anti-Obama sign, but for some other kind of behavior, making this the same kind of case as the ones you described during the Bush years. That observation is only “off-topic” if you wish to apply a nakedly partisan double standard to these stories.

Oh wait, it gets worse.

“Lo and behold,” according to the Secret Service the anti-Obama protestor was never actually arrested:

http://your4state.com/content/fulltext/?cid=75771
http://www.herald-mail.com/?cmd=displaystory&story_id=228604&format=html

How embarrassing for you.

Ever since Obama was elected you’ve given up all pretense of citizen journalism, and are rapidly becoming just another run of the mill partisan hack. The fact that you break out the thesaurus to venomously insult me and crow about “hitting home” rather than double-check your facts demonstrates that you’re becoming as loony as the people you used to mock.

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42gambolputty on Aug 19, 2009 at 11:14 pm:

A link to a pre-presidential effigy story/photo - mild in comparison to some of the photos you’ve posted. When this happened (in my neck o’ the woods) people were very offended, even though it was halloween.

http://laist.com/2008/10/30/obama_effigy_found_in_redondo_beach.php
and a more in depth story (w/ pics)
http://www.dailybreeze.com/ci_10851853

She even got a visit from the Secret Service. But not arrested.

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43gambolputty on Aug 19, 2009 at 11:27 pm:

Oh, there were two students expelled from the U of Kentucky for hanging an Obama effigy…they were arrested and charged w/ several crimes.

Another lesson learned.

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44ALLEN on Aug 19, 2009 at 11:29 pm:

Wrong Zombie, considering the point that you aren’t referencing or citing any of your data, I’ll just consider you point what it is, an opinion. You’ve got several photos of threatening language but you have no data or proof of the level of investigation that the Secret Service may have employed. The threatening language is not protected speech when used against anyone, be they President or not. I would opine, since that is all you seem to be doing , that the Patriot Act used during the Hay-day’s of the Bush years brought a lot more survellance, questioning, and arrest than what your opinion can provide for us at this moment.
Obviously Zombie you weren’t paying attention to the fact the record gun sales began BEFORE Obama was elected. The argument was that the Marxist was going to suspend their Second Amendment rights. Funny how he is either a fascist or a marxist, rather tan a conservative or a liberal, the latter two terms seemed to be reserved to define “White “politicians only.
Brandon Mayfield, arrested as a terrorist and spied on after a false fingerprint reading in the Madrid bombing and attorney Lynne Stewart , tried for aiding and abetting a terrorist after she read her clients statement to the press. These people didn’t even threaten the president and lokk what happened to them. But according to your article we are to believe that nobody did anything about threatening President Bush. Not believable Zombie.
The media has covered the political opponents in what appears to be a fair way. They are looking for dissent, not yes men or women. they covered Bush dissenter and now they are covering Obama dissenters. All’s fair in the world of politics, and Obama has to take his licks, but your right wing loony tunes aren’t that far removed from the left wing ones.

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45Le Jacquelope of Literotica on Aug 19, 2009 at 11:49 pm:

The fairly huge differences between all the death threats made at Bush during protests and what is going on now are as follows:

1) Liberals aren’t nearly as well known for violence as Conservatives. Compare Earth First!’s body count against that of the Ku Klux Klan or abortion clinic bombers… and let’s not even get into Timothy McVeigh.

2) How many of those pictures of death threat mongering Liberals did you see where they carried firearms to the protest?

History says that Right Wingers have a higher tendency of acting out their rage than Liberals do.

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46Iceman on Aug 20, 2009 at 12:01 am:

Bush and Cheney are/were just too powerful. The police and Secret Service knew no one could actually get close enough to do it :(.

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47Pork Soda on Aug 20, 2009 at 12:20 am:

“History says that Right Wingers have a higher tendency of acting out their rage than Liberals do.”

Um… Symbionese Liberation Army, The Weathermen, The Black Panthers and countless other splinter leftist guerrilla organizations of the 70s and 80s? Ya wanna go down that road too?

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48Pork Soda on Aug 20, 2009 at 12:25 am:

Oh ya. Let’s not forget Jim Jones, who was the darling of the political left in San Francisco for quite some time.

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49Sean on Aug 20, 2009 at 1:09 am:

Gotta love the ‘tolerant’ Left! Of course, it’s only okay to fantasize about killing the President if he’s George W. Bush, or as some on the Left so subtly put it, ‘Bushitler,’ but the law only applies when it’s a Democrat being “threatened.” Yep, no double standards there.
and Jacquelope, I hate to break it to you, but the KKK was not remotely close to being a conservative organization, abortion clinic bombers are raving lunatics to begin with, and Timothy McVeigh was a fly on the windscreen who clearly had some deep-rooted mental stability issues. There is nothing conservative about blowing up abortion clinics or federal buildings. Get acquainted with the ideology and then see if your point can be logically pursued.
also, your throwaway line about “right-wingers acting out their rage more than liberals do” is nonsense. The French Revolution was very liberal, as were Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. I’m no expert with numbers, but I’m fairly certain that all of those guys killed a lot more people than “right-wingers” ever did or will.

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50John on Aug 20, 2009 at 2:07 am:

Just shows how paranoid the left is.

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51Chuang Tzu on Aug 20, 2009 at 2:36 am:

Bringing guns or calling for a President’s violent overthrow… Both the LEFT and the RIGHT seem to have embraced political theater.

These “kill Bush” and the “water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants”-types are wannabes. Walter Mittys thinking their Thomas Paine or John Jay. Waiting for “sic semper tyrannis” to make a comeback.

When you’re too lazy to arm yourself with facts and effectively counter every mis-statement the other side makes, you should just double-up on your indignation, moral outrage, and volume.

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52Anonymous on Aug 20, 2009 at 3:53 am:

Report? The Secret Service say that death threats are up — which is something different than idiots holding signs. At any rate, what you’re really proving is how the Right Wing media shielded Bush’s image while cheer leading for war while it now attacks Obama every chance they get.

The Hateful Right and their media surrogates are dragging this nation down — and it’s clear to me that’s not going to ‘change’ no matter who is president.

You really need to loosen the rubber bands on your tin foil hat wingnuts. It’s cutting off the circulation to your hateful distorted brains.

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53Barbara on Aug 20, 2009 at 4:04 am:

According to an article by James Bovard in The American Conservative (December 15, 2003) by 2003 several people had been arrested while protesting President Bush.

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2003/dec/15/00012/

I assume more arrests were made after 2003. In most arrests, individuals with anti-Bush signs (Sample: “The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us.”) were not allowed to be anywhere the President might see them and were told to remove themselves and go to “free speech zones” some distance away. Anyone who refused to leave was arrested for disorderly conduct. People with pro-Bush signs were not treated this way and didn’t have to be sequestered in “free speech zones.”

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54Tonus on Aug 20, 2009 at 4:28 am:

““Lo and behold,” according to the Secret Service the anti-Obama protestor was never actually arrested:”

You’re right, he was detained by sherrif’s deputies and questioned by Secret Service agents, and the SS promised a follow-up investigation. This is reasonable and expected at a minimum– that someone who makes a direct or implied threat towards the President should be questioned and investigated. Something that, apparently, had not been done at the many rallies that Zombie pointed out.

Nitpicking over whether or not he was arrested misses the point– in spite of the fact that he wasn’t arrested, he’s gotten coverage and attention and been detained, questioned, and is being investigated. Something that didn’t seem to happen very often in the previous eight years, in spite of the evidence shown in the photos displayed here. Why wasn’t the mainstream media giving this more coverage at the time? Why weren’t concerned citizens reporting these signs for investigation?

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55Anonymous on Aug 20, 2009 at 4:56 am:

@52 Mr. Johnson?

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56Anonymous on Aug 20, 2009 at 5:13 am:

Plenty of Bush death fantasies still archived over at the crazed hatefest of Dkos. Like this thread: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/29/285344/-Saddam-Executed

Just search a few relevant terms like executed, die, kill, Hitler. Also find Kos’s huge thread on favorite nicknames for GWB, which contains a sampling of the nutroots’ favorite images, including several “Bush as Joker” images.

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57yves on Aug 20, 2009 at 5:48 am:

Extreme? Yes

All presidents go through this hate mongering.

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58jummy on Aug 20, 2009 at 6:04 am:

The lefty troll reactions to this essay have been predictably dishonest.

for instance, allen, with this:

“Funny how he is either a fascist or a marxist, rather tan a conservative or a liberal, the latter two terms seemed to be reserved to define “White “politicians only.”

…which shows how thin progressives are willing to spread their rhetoric of “your a racits!!!on4@”

Off the top of my head I could mention the mock protest group, “Communists for Kerry”, which continues on as a rather good satire site called the Red Cube. I guess John Kerry is black by ALLEN’s reconing.

Maybe Bush too, as a perusal of Zombie’s Bush=Hitler gallery would demonstrate.

But I can only assume ALLEN is there too saying, “but Bush WAS Hitler!!”

A staple claim of the “but Bush WAS Hitler” defense of progressives’ abject hypocrisy now that they consider all dissent to be un-american, treasonous and tantamount to terrorism was reitterated in the very second comment here.

The claim is that everybody loved Bush until 2003, and this of course is a lie.

I want you to consider how terrifying it would be if on inauguration day, 2009, rightwingers had organized a massive protest in the streets of DC, to protest against the prospect of the president elect even taking the oath of office. what if these rightwingers riotted and set fires in the streets and clashed with police, tearing down barricades, trying to get at the president? What if the main event for the protest was to line the motorcade route to throw eggs at the President elect’s limo?

Of course, “rightwingers” did nothing of the kind and I’m describing how the progressive left chose to spend 1/1/2001 in our nation’s capital. The “heroism” of this display of splenetic derangement was memorialized in Michael Moore’s propaganda film, Fahrenheit 911, which was adopted later by the DNC as an official campaign device.

Of course by that time, progressives had fully embraced all of the features of their antipluralistic, anti-Bush derangement. No progressive to this day accepts the legitimacy of Bush’s election to office, based largely on flipped-out conspiracy theories about rigged electronic voting machines. Bush was already being called a “murderer” in reference to a hate crime which had occurred in his state. Bush was already a nazi, a dry drunk, etc. the recession he inherited from Clinton was said to have been caused by him. The whole nine.

This goes hand in hand with the myth that progressives loved him in the interim between the 911 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, supporting the invasion of Afghanistan full-throatedly in between. Of course this is also a lie. The lead coalitions which protested the Iraq war, International ANSWER and the RCP’s WORLD CANT WAIT’s predecessor, Not In Our Name, were formed on september 12th, 2001 and their first demonstration was held less than a week later. The first “911 was an inside job” showed up a couple of weeks later, and by the time U.S. troops actually hit the ground three months later, the leftwing mainstream media had already had in place their narrative about Bush’s “rush to war” and U.S. troops’ inevitable defeat in the frigid mountainscape of Afghanistan. Progressives were already spreading bogus “war crimes” stories about talibanis being suffocated in oil drums.

Now it is clear from polling that progressives have decided that afghanistan should never have been fought and that it is the least important issue for them, in stark relief from their Bush era rhetoric that “of course” progressives regard Afghanistan as the only war worth fighting and that the invasion of Iraq is a dangerous distraction from that important fight. The fact of the matter is that progressives opposed the any response to the 911 attacks - some because they do in fact hate the U.S., but most because they hated the party of the president in office - and the only reason they ever pretended to support the Afghanistan invasion was as a rhetorical lever in their poisonous agenda to undermine the U.S. President in Iraq.

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59Starless on Aug 20, 2009 at 6:31 am:

#58 jummy

You left out the group which perpetually believes that “War is Unhealthy for Children and Other Living Things” no matter what the circumstances.

#47 & #48 Pork Soda (may Les Claypool’s crazy bass stylings live on forever)

There’s the more recent example of the anti-WTO protests with accompanying running battles with police.

It’s all part-and-parcel, though. Whether you’re talking about actual violence, death threats, or the Bush=Hitler v. Obama=Hitler issue, according to the way the MSM portrays it, when leftists are the perpetrators, they are expressing justifiable moral outrage, when anyone else is the perpetrator, they are assumed to be conservatives expressing hate and racism. Be perceived as a conservative and hold a sign which says, “If you raise my taxes to pay for a dubious healthcare plan, I won’t vote for you,” you are not a concerned citizen, you are a foaming extremist who hates minorities and the poor. Just ask Janeane Garofalo.

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60Anonymous on Aug 20, 2009 at 6:48 am:

Let me get this straight, your party leaders (from the Republican party) call Obama, “Hitler” or “Nazi” all the time — that’s unconscionable — there is no behavior like that from the other side of the political spectrum.

Without baseless, scare tactics there is no Republican party.

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61Ringo the Gringo on Aug 20, 2009 at 9:11 am:

Anonymous,
“Let me get this straight, your party leaders (from the Republican party) call Obama, “Hitler” or “Nazi” all the time…”
————————————————————————————–

Really?…I’d love it if you’d provide us with a few examples of Republican Party leaders calling President Obama a Nazi or Hitler. It should be easy, if they do it all the time.

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62jummy on Aug 20, 2009 at 9:17 am:

goodness, i missed a couple of deceits in #2 anonymous’s post.

pelosi never put the leftwing crazies “in a box”. when code pink would disrupt her speaking engagements, she would actually court their approval and cooperation while praising their enthusiasm.

http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2009/08/10/pelosi-finds-dissent-un-american-now/

second, the theme of Death of a President was not, as you misstated it, “…clearly castigating [of] the extremist rhetoric…”

the plot and theme was that, though bush deserves killing, the likely outcome of a successful assassination attempt would be that the arch nazi, cheny would step up and be even more evil than bush.

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63Horse on Aug 20, 2009 at 9:18 am:

Squanto McButterpants on Aug 19, 2009 at 10:50 pm: “There are numerous examples of protestors with anti-Bush signs being arrested.”

Please link the numerous examples. It would be great to read about and understand it better.

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64dee on Aug 20, 2009 at 9:36 am:

Where are the guns at these rallies?

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65zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 9:46 am:

#41 Squanto McButterpants:

” “Lo and behold,” according to the Secret Service the anti-Obama protestor was never actually arrested:

http://your4state.com/content/fulltext/?cid=75771
http://www.herald-mail.com/?cmd=displaystory&story_id=228604&format=html

How embarrassing for you.”

Actually, those articles confirm most of what I claimed — that the Secret Service is following up on the investigation, and are likely to charge him, and that he was brought in for questioning because of his sign, not because of his behavior.

But yes, it says in this version that he was “detained,” rather than “arrested” as an earlier article stated. I have now corrected my original sentence to say “detained.” Which neutralizes your criticism. So, it’s not embarrassing for me at all. Thanks for pointing out the minor correction. I have fixed that one word.

As for your claim, “There are numerous examples of protestors with anti-Bush signs being arrested.” Please provide links! (Beyond the ones I already linked to.) Thanks.

If you think I’m a “run of the mill partisan hack,” then you are free to read other blogs. No one is forcing you to hang around here. There are plenty of blogs that I don’t like –and I deal with that by simply not reading them. What a novel idea!

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66zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 9:52 am:

#44 ALLEN:

Yawn.

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67jummy on Aug 20, 2009 at 9:56 am:

64dee on Aug 20, 2009 at 9:36 am

when bush was in office, progressives would bring their guns up to the whitehouse and fire through the gate at the oval office.

59Starless on Aug 20, 2009 at 6:31 am:

i don’t know which group you mean. i know that there’s no such thing as a leftwing “pacifist”. progressives’ reconning of the morality of war was laid out a long time ago. marx defined “peace” as “the absence of opposition to socialism” and this is what “peace” protesters mean when they identify with the term; war against non-socialists.

that is how they resolve the apparent contradiction between marching for “peace” wearing che shirts and waving hezzbolah flags. they mean that the “hegemon” should be peaceful while the “counter-hegemon” kills who they need to kill.

similarly, the hypocrisy in their phony outrage over townhall protests is resolved by doctrinal assertion. lenin said of communism’s permanent “revolution”: “Of all the wars known in history it is the only lawful, rightful, just, and truly great war… in Russia this war has been declared and begun.”

their double standard toward dissent in the current era is based on a similar unprincipled exception.

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68zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 10:06 am:

#45 Le Jacquelope of Literotica:

The fairly huge differences between all the death threats made at Bush during protests and what is going on now are as follows:

1) Liberals aren’t nearly as well known for violence as Conservatives. Compare Earth First!’s body count against that of the Ku Klux Klan or abortion clinic bombers… and let’s not even get into Timothy McVeigh.

2) How many of those pictures of death threat mongering Liberals did you see where they carried firearms to the protest?

History says that Right Wingers have a higher tendency of acting out their rage than Liberals do.

Your argument fails on several levels.

1) The Ku Klux Klan are not a “conservative” group, they’re a bunch of demented racist revolutionaries. If the Ku Klux Klan is “conservative,” then the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers and Bolsheviks are “liberal.” Absurd comparison. If you want to go down that road, the body count of “liberals” is higher than that of “conservatives.” You’re operating in stereotype-land.

2) How many pictures are there of people who carried firearms to a protest while holding signs that threatened Obama? Answer: None.

Which of these counts as a threat: Someone making a threat; or someone not making a threat, but carrying a gun while not making a threat?

The law says: Threatening the president is a crime, whether or not you are at that moment carrying a gun. The people threatening Bush needed to have been arrested — and weren’t. (And before you claim they were: Show me a single scrap of evidence that anyone depicted in the pictures above was ever arrested or questioned by the Secret Service.)

Your argument boils down to: “Liberals are nice and wonderful loving people, so when they make a death threat, it doesn’t really count. Conservatives are inherently dangerous violent maniacs, so we can simply assume they’re making threats, even when they aren’t actually making threats.” Nice.

Rant all you want on irrelevant side-topics: Nothing you say will make the pictures of people threatening Bush go away. They speak for themselves.

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69AtheistConservative on Aug 20, 2009 at 10:07 am:

There are two replies the left-wing nutroots will leave to this. Understand that these are irrational people, so they don’t have much to work with:

1. Wanting to kill Bush was ‘justifiable’ because of Iraq/9-11/Halliburton whatever. Disregarding the stupidity of this claim, most of them don’t seem to realize that Bush was violently protested his first year in office, before any of this happened.
2. The threats against Obama are ‘more real’ - the people in these pictures were ‘obviously not going to go through with it’ and ‘were no real threat’. Meanwhile, two isolated cases of people with legal carry permits and permission to demonstrate being in public with guns ’scares them to death’ and ‘are clearly a cause for concern’.

That’s how lefties think: everything they do is justifiable and reasonable, everything done by a Conservative (or by a leftie, as in the LaRouche situation, but which they can dishonestly pin on Conservatives) is evil.

And the lefties will never change.

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70zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 10:16 am:

“53 Barbara

According to an article by James Bovard in The American Conservative (December 15, 2003) by 2003 several people had been arrested while protesting President Bush.

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2003/dec/15/00012/

I assume more arrests were made after 2003. In most arrests, individuals with anti-Bush signs (Sample: “The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us.”) were not allowed to be anywhere the President might see them and were told to remove themselves and go to “free speech zones” some distance away. Anyone who refused to leave was arrested for disorderly conduct. People with pro-Bush signs were not treated this way and didn’t have to be sequestered in “free speech zones.”

Again, that is irrelevant to this essay. None of those people were arrested for threatening the President, and none of them were carrying death threat signs.

We may not like the existence of “Free Speech zones” that various police departments have set up, and some people may get arrested purposely challenging the “Free Speech zone” laws, but that is a different topic from people actually threatening the president.

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71obloodyhell on Aug 20, 2009 at 10:29 am:

Sorry, I disagree with you vehemently on this — saying “Death to xxx” is not the same as making an overt death threat against someone, and I believe this has been held up in court. For someone to arrest this man for having carried such a sign is likely a violation of his civil rights, and he should sue whatever people did it.

“I will kill you” is a death threat.

“Someone should kill you” is not.

“Death to xxx” is a form of the latter, not the former.

While I don’t really support “Death to xxx” made against either Bush or Obama, they are still free speech. Saying that you believe someone should die in a just world is not the same as expressing an intention to make it so, and it is the intention to act which is illegal.

Any other interpretation leads to prosecution for thought crimes.

And, fwiw, I am **very much** opposed to Obama and **everything** he stands for.
.

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72CattusMagnus on Aug 20, 2009 at 10:31 am:

#47 & 48 Pork Soda,

You forgot ALF and ELF.

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73Philster on Aug 20, 2009 at 10:34 am:

The media is not “liberal,” in the American slang sense of the term- i.e. socialist or statist. The media is “Democratic,” as in the Democratic party. They only care about partisanship, not ideology. If a Democratic President came out in favor of all the things that Bush did in the War on Terror, they would be cheering for that Democratic politician. For proof, just look at how they treat the guy who adopted all of Bush’s positions on the war- Barrack Obama.

P.S.- Obama’s not going to close Gitmo; he might move it to a new location, but he won’t close it.

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74zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 10:40 am:

#7 1obloodyhell

I think the courts strongly disagree with you. Many many people over many presidential administrations have been arrested and convicted for threatening the president for expressing all sorts of statements along the lines of “Kill President X” or “Death to President Y” or “I call for President Z to be killed.”

Very very very few people are so crazy as to stand in front of the White House holding a sign that says, “I AM GOING TO KILL THE PRESIDENT!” It is almost always expressed in a semi-passive way. And that is sufficient to be counted as a threat. Otherwise, threateners would just play various word games to get out of being charged under the United States Code. Under your criteria, calling up the White House and saying, “I’m on my way to blow up the White House with a truck bomb, but I got stuck in traffic, so I’ve decided to call the the whole thing off for today. Maybe later, maybe not — who knows? Just wanted to let you know that the assassination attempt is definitely not going to happen today.” Under your scenario, prosecuting this guy for threatening the President would count as “prosecution for thought crimes” since he didn’t actually do anything and instead kindly announced he wasn’t going to kill anyone at all today.

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75obloodyhell on Aug 20, 2009 at 10:42 am:

1) ——
Sorry, I disagree with you vehemently on this — saying “Death to xxx” is not the same as making an overt death threat against someone, and I believe this has been held up in court. For someone to arrest this man for having carried such a sign is likely a violation of his civil rights, and he should sue whatever people did it.

“I will kill you” is a death threat.

“Someone should kill you” is not.

“Death to xxx” is a form of the latter, not the former.

While I don’t really support “Death to xxx” made against either Bush or Obama, they are still free speech. Saying that you believe someone should die in a just world is not the same as expressing an intention to make it so, and it is the intention to act which is illegal.

Any other interpretation leads to prosecution for thought crimes.

And, fwiw, I am **very much** opposed to Obama and **everything** he stands for.

2) ——-
>> “I believe this partly accounts for the 400% increase in reported threats against Obama over those against President Bush.”

You know, I have YET to see this from a reliable source.

People should stop quoting some friggin’ liberal/leftist UK rag sheet’s quote of a claim from a BOOK AUTHOR as though it were fact. That’s not only not a reliable source, it’s not even a reliable source for a source.

I sincerely doubt if *credible* threats against Obama have gone up substantially vs. those against Bush — there are far more outright loons on the Left than there are racist loons on the right. And I sincerely doubt if threats in general have gone up substantially, either. As you yourself note, there was hardly a shortage of people making even direct threats (like that in your “I’m here to kill Bush” picture, which IS a threat and SHOULD be prosecuted) against Bush, and, while there’s a lot of ire against Obama, I hear very little which attacks him personally as opposed to someone abusing the office of PotUS.

.

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76obloodyhell on Aug 20, 2009 at 10:48 am:

> I think the courts strongly disagree with you. Many many people over many presidential administrations have been arrested and convicted

1) Cite some examples, not your beliefs to the contrary, please.

2) If you can show me a person who has been arrested and convicted for doing the same to some “lesser person”, then I’ll grant that the actions of the court/DoJ are constitutional. The PotUS is not some special personage — a king or pope or whatever, who gets special privilege in this nation, and forgetting that is one of the problems with this nation.

He needs additional protection, yes, but only directly as would be given/required for any person of importance, weath, or other note. He should not have special laws making actions against him any different from actions against any other citizen. To do otherwise is to take the first step towards the dissolution of our democracy, and the establishment of an imperial “presidency” in name only.

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77obloodyhell on Aug 20, 2009 at 10:58 am:

> In another case, a woman with a t-shirt that read “President Bush You Killed My Son” was removed from a speech being given by Laura Bush. But once again, it was not her message which got her arrested, but the fact that she disrupted the speech and refused to leave when asked — leading to a charge of trespassing.

This, too, is wrong. It is one thing to claim that someone with a placard, which clearly obstructs the view of others, should be moved out of such a location (though they should certainly be relocated with that sole complaint in mind — such as to a back corner of the room, not to a field two blocks away).

It is quite another to claim that someone making a silent statement of protest via their clothing, which in no way interferes with the event or someone else’s experience of it (in terms of their ability to hear/see what is occurring) should be silenced or marginalized.

Suppose an anti-Obama group manages to associate its opposition to Obama with a certain specific color? Shall we then allow them to remove people for wearing a color!?!?

Preposteerous.

This activity is WRONG. It is no better than what the Left wants to do to its opponents, which is to silnce any opposition or dissenting views. That it’s a bit more polite about it does not make it remotely defensible. It is one thing to prevent interference with speech (including the obstruction of view using placards).

It’s quite another to prevent silent expressions of dissent.

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78zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 11:00 am:

#75 & 76obloodyhell:

OK, then how about this: To test your theory, make a sign that says “Kill Obama” and go stand in the crowd at his next public appearance.

After you’re arrested and jailed and charged with threatening the president, you can counter-sue and be confident that you’ll win the case!

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79Pork Soda on Aug 20, 2009 at 11:04 am:

CattusMagnus on Aug 20, 2009 at 10:31 am:

#47 & 48 Pork Soda,

You forgot ALF and ELF.

Very true, but I was going for the most low hangin’ fruit w/ obvious body counts. This back ‘n’ forth pissing match with leftistas can get mind numbing after a while.

My take on the Arizona gun thing; Legal yes. Friggin’ stupid to the nth degree however from a pr standpoint. I understand the sentiment but abhor the adolescent and potentially dangerous display. Even if this was a rally for, (insert your favorite conservative public figure here.) showing up w/ guns in full view is “A vulgar display of power”.

Nazi comparisons: Drove me absolutely frothing batshite when used so cavalierly by the left. The most prominent Obama/Hitler samplings used by the media to attack the townhall protesters, that I have seen, have been generated mostly by the cuckoo for cocoa puffs, Lyndon LaDouche bags. I do not wanna see “my side” pick up where the leftosphere left off in watering down the evil of the Nazis, even if it does provide me w/ a little indulgent schadenfreude political fix.

Oh and Primus sucks! (wink, wink!)

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80Mike H on Aug 20, 2009 at 11:05 am:

Thank you for this compelation … sort of puts things into perspective.

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81Fenris on Aug 20, 2009 at 11:07 am:

#72

Technically, they didn’t kill anyone, but their affiliates in the UK came close.

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82obloodyhell on Aug 20, 2009 at 11:10 am:

> the lines of “Kill President X” or “Death to President Y” or “I call for President Z to be killed.” —- Very very very few people are so crazy as to stand in front of the White House holding a sign that says, “I AM GOING TO KILL THE PRESIDENT!”

You draw a defective connection here, both apparently in general and certainly in terms of what I say —

“I am going to kill the president!” is a direct, inarguable threat.

I do not defend anyone making this claim.

“The president should die a horrible death!” is not a threat, it’s an expression of opinion. “The president should just die!” is also an expression of opinion. It is not a threat, and, were it made against the average person, would have little or no significance in terms of being taken as an intent to act. The courts, when dealing with regular citizens, recognize that the dividing line is the intent to act. You can say anything you want to — but the moment you show intent to act — the action of laying out a serious plan to others, and the obtainment of requisite elements to execute said plan (a truck, say, or a gun) then you have committed a crime. “I wish my wife would get killed in some robbery attempt” is not a threat against your wife, no matter how evident it may be of serious marital problems.

What, you have never, ever said to anyone “Why don’t you just drop dead?” If you have not, well, regardless of that, such an utterance is made millions of times a year and no arrests, or even statements to the police, get made about such utterances. “Death to the president” — especially in a venue where the president is not scheduled to be — is not a credible threat nor a sign of intent to act.

If any laws exist which make a special case of the status of the presidency, then those laws are flat out wrongheaded and should be invalidated.

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83Fenris on Aug 20, 2009 at 11:13 am:

Looking through these comments, both sides have fallen into the very trap, Zombie warned about in his essay: This is not some wrongheaded attempt at a tu quoque logical fallacy; in other words, I’m not trying to claim that death threats against Bush in the past justify threats against Obama now.

This has essentially turned into a game of Count the Bodies, in which whoever killed or arrested fewer people wins. Kinda defeats the point of the essay.

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84Pork Soda on Aug 20, 2009 at 11:32 am:

Fenris on Aug 20, 2009 at 11:13 am:

This has essentially turned into a game of Count the Bodies, in which whoever killed or arrested fewer people wins. Kinda defeats the point of the essay.

Yup!

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85jummy on Aug 20, 2009 at 11:40 am:

nope.

this is and always has been an expose of progressives’ hypocrisy.

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86Anonymous on Aug 20, 2009 at 11:42 am:

Please everyone copy and paste this page to

hardball@msnbc.com

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87zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 12:31 pm:

#82 obloodyhell

OK, then make two signs that say “Obama should die a horrible death!” and “Obama should just die!” and take them to the next Obama appearance. See what happens. You can then counter-sue, take it to the Supreme Court, and win!

And yes, there is a special law in the United States Code specifically protecting the president from threats. I link to it at the top of this page:

Threats against President and successors to the Presidency

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88George Bruce on Aug 20, 2009 at 12:32 pm:

Good work Zombie, but it is totally wasted on anyone left of center.

“Before we can have a rational discussion on this topic, we need to have a shared factual basis.”

You CAN NEVER HAVE A SHARED FACTUAL BASIS with leftists. They will always DENY your facts, and make up new ones that are more suited for their purpose. It is never about truth. It is always about getter power through any means necessary.

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89John on Aug 20, 2009 at 12:35 pm:

I keep trying to figure out zombie’s point. It does seem to change a bit. As I read the original essay, his point SEEMED to be that the Secret Service is doing a good job, but that the media is making the Secret Service aware of the death threats. There would seem to be two possible ways that this could be happening, if we assume that zombie is correct that the Secret Service finds out about death threats through the media. Either 1) the media calls the Secret Service and tells them or 2) the Secret Service is watching the news to find out who is carrying signs at various rallies where the President is present.

If zombie’s point is that the media is calling the Secret Service to stir things up, I would like to see some evidence of the suggestion.

If zombie’s point is that the Secret Service is watching the news to find out about these things, then I would question his sincerity in saying that the Secret Service is doing a good job. It also calls into question who is being defined as the media. Were the Bush protesters not covered by the media? Did not at least Fox refer to such protests and point out the crazies? Perhaps zombie’s argument is that the Secret Service doesn’t have cable due to their limited resources.

One aspect that is NOT mentioned about these incidents is the location of the President when the protests are being made. It does seem quite different to be carrying a sign protesting and seeming to make a threat to the President when the President is in Washington, DC and the protester is in San Francisco. It seems to be a bit of a more credible threat when you are in the same city or standing outside an event where the President will be.

The other problem with zombie’s analysis is that he only has ONE example of a protester being arrested for a death threat made against Obama. Other commenters have pointed out that people were arrested outside of Bush events. zombie claims that they were arrested for other reasons. As other posters noted, the people with pro-Bush signs were allowed to stay. It seems less than credible to suggest that the content of the sign was NOT the reason for the arrest at that point. To re-phrase zombie’s key question: Were any Bush supporters ever arrested or questioned at a Bush protest? If the issue was non the content of the signs, surely zombie can provide examples of people who were arrested while supporting Bush in such locations.

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90John on Aug 20, 2009 at 12:40 pm:

#88 George Bruce–
The issue of some protesters from both sides being jerks is not disputed by most. The notions that zombie presents that follow from that is what is questionable. Take out the pictures from the essay and what is his point? Ask yourself how he PROVES his fundamental claims about 1) media bias and 2) Secret Service arrests of protesters.
The piece does a good job of identifying some anti-Bush signs that are certainly in poor taste and quite possibly illegal. The rest of the essay is where it falls apart.

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91zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 12:41 pm:

#83 Fenris

Looking through these comments, both sides have fallen into the very trap, Zombie warned about in his essay: This is not some wrongheaded attempt at a tu quoque logical fallacy; in other words, I’m not trying to claim that death threats against Bush in the past justify threats against Obama now.

This has essentially turned into a game of Count the Bodies, in which whoever killed or arrested fewer people wins. Kinda defeats the point of the essay.

Couldn’t agree more. It’s a veritable tu quoque fiesta!

But to be honest, I fully expected it. What other response can the Left possibly have to this report?

Before I published this, they absolutely owned the field, claiming that Obama was being uniquely targeted, whereas under Bush we lived in a police state. I completely turned the table on them, and inverted the argument 180 degrees, showing the exact opposite is true.

Now, instead of taking victory laps, the Left is suddenly back to playing defense; and since the charge against them is unassailable, all they can do is resort to the ol’ “Yeah? Well you did it too!” argument. Which is precisely the trap I wanted them to fall into. Then there are counter-responses of “Well, you did it more!” and so on. But the end result is, they no longer control the narrative.

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92zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 12:54 pm:

#89 John

Your argument seems to be chasing its tail in ever tighter circles.

I’m saying that the Secret Service almost certainly doesn’t have a political bias: They undoubtedly pursue every threat they find out about, against any president. The question then becomes: Why were all these threats to Bush ignored? My only reasonable answer is that they simply were never aware of them.

But then: why do they seem to be pursuing every possible threat against Obama, some of which seem much less overt than the ones shown here against Bush? The answer being: Because now they’re aware of them. But why are they more aware of threats now than before? Again, it seems to me that a very likely reason is that the media is now focusing on threats more and publicizing them, so the Secret Service finds out about more of them.

(And no, the MSM did NOT publicize any of the anti-Bush the threats I shown on this page — not even Fox.)

If you don’t like the framing I do in my introduction, you are free to ignore it and draw your own opinions from the photos.

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93John on Aug 20, 2009 at 1:13 pm:

zombie,
I can’t tell which tail you are chasing.
You have evidence of ONE arrest of an anti-Obama protester. ONE is not the same as “every possible threat.”
The story you link to indicates that the sheriff’s office turned the case over to the Secret Service. The sheriff’s office claims to have been getting calls from people at the event.
I would certainly give you that liberals are probably more scared of the right-wing being violent than conservatives are of the left-wing being violent. That could explain the phone calls from people at the event to the sherriff. Another possible explanation would be that the people at this particular event know the law better than people at a Bush event. However, based on the articles you cite, there is NO reason to believe that the media is calling the Secret Service or that the Secret Service is relying on the media for its information.

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94Squanto McButterpants on Aug 20, 2009 at 1:16 pm:

Zombie, thanks for confirming that this story is much ado about nothing.

You’ve got one example of an anti-Obama protestor being detained (not even arrested). This link reveals the man wasn’t just quietly holding a sign, but was also engaged in shouting matches with passerby:

http://washingtonindependent.com/55049/a-readers-encounter-with-the-death-to-obama-protester

Maybe it was his disorderly conduct that attracted attention, not his sign.

Plenty of anti-Bush protestors have been arrested at protests for conduct and signs less extreme than this. Plenty of anti-Bush protestors have also been investigated by the Secret Service for threats against the president.

Is your whole point that you weren’t able to find an example of an anti-Bush protestor investigated by the Secret Service for conduct at a public protest?

Based on the shoddy research you’ve done for this story, that’s not much of a point.

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95jummy on Aug 20, 2009 at 1:31 pm:

94Squanto McButterpants on Aug 20, 2009 at 1:16 pm:

94 comments into the comments thread i don’t think your beating the dead red herring is worth further rebuttal.

progressives’ shrieking outrage over healthcare protests is rooted in the most shameless hypocrisy and zombie has provided a wonderful one-stop stfu resource for anyone having to endure some lefty horsesh*t about the “threat” obama suffers by not having everyone in the country fall into immediate, silent compliance with his agenda.

please go f*ck yourself.

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96John on Aug 20, 2009 at 1:42 pm:

Jummy
Ummmm…what you are talking about was not zombie’s claim in his essay. The reason is that if hypocrisy were the standard, that would be the tu quoque that zombie originally mentions and it would make his writing this irrelevant.
If what you are talking about were his original claim, there would be LOTS to say back to it. It would involve the hypocrisy of the right.
If that was zombie’s real intention, as zombie implies when he writes in post 91, then I will give him credit for one thing: zombie can write in a manner that is sufficiently devoid in reasoning to persuade some conservatives that he has proved something.
zombie makes an interesting move in the piece by trying to assert that there are more arrests made by the Secret Service BECAUSE of media attention.
(I probably would have more sympathy with his claim that the anti-Bush protests were not covered by the media if I did not recall some of the signs when I saw them. For zombie to be correct about media coverage, the photos would have had to be SHOCKING to the readers of this.

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97freeta goodholm on Aug 20, 2009 at 1:45 pm:

They started in on bush right after the 2000 election.
The left never got over Algore not being allowed to steal the election.

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98AZH on Aug 20, 2009 at 2:07 pm:

Was Lee Harvey Oswald a right-winger? Sirhan Sirhan?

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99AZH on Aug 20, 2009 at 2:08 pm:

Which is worse, the gun you see or the 5 you don’t?

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100zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 2:20 pm:

Everyone please note:

I have now added a new section near the bottom of the essay called “Counter-Examples,” in which I gather together all the “best” examples of incidents of Obama-threateners getting away with it, and of Bush-threateners getting nabbed. As you will see in the section, I was able to find only meager evidence in either category.

Anyone with solid links to either type of counter-example, please post them here and I will do my best to update that section with them, if the examples stand up to scrutiny.

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101zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 2:25 pm:

#93 John
If you have any links to solid examples of Obama threateners-at-protests getting away with it with no Secret Service questioning and no media publicity about their threats, please post them here. Otherwise, your criticism of my thesis doesn’t hold much water.

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102zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 2:29 pm:

94Squanto McButterpants

You are free to post counter-examples here in the comments section. You are free to write your own essay trying to prove the opposite of my essay. You are free to contact all the other blogs, Web sites, news outlets and magazines which have already linked to the post and tell them that my story is “much ado about nothing” and that they should unlink to me. Be my guest! Go for it.

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103Horse on Aug 20, 2009 at 2:33 pm:

Squanto McButterpants on Aug 20, 2009 at 1:16 pm:” Plenty of anti-Bush protestors (sic) have been arrested at protests for conduct and signs less extreme than this.”

And once again he provides zero substantiation. Guess he just surrenders without the ability to support his point.

What’s the title of this posting? “Death Threats Against Bush at Protests Ignored for Years”.
Who ignored these threats to President Bush for years? MSM, liberals, democrats.
Who is freaking out about protests against President Obama’s policies with trumped up emphasis on threats of violence and racial undertones that don’t even exist? MSM, liberals, democrats.
Who’re the partisan hypocrites who misrepresent their own actions and the actions of others for political expediency? MSM, liberals, democrats.

The point of this posting was made pretty well.

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104Jolter on Aug 20, 2009 at 3:13 pm:

oh please…get off that dead horse already. I find some of these funny as hell…some dumb.. some spot on. Im more worried bout the GOP goons showing up armed at townmeetings than some stupid signage.

everyone..EVERYone ..at some point has used the phrase ‘i want to kill you (or him or her etc)… its nonsense.

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105Squanto McButterpants on Aug 20, 2009 at 3:38 pm:

Zombie, I know I don’t really need to explain the gap in your logic to you again. You see it now, and you last post to me is your attempt to get rid of me without admitting that I’m right.

Horse, for substantiation of my claim please see the essay above this thread.

By the way, there is nothing wrong with the word “protestors”:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/protestor

Your (sic) in my quote is just proof that you aren’t as smart as you think you are.

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106MannyT-vA on Aug 20, 2009 at 3:57 pm:

@45Le Jacquelope of Literotica on Aug 19, 2009 at 11:49 pm:

You made your argument completely moot when you included the KKK (not that the rest of it wasn’t anyway)

It is well known that the KKK was founded by Southern DEMOCRATS many moons ago when it was the Republicans (i.e. President Lincoln, a Republican) who were primarily interested in abolition and freeing the slaves. Sounds like a real party of racists. ::rolleyes::

The Dems didn’t latch onto the whole idea of being the party of the ‘oppressed minorities’ until the Johnson administration and did a great job of flipping the tables and indoctrinating the very idea that you espouse into all the willing sponges out there.

Extremists on either side of the political spectrum are as responsible for horrific acts to try to paint it as a ‘right wing only’ problem only further illustrates many of the points and premises proffered by Zombie.

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107tomllewis on Aug 20, 2009 at 3:57 pm:

Thanks for this great montage that again, and again, and again shows the incredible hypocrisy of the MSM. It’s enough to tear my hair out.

It’s so hard to see how out of touch so many millions of people are. Even more unfortunate, that’s what the Left says about us.

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108Uncle Jefe on Aug 20, 2009 at 4:05 pm:

Thank you, Zombie.
I think the media coverage of the idiots in Arizona made your point…
MSNBC purposefully cropped the neck and head off of the guy holding the AR15 over his shoulder, so that they could talk about the ‘racist’ angle of these gun-totin’ freaks…
Funny, the guy was black.

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109john F. on Aug 20, 2009 at 4:06 pm:

I couldn’t stand Bush. And I confess, I think up front that any thinking man would find him a disaster of history. Likewise, I’ll come clean immediately on the fact that I’ve got both high respect and hope for Obama’s Presidency. He doesn’t have it right quite yet. But he will. And history, I think, will remember him kindly.

All that said, if it’s true that these anti-Bush protestors were not followed up on for those signs, I think that’s terrible. The right to say something doesn’t excuse one from the responsibility of what’s being said, no more than the right to bear arms excuses someone from waving one around (or even wearing one) in a place where there presence would be inappropriately threatening.

When Bush’s people had protestors arrested for t-shirts that said things like “don’t tread on my civil liberties” or showing the number of dead in Iraq, I found that outrageous. But someone with a sign threatening to kill the President even if it WAS Bush they were talking about? That’s just wrong. Of course, I hope anybody who can agree with that will also agree that it’s no more right to make the same threats toward Obama.

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110jummy on Aug 20, 2009 at 4:18 pm:

106MannyT-vA on Aug 20, 2009 at 3:57 pm:

yep. and what was the “former” segregationist lbj’s angle?

while he was passing token legislation like the voting rights act, which was only well-received because civil rights activists expected less than nothing from him, he had already made his reasoning explicit:

“These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

and, later:

“we’ll have these ni**ers voting with us for 200 years.”

in the meantime, he ran ads like this against barry goldwater:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWusOhZpq7w

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111Steve on Aug 20, 2009 at 5:15 pm:

You’re right. Those people were out of line. You might note that many of the pictures came from one place, and others from overseas. However, you are correct.

Most liberals didn’t want Bush to die. That would have mad Dick Cheney the President. Instead, we wanted them both in jail. Unfortunately, we were unable to find someone who wanted to blow him and save the semen.

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112jummy on Aug 20, 2009 at 5:32 pm:

tough shit for you that deposing dictators is perfectly legal while perjury is a crime, right steve?

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113Horse on Aug 20, 2009 at 5:33 pm:

Squanto McButterpants on Aug 20, 2009 at 3:38 pm: Horse, for substantiation of my claim please see the essay above this thread.

LOL, and the essay does not support “… have been arrested at protests for conduct and signs less extreme than this.“

The protesters were never arrested for signs less extreme than this. Nothing in the essay substantiates that ludicrous claim.

Again, who ignored the threats to President Bush for years? MSM, liberals, democrats.

Who is freaking out about protests against President Obama’s policies with trumped up emphasis on threats of violence and racial undertones that don’t even exist? MSM, liberals, democrats.

Personally, I could care less about protests against Bush or Obama, non-violent protesting is almost always a good way to get people to demonstrate their real concerns and beliefs.

So who is the hypocrite? LOL

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114Ringo the Gringo on Aug 20, 2009 at 5:33 pm:

My goodness.

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115Squanto McButterpants on Aug 20, 2009 at 5:40 pm:

Horse:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/04/INGPQ40MB81.DTL&type=printable

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116zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 5:45 pm:

#104 Jolter

oh please…get off that dead horse already. I find some of these funny as hell…some dumb.. some spot on. Im more worried bout the GOP goons showing up armed at townmeetings than some stupid signage.

everyone..EVERYone ..at some point has used the phrase ‘i want to kill you (or him or her etc)… its nonsense.

Excellent! Beautiful comment. As if on cue, some leftist dingbat comes in and starts to defend the death threats as being “funny as hell” and “spot on.” Somehow, I just knew that would happen.

And of course it was the left who brought up — in total hysterics — the topic of presidential death threats in the first place; and when the tables are turned on them and they’re revealed to be the worse perpetrators — oops, suddenly the issue is a “dead horse” and that “everybody does it.”

Please, Jolter, I want you to post some more comments! Let’s hear what you have to say. Because every character coming out of your keyboard only discredits your side further.

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117Chris E on Aug 20, 2009 at 5:55 pm:

Steve,

I think you are right — this only happened in certain places, namely NYC and Southern California…but these are the places where protests actually take place! If you think they were flash in pan incidents, you are mistaken. I had the fine pleasure of watching 6+ years of this in NYC. Not only did this happen many times over several years, it happened an absurd amount of times at just about every major protest event.

I would liken it to the comparisons now being made of Obama as Hitler (extremely rare) or Obama as the Joker, to Bush as Hitler. Likening Obama to a fictional character that prized chaos I find far less disturbing than comparing Bush to a man who decided it was his right to kill millions of Jews. Even sadder, the Bush as Hitler sign was extremely common and was highly accepted amongst the protesters even if their logic was severely flawed. Most sad, I have heard more about one man holding an Obama as Hitler sign from Congress then anyone heard from the MSM or Congress during the eight years of Bush.

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118Horse on Aug 20, 2009 at 6:00 pm:

Yes, I know about Bursey, I was the one who dug up his case. He wasn’t arrested for his sign, which contained no threat, it was for trespassing. His sign certainly indicated he was a protester, but that is not why he was arrested or why he was charged. During presidential visits the secret service have a lot of leeway in establishing exclusion zones. As much as I support protesting, I would not take away the secret service’s leeway regardless of which president they are protecting.

Finally, note that every single MSM article about Bursey and others takes the side of the protesters. The articles are not about the unreasonable, potentially violent, astro turfing protesters, it is about how great the protesters are and how unfair it is to restrict them during presidential visits. Compare that to the current MSM coverage of protesters against President Obama’s policies. Now the protesters are teabaggers, gun crazy, violent, out of control, unreasonable, uniformed, etc. It points out the incredible partisan nature of the MSM (-fox) as pro democratic party. That is a big point of Zombie’s essay.

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119zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 6:02 pm:

#115 Squanto McButterpants

That link you posted — about “free speech zones” — doesn’t prove anything. The “free speech zone” policy set up by local police departments and by the Secret Service — which is continuing under the Obama Administration, by the way — is not something I personally care for either, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with failing to arrest Bush-threateners or aggressively pursuing Obama-threateners.

People who violate the free speech zone policies get arrested for violating the free speech zone policies — i.e. they get arrested for trespassing. Never in single instance could I find someone who was arrested for carrying a mild sign that didn’t threaten Bush. In every case the actual reason was something different — trespassing, disrupting a meeting, etc. The whole “They arrested me because I criticized the President!” meme is just an empty claim raised by the protesters themselves, as part and parcel of their protest.

Think about it: Protesters carry protest messages, and if any protester violates a free speech zone, they’re almost certain to be displaying some kind of message or another. Hence, whatever message they randomly happen to be displaying at the moment they’re arrested for trespassing — voila! — the message is cited as the reason for the arrest.

No one is buying this argument, Dave — er, I mean “Squanto”. You can keep harping on it and harping on it, but you are convincing no one and scoring zero logic points.

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120Chris E on Aug 20, 2009 at 6:13 pm:

Horse: “Now the protesters are teabaggers, gun crazy, violent, out of control, unreasonable, uniformed, etc. It points out the incredible partisan nature of the MSM (-fox) as pro democratic party.”

I laugh every time I witness this, because it truly is the best inside joke today: liberal media makes illogical and irrational statements, liberals step in line and keep up the rhetoric and sling accusations that Republicans are Faux News puppets. Oh, sweet irony.

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121Squanto McButterpants on Aug 20, 2009 at 7:42 pm:

Zombie, you are defending the arrest of protestors with anti-Bush signs by saying they weren’t really arrested for their signs, but for something else. We have now come full circle.

In my original post in this thread (#38) I said we should find out what this guy was really detained for before getting all worked up. Details are sketchy right now, but there’s a report this guy was actually getting into shouting matches with people passing by. What if this protestor was actually detained for disorderly conduct, and not for his sign?

I can’t believe we’re 120 posts into this thread and you still can’t grasp this simple point.

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122ALLEN on Aug 20, 2009 at 7:59 pm:

Thanks Jummy for reminding me that Conservative stupifycation is not solely reserved for Black politicians, though I have to say a large part of Kerry‘s “Communist tagging started after he, George and Laura Bush endorsed recognizing two Black historical figures, W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. Unfortunately Kerry’s “Commie tag “ came with the race baiting charge that he was a closet Jew masquerading as an Irishman.

“Postnote: In 2003, The Boston Globe ran a lengthy article detailing the newspaper’s “discovery” that Senator John Kerry was not of Irish heritage, but, instead, was Jewish. In fact, insiders believe that Kerry’s camp actually “planted” the story, it having been decided by the Illuminati that “it was time” for Kerry and a select, few other “Jews-in-hiding” to come out of the closet—Texe Marrs)
http://www.texemarrs.com/052004/john_kerry_coverup_artist.htm

I was going to say this in my own words, but other people are saying it better, but hopefully conservatives will understand that Hitler was an enemy of the Marxists, so to call Obama a Marxist and then Hitler really highlights the “conservative stupifycation of America.” And all this time I was worried about the “dumbing down of America “due to Affirmative Action .

“In fact Hitler labeled Marxist and socialists for extermination in his final solution. So to call someone a Marxist then compare them to Hitler is stupid.
politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/11/12/congressman-sorry-for-likening-obama-to-hitler
“Hitler personally claimed he was fighting against Jewish Marxism. His views were more or less formed during three periods: His poverty stricken years as a young adult in Vienna and …”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_political_views

The Black man with is head cropped out of the picture, interesting. You’ve never heard of a “Black-White man” before have you. A term meant to describe a cultural affinity, not a skin tone. Skin tones mean nothing when compared to a persons cultural attributes. Plenty of light and White skinned African-Americans from a cultural standpoint.

In all the years of listening to conservatives complain about the liberal media, I have never viewed mainstream media as liberal. It’s always been black male suspect, bad neighborhood , and advertising for jobs and houses that were out of reach. I’ll take another look at the articles today and try to see how liberal or conservative they are?

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123zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 8:58 pm:

#122 ALLEN

After that rambling, loopy free-association prattle, I see now that I can henceforth safely relegate you to the “scroll-over” category.

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124Liberal Texan on Aug 20, 2009 at 9:04 pm:

The Secret Service doesn’t get it’s information from the media. They are neither underfunded, under equiped, understaffed or biased toward one party or the other. Their job is to protect the president. The methods they use and the actions that they take are all classified and not available to Zombie or anyone else posting to this site.

Much noise with no facts.

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125Squanto McButterpants on Aug 20, 2009 at 9:09 pm:

Amen, Liberal Texan.

I miss the original Zombie.

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126zombie on Aug 20, 2009 at 9:21 pm:

#124 Liberal Texan

I see — so the Secret Service has so many agents that they’re present at every single protest across the country every day, and they drive around inspecting everyone’s Halloween decorations, and wherever people gather in public, there is sure to be an undercover Secret Service agent somewhere in the crowd! They are everywhere, omniscient, and certainly don’t need anybody to point out possible threats to them!

Much noise with no facts.

Facts? Who needs facts? I just make shit up. Every photo and every link on this site is completely fake. To be honest, all of zombietime is just one big hoax. I’ve never taken a picture in my life. I create every image from scratch in Photoshop. I built whole false-front Web-sites with fake news stories on them (which I write myself) just so I can link to them and give the link an air of authority. Nosiree, no one ever threatened President Bush ever, no way.

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127Horse on Aug 20, 2009 at 9:44 pm:

Yeah, the secret service don’t read the news, they learn about potential threats from the tens of thousands of informants they have planted in every town across the country. That and their psychics. And maybe other government agencies that do read the news and then inform the secret service if they think something should be checked out.

The proof of double standards still stands. Bush protesters good, regardless of sign content and actions. Obama protesters bad, and fabricate sign content and actions to make them look as bad as possible. Mmmmm, taste the triumph.

Zombie was starting to sound like the Comedian in that last comment “… is just one big hoax”.

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128Squanto McButterpants on Aug 20, 2009 at 10:55 pm:

What a juvenile and bitter response to a completely obvious, common-sense statement. Zombie just flushed his “journalist” credibility down the toilet.

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129ALLEN on Aug 20, 2009 at 11:28 pm:

Here’s the counterpoint to your article Zombie, life just isn’t fair, is it?

http://theloop21.com/news/fake-racist-prosecuted-for-threats-why-not-prosecute-the-real-ones

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130Phil on Aug 21, 2009 at 12:27 am:

Hey Squanto (Post 121, 38), check out an arrest of a different guy threatening Obama:
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN19491852
“MIAMI, Aug 19 (Reuters) - A Florida man pleaded guilty on Wednesday to threatening to kill President Barack Obama in an e-mail that said “the blood of Obama will run down the streets” of the U.S. capital, a federal prosecutor said….”

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131Starless on Aug 21, 2009 at 4:59 am:

Squanto McButterpants, I know grieving is difficult, but it may be time to admit that you and Zombie have grown apart and you should start seeing other bloggers.

#67 jummy

I should have been clearer. My reference wasn’t to extreme leftists of a particular organization but to the generally mush headed “war is never the answer/violence never solved anything” crowd, composed primarily of well-intentioned soccer mom types.

#79 Pork Soda

LOL. (Full disclosure: I’m not a Primus fanatic, but I’m aware of what they’ve done.)

#126 Zombie

This is speculation.

The Secret Service isn’t omniscient, but I have a hard time believing that the Karl Rove political machine was unaware of the extent of the openly expressed threats at anti-Bush protests. What I assumed at the time was that the lack of a harsh crackdown (the Secret Service is required, by what I understand is iron-clad law, to investigate every single threat reported to them) or even so much as a harsh word from the WH regarding the nastiness at protests, was due (ironically) to a respect for the First Amendment and rhino-like political skin. Obama, OTOH, has displayed a particularly thin skin when it comes to critics. Using an eleven-year-old girl to rhetorically shoot back at protesters — very cheap and unseemly.

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132Anonymous on Aug 21, 2009 at 6:39 am:

I have two things to point out:

1. Bush was in office for 8 years,
Obama has been in office for less than one.

MAYBE, and you know this isn’t really very likely, but oh gee, MAYBE that has something to do with the considerably smaller number of death threats -investigated or not - against Obama.

2. Like it or not, Obama is our first black president, and like it or not, racism does still exist in this country. I’m not accusing anyone that has made a death threat against Obama of being racist, but these facts put the secret service on edge. It’s quite possible that in a year or two when he is no longer new to the office, more death threats against him will go uninvestigated. After all, if this person really really wants to kill Obama why didn’t they say or do anything the first year he was president?

the secret service doesn’t investigate every death threat against a president because that would waste its resources, and realistically some punkass who thinks he/she is cool for carrying around an angry and threatening sign against an unpopular president (which is what most of the people portayed in your photos were) is not going to spend the time and brainpower required to plan the assassination of said president.

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133otcconan on Aug 21, 2009 at 7:31 am:

132Anonymous
the secret service doesn’t investigate every death threat against a president because that would waste its resources

They are required to investigate EVERY ONE OF THEM BY LAW.

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134John on Aug 21, 2009 at 8:15 am:

zombie writes: If you have any links to solid examples of Obama threateners-at-protests getting away with it with no Secret Service questioning and no media publicity about their threats, please post them here. Otherwise, your criticism of my thesis doesn’t hold much water.

The response by zombie is pretty damning to his thesis. Notice how when challenged the type of evidence that he requires changes. He is now asking for “solid examples” of protesters getting away with it. Remember he has ONE example of anyone EVER being arrested by the Secret Service to support his claim that “every possible threat” is now being arrested.

Interestingly, he has NO SOLID examples of anti-Bush protesters not being arrested of his own. He has pictures of protesters, but he does NOT provide “solid examples” that they were never arrested or followed up. In reality, I doubt that they were arrested or followed up, my only point is that such examples are, at best, difficult to provide since the lack of arrests are seldom reported by the any media. (As a case in point, I did a quick Google search just now of “zombie” “not arrested” and could find NO SOLID EXAMPLES of zombie NOT being arrested today. Does that mean zombie was arrested today?)

In the end, zombie FAILS to answer the fundamental criticisms of this essay I offered.

While he seems to find his “new section” on lack of signs that are death threats to Obama persuasive, I am unsure why it is even relevant to the point at hand. Remember how the essay begins. It begins with the claim that the Secret Service claims that threats against Obama are up 400%. He then states that this is because the media is so widely covering threats. He now suggests that he can only find a handful of threats that were not prosecuted. He discovered this, I would assume, by doing some searches of the very same media who he claims the Secret Service is watching to get its information.

Again, my point is NOT that the pictures are not important nor uninteresting.

My point is that zombie’s thesis either 1) is not supported by his pictures or 2) has changed since he wrote the post.

In short, the problem is not the tu quoque, it is the problem of hasty generalization. (The Greeks were not too big on inductive reasoning. So…secundum quid, perhaps????) (Yes, I know secundum quid is Latin, but Roman education was heavily influenced by the Greeks.)

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135John on Aug 21, 2009 at 8:37 am:

On different topics…

1. At the top of the page, it says there have been 161 comments. But I only see 134. Does anyone know why that would be? I am just curious. I am not accusing zombie of a right-wing conspiracy.

2. The pictures and commentary from the impeachment-weekend post are HYSTERICAL and very well done!

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136Photosynthesis on Aug 21, 2009 at 8:51 am:

Hey Zombie,

Mark Steyn name-checked you on the Hugh Hewitt show. You can download the mp3:

Friday August 21, 2009
H3: Mark Steyn, Michael Yon With Hugh Hewitt

It’s about 15:40 in, it’s actually regarding the topic of this blog post.

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137Photosynthesis on Aug 21, 2009 at 8:52 am:

Forgot the actual link: http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/Talkradio/Show.aspx?RadioShowID=5&page=1

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138zombie on Aug 21, 2009 at 9:40 am:

#135 John

1. At the top of the page, it says there have been 161 comments. But I only see 134. Does anyone know why that would be? I am just curious. I am not accusing zombie of a right-wing conspiracy.

That number is auto-generated by WordPress; the reason it gives a number higher than the actual number of comments is that it also includes the number of “Trackbacks” — i.e. some of the other blogs which linked to this post. The number at the top of the page is comments+trackbacks, even though it only says “comments.”

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139DangerousNate on Aug 21, 2009 at 10:19 am:

I think the biggest reason why, there was so many death threats made against Bush, versus Obama who has probably just started getting more.

I’m not saying it’s a good thing to threaten our presidents’ lives either, I don’t care what their color is or what they stand for, they’re still our president.

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140zombie on Aug 21, 2009 at 11:40 am:

#136+7 Photosynthesis

Great catch! Thanks for linking to it.

I’ll make a little update to the post with the Mark Steyn audio, soon.

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141zombie on Aug 21, 2009 at 12:26 pm:

OK, now there is a new section near the end of the essay called “Audio” that says:

Audio

Columnist and author Mark Steyn, while appearing on the August 20, 2009 Hugh Hewitt radio show, discussed this essay on air. You can hear a short mp3 of the one-minute clip by clicking here (392kb mp3 file) or listen to the full half-hour show here. Here’s a transcript of the interview:

Mark Steyn: “We’ve had people now, since about three month before the Iraq invasion, we’ve had people marching every week through American cities, with signs saying “Kill Bush” — explicit threats to kill Bush. Pictures of Bush with a bullet, a red blood bullet hole through the center of his forehead. Zombietime, the Web site zombietime has just collected dozens and dozens of these pictures from marches of ordinary Americans demanding the execution of their president, that were going on as I said from early 2003 right up to the end of Bush’s term. None of these guys were ever prosecuted. None of these magazines — people made films, there was an award-winning film made about the assassination of the president. Nicholson Baker wrote a novella about the death of Bush, about killing Bush. And nowhere, Newsweek I don’t recall — not that I ever listen to the Newsweek podcast, I think they had it in those days — but I don’t recall anyone in Newsweek expressing concern about films, novellas, and marches explicitly fantasizing over the death of President Bush, week in week out for five years.”

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142John on Aug 21, 2009 at 12:33 pm:

zombie,

I checked the contact page and see there is not a direct email to you. So, I will post a message here.

While you and I come from different political perspectives, most of your commentary is VERY good. While I did disagree with some of the conclusions of this essay, I have really enjoyed the other essays and commentary I have read. You seem to have a keen sense of humor. As less than an amateur, I am very impressed by your photos as well. They fit your stories and commentary perfectly.

Anyways, I did want to let you know that I am a bit of a fan from exploring the site the last two days.

Thanks for reminding me that there are people with whom I can disagree that are sane, thoughtful, AND funny.

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143zombie on Aug 21, 2009 at 1:09 pm:

#142 John

Thank you! Glad you can appreciate the site even though you have a different political perspective.

Do be aware that it is only my detractors who label me “conservative”; I don’t consider myself to be conservative at all — though some of my highly idiosyncratic and individualized beliefs do overlap with what now passes for conservativism. On the other hand, some of my other beliefs also overlap with what is now classified as “liberalism.” As a mish-mash of the two, I reject both labels and plan to come up with my own label (eventually). Until then, I simply enjoy mocking people I think are idiots, and since 99% of the political activity in the area where I live is performed by left-wingers of various stripes, they’re the people I end up mocking. If I lived in a hyper-conservative area, I might very well mock paleo-conservatives as well in my photo essays. I just so rarely ever encounter anyone to the right of Trotsky, I really have no option but to mock those in my face.

Anyway, you say, “While you and I come from different political perspectives…”. Actually, I originally came from a left-wing/liberal/Democratic perspective as well, so we likely do “come from” similar perspectives; I simply have traveled further down the road and have had perhaps more eye=opening epiphanies about the fundamental erroneousness of contemporary leftist thought and behavior. I can only hope that my site has nudged you a little in that direction.

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144Dave Surls on Aug 21, 2009 at 2:21 pm:

“I contend that the media is aggressively reporting on, highlighting and pursuing any and all possible threats to President Obama — and even hints of threats — but they purposely glossed over, ignored or failed to report similar threats to President Bush. Why? I believe it is part of an ideological bias:”

Well, of course, you can see the same ideological bias in actual assassinations and how they’re dealt with by leftoid dominated groups like academia or the media. The assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and JFK are constantly brought up referred to and written about, the assassinations of James Garfield and William McCkinley are virtually never talked about.

Why is that? Because Lincoln and JFK are leftoid icons, and Garfield and McKinley aren’t.

That’s not a problem unless people actually believe that leftoid media or academic types are unbiased and honest in their reporting…when they’re not, and they never have been.

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145Dave Surls on Aug 21, 2009 at 4:12 pm:

“On July 11, 2007, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Betty Williams…”

As for her she’s a typical America-hating, leftoid liar, hypocrite and fake pacifist who never should have been allowed to set foot in the United States. She, herself is a former member of the Irish Republican Army who took an active part in IRA military operations (a fact that’s almost always left out of her little internet biographies), she is a supporter of numerous ultra-violent murderous thugs, from convicted American murderers like Leonard Peltier and (the late) Tookie Williams to commie thugs like Nelson Mandela and the ANC.

She’s never had any problem with violence as long as its carried out by the “right” people, which attitude is, of course, reflected in her statements directed at George Bush.

She’s also virulently anti-American in general, aside from being a Bush-hater in particular.

“First, our top priority is rape used as a weapon of war. Right now that’s number one on our list. As you heard last night, the United States army is way up there in the world – you wouldn’t believe that the GI Joe would use rape as a weapon of war? But all armies do that.”–Betty Williams, accusing the United States Army of using rape as a tactic of war.

Williams wasn’t investigated by the Secret Service ONLY because she has powerful friends in the Democrat Party (she even once held a government position in the United States…despite the fact that she doesn’t appear to be an American citizen…appointed to the position by a, surprise, surprise, liberal Democrat), who have no problem with her IRA associations, her blind hatred for America, and her support and admiration for thugs and murderers (as long as the thugs and murderers are communists, or anti-western, or especially anti-American).

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146Greg on Aug 21, 2009 at 4:45 pm:

WTF do you have to refer to that crunt as ‘Nobel Peace Prize Laureate’……..Are you uplifting her? Phuk, Yassir Arafat is also a peace prize laureate. Nobel…anything…..isn’t worth a shit anymore.

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147Greg on Aug 21, 2009 at 4:50 pm:

And, david letterman isn’t worth a slo-jak-off in a shower room anymore……haven’t looked at that retard in years. And oprah isn’t worth anyones time anymore…..she got stopped at an airport security check some time back and under her dress they found 250 Lbs. of crack….
Degenerate? I don’t even want to talk about ellen.

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148CattusMagnus on Aug 21, 2009 at 4:55 pm:

#145 Dave Surls,

Sounds like Betty Williams is a pretty nice individual. I bet she and Yasser Arafat would get along real well. And speaking of peace prize winners . . . . . can you believe they picked a bloviating, self abosorbed, snake oil selling former vice president over a nun who saved Jewish children from the Holocaust?

I find it intriguing that you refer to Nelson Mandela as a communist thug. This is news to me. Would you mind elaborating on this?

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149Dave Surls on Aug 21, 2009 at 5:48 pm:

“I find it intriguing that you refer to Nelson Mandela as a communist thug. This is news to me. Would you mind elaborating on this?”

Surely. The ANC has a more or less permanent alliance with the South African Communist Party (which in practice has meant one-party rule for South Africa since 1994, even though technically the three parties that rule, the ANC, SACP and COSATU are seperate entities…in reality…they aren’t really seperate). THE ANC is a member of the Socialist International, and while it existed the Soviet Union was the ANC’s primary foreign backer. In practice the ANC government is heavily socialistic, with the usual results: South Africa is poverty stricken, internal violence is endemic, with South Africa being one of the most violent countries on the face of the earth.

The usual blessings of socialism…all of which means absolutely nothing to lefties, including fake pacifists like good old IRA Betty, who could care less how violent South Africa is, or how many kids are going hungry there (another one of her supposed causes)…as long as the dump is run by anti-western socialists, like her hero Nelson Mandela,…she’s as happy as a pig in shit (an all too appropriate metaphor in her case).

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150KC on Aug 21, 2009 at 8:33 pm:

Thanks, zombie, for yet another useful and thoughtful article. Over the last couple of years, you have added much to my understanding and awareness of what seems to pass for political discourse in parts where some of us simpler folks dare not tread. I, for one, appreciate your efforts.

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151Le Jacquelope of Literotica on Aug 21, 2009 at 9:28 pm:

Oh we have a bunch of live ones here.

The KKK isn’t Conservative? Abortion clinic bombers aren’t Conservative? Oh man, the insanity factor here is totally off the chain.

Oh yeah, it’s Looney Tunes hour. I’ll see your Stalin, Mao and the Bolsheviks, and raise you 100 million dead as a result of American Slavery and the slaughter of the Native Americans. Oh wait, you’re gonna tell me those slave ships were run by liberals. And hey how about those tie dye shirts General Custer wore to battle! (<— sarcasm, folks.) Hey, if the KKK and abortion clinic bombers aren’t Conservative then we can make up just about anything, right? Hell, I can even call Stalin and Mao a bunch of right wingers going by your *ahem* logic. Funny, how you Right Wingers support free trade with those uberpolluting undemocratic baby girl-murdering f**ktards. If “liberal” Hitler had offered you Volkswagons made by free outsourced Jewish slave labor you’d be all up on that.

Basically, yeah, Conservatives are inherently dangerous violent maniacs. And now we can throw in delusional, irresponsible, dishonest and spin-mongering, too! Liberals aren’t angels but they don’t blow up FBI buildings or throw black people off the side of ships to haul them off to slavery or send Jews to gas chamb… er, wait, you nutballs even said Hitler was a LIBERAL. Holy smokes! I can’t wait to hear your argument making the U.S. slave trade a Liberal cause.

You have to be asking yourselves why America is having issues with Obama but you guys aren’t being picked as an alternative. It’s because most of the country sees you the way I do: a bunch of poster children for why mercury poisoning is so dangerous to young skulls full of mush. (Hi, Rush!)

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152zombie on Aug 22, 2009 at 12:12 am:

#151 Le Jacquelope of Literotica

I’m going to frame that comment and hang it on my wall. Great satire!

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153Dave Surls on Aug 22, 2009 at 12:18 am:

#151

Amusing. Absurd. But, not exactly on topic.

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154azreal progressive on Aug 22, 2009 at 12:23 am:

Zombie, your posting is illustrative of the truth. It is beyond comprehension that anyone would even argue the point. The double standard is beyond description between Obama and GWB.. What you have here is posters arguing semantics. The core point of your post is deflected.

Your challenges are unmet.

The core issue of your post is understated.

Zombie was being generous in pointing out the comparisons. Very generous.

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155Jeremayakovka on Aug 22, 2009 at 8:21 am:

In case no one else mentioned it, the black child who mouthed off about killing George W. Bush (w/ video):
http://jeremayakovka.typepad.com/jeremayakovka/2008/04/kiss-my-black-a.html

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156Jeremayakovka on Aug 22, 2009 at 8:23 am:

Five years jail time, minimum, for all these yokels:

According to 18 USC Sec. 871:
http://usgovinfo.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/871.shtml

….Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits for conveyance in the mail or for a delivery from any post office or by any letter carrier any letter, paper, writing, print, missive, or document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States, the President-elect, the Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President of the United States, or the Vice President-elect, or knowingly and willfully otherwise makes any such threat against the President, President-elect, Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President, or Vice President-elect, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

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157bigfurhat on Aug 22, 2009 at 1:54 pm:

“History says that Right Wingers have a higher tendency of acting out their rage than Liberals do.”>>>

Once again the left tries, in vain, to rewrite history by going for the BIG LIE.
Every assassination of an american president was a lefty. Several attempts were by lefties.
And the left-wing regimes have been the most murderous regimes in modern history.
WTF are u babbling about?

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158bigfurhat on Aug 22, 2009 at 1:56 pm:

Sorry about sounding like Tonto in my previous post, but the incredulous statement left me dumbstruck.

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159Dave Surls on Aug 22, 2009 at 3:59 pm:

“the incredulous statement left me dumbstruck.”

Yeah. lefties are a caution all right.

You have to admire a political group (liberals) that can drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima one day, and turn around and talk about how bloodthirsty and violent right wingers are the next day.

That’s some serious chutzpah combined with some serious cluelessness.

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160Dave Surls on Aug 22, 2009 at 6:21 pm:

“Every assassination of an american president was a lefty.”

You have a cabal of Republican-haters(Lincoln), a garden variety French lunatic (Garfield), a wannabe socialist/anarchist (McKInley) and a communist (Kennedy).

Presidential assassins aren’t exactly drawn from the ranks of the right.

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161CattusMagnus on Aug 22, 2009 at 9:24 pm:

Dave Surls,
Thanks for the response. I was in the audience when Nelson Mandela gave a speech in London several years back. It was to commemorate the ending of apartheid in South Africa. Now I wish I could remember the things that he said. But at the time I couldn’t care less because I was there to see REM who opened for him!

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162pub on Aug 22, 2009 at 11:22 pm:

I didn’t have time to read through the comments, so sorry if I’m repeating what someone else has already brought up.

A group in the Netherlands, Gatas Parliament, made a video called Antiamerikansk Dans (Anti-American Dance) where they encouraged burning American embassies and showed a hitman with a big gun out to kill Bush. Unbelievably, if that’s not bad enough, the footage showed Mrs. Bush there with Pres. Bush as it insinuated that he was shot and killed. They had a website KillHim.nu, but that was taken down, but you can get the video showing the hitman and the Bushes on YouTube. I can’t find the one with subtitles, but it’s pretty descriptive — they show all these horrid things the USA has supposedly done over the years, people out to burn things, and lead up to the assassination of President Bush. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaNvd_dfRh0

There was the group in the UK that made the film about Bush being assassinated (while he was sitting president) and used his actual face by computer techniques.

Thanks so much for bringing this issue up. I knew for 8 years I watched complete vile hatred towards Bush and now the slightest negative thing towards Obama makes the world go berserk. Mark my words, the Leftists are gearing up to commit an atrocity just like the ones they have committed in history. They hate Christians like Lenin and have chosen a group of people to demonize and dehumanize just like Hitler, the White “small-town” Christian heritage Americans, better known as the ignorant inbred redneck hicks to the Party of Tolerance.

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163Pork Soda on Aug 22, 2009 at 11:48 pm:

143zombie on Aug 21, 2009 at 1:09 pm:

I just so rarely ever encounter anyone to the right of Trotsky, I really have no option but to mock those in my face.

San Francisco Bay Area living at its finest eh? Don’t worry Zombie, there are plenty of us “others” living within this domain that can sympathize with you & the statement above. Heck you even motivated me enough to go out and take some snap shots of the first ‘Impeach on the Beach’ event a few years back on Ocean Beach. I was lucky enough to have you link to my photo gallery (Pork Soda AKA Blast Pattern) of the event at the time. Dang that was a hoot.

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164Pork Soda on Aug 22, 2009 at 11:51 pm:

Oh and Frank Chu rules! All hail the 12 Galaxies! (San Francisco inside joke)

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165pub on Aug 22, 2009 at 11:52 pm:

You’re a LGF fan with morons like #2 Anonymous? Forget I mentioned anything. I’m evidently the type of Republican your ilk are trying to get out the party. I got lost in cyberspace.

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166Grung_e_Gene on Aug 23, 2009 at 3:38 am:

I’m late in the comments game here, but my most pertinent question is: How do you know that the threats against President Bush were not investigated? You repeatedly claim that none of the Bush protestors were investigated but that seems quite an assumption on your part unless you have access to Secret Service daily logs, activity reports and assigned tasks.

And I recognize your post generally gets around to claiming the Media is to blame for the lack of coverage of threats to President Bush but you make several assertions against the Secret Service:

What I’m saying is that present-day threats to Obama at protests should be investigated — yet previous threats to Bush at protests weren’t investigated, which I think is inexcusable.

All I am saying is that threats to Bush should have been similarly pursued — but weren’t.

So, I’m not saying this in a confrontational sarcastic manner but unless you’ve filed for FOIA concerning the threats made to President Bush you essay appears to be based on an unfounded assumption.

Here are two easily found counter examples of a threat to Bush which were investigated:
A California artist’s cardboard cutout of President Bush with a knife through his head earned him his second visit from the U.S. Secret Service. March 2007, Investigated by US Secret Service.

13 year old Teenager investigated by the Secret Service for threatening emails to Bush. The FBI in Louisville referred questions to the Secret Service in Cincinnati. A Secret Service spokesman said he couldn’t comment on an ongoing investigation. March of 2006.

And to Ring the Gringo Post #61: Republican Congressman Paul Broun on Obama
“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.” - Republican Congressman Paul Broun. Who proudly stands behind his comments.

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167DangerousNate on Aug 23, 2009 at 7:06 pm:

#151 Le Jacquelope of Literotica

Wow…that was alot of words…

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168Ken on Aug 23, 2009 at 8:19 pm:

144

“Why is that? Because Lincoln and JFK are leftoid icons, and Garfield and McKinley aren’t.”

I think, Dave, it probably has more to do with Lincoln and JFK just being more famous presidents. We can all name several of their accomplishments, but who could do the same for Garfield or McKinley? They just weren’t particularly important historical figures like JFK and Lincoln were. I don’t think the remembrance of their assassinations has anything in particular to do with their politics.

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169Dave Surls on Aug 23, 2009 at 9:31 pm:

“I think, Dave, it probably has more to do with Lincoln and JFK just being more famous presidents.”

Yeah, if the Kennedy loving television folks and Kennedy-loving schoolteachers never shut up talking about him…then he’s pretty much for sure going to be more famous.

Obviously.

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170Dave Surls on Aug 23, 2009 at 9:36 pm:

Search Results 1 - 10 of about 470,000 for kennedy assassination

Search Results 1 - 10 of about 24,300 for mckinley assassination

Why is one much more important than the other? Because the people who control the flow of information MADE it so.

Kennedy is a lefty icon, McKinley ain’t.

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171mickster on Aug 23, 2009 at 10:34 pm:

Geez,you’re right. Some these signs are appalling. On the down side tho Bush did lie us into a war that has cost $1 trillion + dollars and claimed going on 5,000 american lives. So if you were pissed enough about that to carry a sign I wouldn’t blame you the right to be immensely angry. On the other side Obama has written no legislation, nothing has been passed, and if you read the pending legislation you would realize that the facts of the bill contradict the lies that so many believe. So use your head for something else than a place to attach your hat.

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172zombie on Aug 23, 2009 at 11:35 pm:

170mickster:

Geez,you’re right. Some these signs are appalling. On the down side tho Bush did lie us into a war that has cost $1 trillion + dollars and claimed going on 5,000 american lives. So if you were pissed enough about that to carry a sign I wouldn’t blame you the right to be immensely angry. On the other side Obama has written no legislation, nothing has been passed, and if you read the pending legislation you would realize that the facts of the bill contradict the lies that so many believe. So use your head for something else than a place to attach your hat.

Excellent reasoning! So, Bush deserved all those threats, because he was a worse president, whereas Obama hasn’t done a thing to merit criticism! I like your style.

Why, Bush personally spent $1 trillion on a war over a 6-year span! Outrageous. What a bad, bad president. Whereas the saintly Obama — why, he has hardly done anything at all, except plunge us into a projected $9 trillion in soul-crushing debt in a mere six MONTHS. And the completely innocuous health care bill will only add a few tens of trillions more over the upcoming years and decades. Really, what’s a few dozen trillion among friends?

Wait — what’s the sound I hear? Oh yeah, that’s right, it’s the distant echo of all those Democrats in the Democratic-controlled congress in 2003 overwhelmingly voting for the war. And then repeatedly over the following years voting to fund the war to the tune on $1 trillion. But wait! It’s not they’re fault. They are but mere geniuses masterfully outwitted and fooled by the moronic chimperor!

No, Obama has written no legislation at all. Not a word. You’re so right. Please tell us more about Bush’s evil and Obama’s complete passivity. I love to hear stories.

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173gtc on Aug 24, 2009 at 12:17 am:

The sign saying the Gulf War is Bush’s Nam is on a wall on Eliza Street Newtown, Sydney, Australia.

I think the GPS reference is

-33° 53′ 46.75″, +151° 10′ 43.25″

and it can be seen on Google streetview.

It has been there a number of years and may actually refer to the early 1990s Gulf war

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174Dave Surls on Aug 24, 2009 at 1:33 am:

“Bush did lie us into a war”

Same old lefty lie…different day.

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175Dave Surls on Aug 24, 2009 at 1:35 am:

“going on 5,000 american lives.”

Only 395,000 more deaths and Bush’s war will have cost us as many lives as Roosevelt’s war.

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176Jon on Aug 24, 2009 at 4:19 am:

Excellent work! I’d noticed the same thing from over in the UK; that is the left leaning media ignoring threats to Bush while trumping up threats to Obama.

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177zombie on Aug 24, 2009 at 9:17 am:

#172 gtc

The sign saying the Gulf War is Bush’s Nam is on a wall on Eliza Street Newtown, Sydney, Australia.
I think the GPS reference is
-33° 53′ 46.75″, +151° 10′ 43.25″
and it can be seen on Google streetview.
It has been there a number of years and may actually refer to the early 1990s Gulf war

Wow –great catch! Checked it out myself and you are correct. I’ve now updated the caption to that photo, saying where the graffiti can be found. Thanks.

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178Bakunin on Aug 24, 2009 at 8:54 pm:

157bigfurhat on Aug 22, 2009 at 1:54 pm:
Every assassination of an american president was a lefty. Several attempts were by lefties.

Could you tell me how John Wilkes Booth, confederate sympathizer, was a leftist? Charles Guiteau killed Garfield because he thought God had commanded him to kill. While Leon Czolgosz described himself as an “anarchist”, his fanaticism and comments about violence aroused other anarchists’ suspicions, and he was labeled a police spy by the newspaper Free Society issued warnings pertaining to Czolgosz. Oswald never said why he killed Kennedy, saying he was a patsy.

Attempts… Richard Lawrence tried to kill Andrew Jackson. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity. two Puerto Rican Nationalists attempted to kill Truman. Samuel Byck apparently planned to kill Nixon by crashing a commercial airliner into the White House. He suffered from severe bouts of depression after his wife divorced him and after experiencing many business failures. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, drew a Colt .45 caliber pistol on Ford. John Hinckley, Jr. shot Reagan to impress actress Jodie Foster.

Of course there are more. It seems to me that most if not all of the assassinations and attempted assassinations on presidents are not motivated by leftist politics, but rather are motivated by people being crazy.

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179Bakunin on Aug 24, 2009 at 8:59 pm:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Barack_Obama_assassination_scare_in_Denver

The Centre for Research on Globalisation, a Montreal-based website about social and economic issues, said the alleged assassination plot received “oddly…little coverage”[24] in the American mainstream media and said foreign news agencies in Russia, Lebanon and Israel provided more detailed coverage. The Centre suggested a media blackout had been initiated against the story, although it did not specify whether it was implemented by the government or willingly by the press.[24] Robert Arend, a writer with OpEdNews, said within two months of the alleged plot, media coverage of the trio had dropped so much, “those three creeps dropped into the bottomless pit of media obscurity.”[25]

MSM strikes again, always covering up threats to bush…err… never mind.

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180Dave Surls on Aug 25, 2009 at 1:46 am:

#177

Just about all political assassins and would be assassins are left wingers or totally nuts.

But, I repeat myself.

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181ET on Aug 26, 2009 at 6:56 am:

Excellent work, Zombie!
Please keep it up.
Thank you.
ET.

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182rush on Aug 26, 2009 at 1:20 pm:

Bush, Cheney and Rove should still hang…

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183chad on Aug 26, 2009 at 7:22 pm:

anyone notice how the link to the united states code in which he says threatening a president is illegal only cites mailing a letter that threatens the life of a president? i didnt read the rest of the article. if i notice a writer has not properly done his research or is directly misleading in the first paragraph, i stop reading. not sure which it is, but one of the two has to be true.

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184Dave Surls on Aug 26, 2009 at 8:32 pm:

“anyone notice how the link to the united states code in which he says threatening a president is illegal only cites mailing a letter that threatens the life of a president?”

It’s against the law to threaten the life of the POTUS…period. More than one statute covers this.

For example:

U.S. Code 41.879

(a) Whoever knowingly and willfully threatens to kill, kidnap, or inflict bodily harm upon—

(1) a former President or a member of the immediate family of a former President;

(2) a member of the immediate family of the President, the President-elect, the Vice President, or the Vice President-elect;

(3) a major candidate for the office of President or Vice President, or a member of the immediate family of such candidate; or

(4) a person protected by the Secret Service under section 3056 (a)(6);
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

The POTUS is covered under section 4 (i.e. he’s one of the people protected by the Secret Service per section 3056(a)(6)).

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00000879—-000-.html

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185zombie on Aug 27, 2009 at 7:42 am:

#182 chad

anyone notice how the link to the united states code in which he says threatening a president is illegal only cites mailing a letter that threatens the life of a president? i didnt read the rest of the article. if i notice a writer has not properly done his research or is directly misleading in the first paragraph, i stop reading. not sure which it is, but one of the two has to be true.

No, you stopped reading because you’re inattentive and have reading comprehension problems. Did you even bother to actually read the link? It says:

“(a) Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits for conveyance in the mail or for a delivery from any post office or by any letter carrier any letter, paper, writing, print, missive, or document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States, the President-elect, the Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President of the United States, or the Vice President-elect, or knowingly and willfully otherwise makes any such threat against the President, President-elect, Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President, or Vice President-elect, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.”

Notice the bolded part? It covers any manner of threat, not just mailing letters. To simplify it for you, the sentence says, “Anyone who mails a threat or makes any other kind of threat against the President will get five years in jail.”

But then again, you likely are just a liberal looking for some way to excuse or justify threats against the President, so it makes perfect sense that you would intentionally mis-read a link and then use that as a phony rationale to refuse to even perceive the actual evidence.

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186Anonymous on Aug 27, 2009 at 5:10 pm:

To be clear, are you suggesting that the signs seen in the last 7 months of the Obama Presidency should be compared to the number/frequency of the signs seen in a full 8 years of a Presidency? Should we revisit this in 2016?

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187Bakunin on Aug 27, 2009 at 7:08 pm:

If the Nuremberg principles were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

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188Horse on Aug 27, 2009 at 8:26 pm:

186. Or not. You really need to substantiate an over the top statement like that one, or just don’t bother posting it.

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189Dave Surls on Aug 27, 2009 at 11:05 pm:

“If the Nuremberg principles were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”

Yeah, and if the Allies had applied their “principles” to themselves, then they would’ve hanged themselves too.

The only principle applied at Nuremburg was: You lost, now you’re screwed.

But, don’t expect me to feel sorry for the Nazis because they were on the recieving end of victor’s justice…they had it coming, in spades.

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190Don-Quixote on Aug 28, 2009 at 2:54 pm:

Zombie, thanks for the great work. Once again you drummed up the trolls and far left defenders. Your logic is excellent, fools like Squanto, LiberalTexan and others are simply left to flail weakly. The facts (and pictures) speak for themselves. Until the left can put up many more examples of Obama being threatened (which I hope does not happen) they have NOTHING to speak of and it pisses them off. Look at two reactions, one the defeat of John McCain and the defeat of John Kerry. You Zombie have an excellent photo-essay documenting the day after Kerry was defeated. I saw no right-wing protests when Obama won. To me sounds like another opportunity for a photo-essay. Keep at it!

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191LEGION on Aug 29, 2009 at 6:35 pm:

Great posting Zombie. Conservatives do their talking at the voting booth. Neutralize stinky b.o. by taking away the lib majorities in the House and Senate- then proceed with Impeachment on the charge of incompetence, if not being a traitor by destroying America by trashing its economy willfully.

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192Squanto McButterpants on Aug 30, 2009 at 11:01 pm:

Anyone notice zombie never actually addressed my point in #121?

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193Dave Surls on Aug 31, 2009 at 12:05 am:

#191

You didn’t have a point. So, there’s nothing to address.

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194Squanto McButterpants on Aug 31, 2009 at 12:37 am:

Dave, I hope for your sake you’re being deliberately dense.

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195Anonymous on Aug 31, 2009 at 4:27 am:

I appreciate your post and tone, but I do have a question. How do you know that the threats against Bush were ignored? I think it’s an assumption that the CIA would not be looking for these signs and depend on the media to bring them to their attention. I would guess that assessing such verbal threats is part of the job they do for every president. So I am not convinced that the Obama death threats are overstated because of that assumption.

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196Don-Quixote on Aug 31, 2009 at 2:54 pm:

#193 Squanto The only one who is “dense” around here is you. You seem to want to pick on one aspect of zombies essay and then do the standard deconstructionist liberal leftard action which is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It must really bug you that your cool-aid is not being swallowed. His essay is concise, the answers have already been given and you just cant accept it.

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197Squanto McButterpants on Aug 31, 2009 at 8:24 pm:

Don, my observation questions the very premise of Zombie’s essay — was the protester at the top of this story actually detained for threats against Obama, or something else such as disorderly conduct?

Lay off the invective for a minute and read post #121, then show me where zombie addressed this point.

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198Don-Quixote on Sep 1, 2009 at 2:43 pm:

Squanto, I for one can’t find what the guy was arrested for. Does it really make a difference?
It is pretty clear that during the Bush presidency there was not alot of coverage of threats made to old George. I for one hope that Obama is not being threatened, however it would seem that the liberal media loves to play up any threat to Obama. Incidentially I googled “threats against Obama” and came up with 245 million hits. I typed “threats against Bush” and came up with 162 million. Obviously considering we have had two presidents and a governor named Bush who served over 20 years in office all told it seems pretty clear that Obamas 245 million is being drummed up by someone. I suspect it has to be the fawning media.
Try it and see.

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199Squanto McButterpants on Sep 1, 2009 at 3:00 pm:

Don, yes, of course it matters why the protestor with the anti-Obama sign was actually arrested! Zombie claimed that he was arrested for his sign, and he could find no example of this happening to someone with an anti-Bush sign.

Several people gave examples of people being arrested with anti-Bush signs, but Zombie then said these people were actually arrested for something else, like disorderly conduct, and their anti-Bush sign was irrelevant.

But what if this protestor was actually arrested for disorderly conduct as well, and the anti-Obama sign was irrelevant? That would undermine the whole argument contained in the essay. When I mentioned this possibility Zombie first insulted me, and then ignored me.

As far as the high number of google hits for “threats against Obama,” I just did another google search. Try searching on “worst president ever Obama” (12.7 million hits) and “worst president ever Bush” (1.4 million hits). Is this due to the evil conservative media?

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200Kun on Sep 2, 2009 at 8:38 am:

@Dave Surls, #149:

You mention the ANC being in the Socialist International, but that’s a Social-Democratic international. Among its members are the MDC in Zimbabwe led by Tsvangirai. Whereas ZANU-PF, unlike the pro-British MDC, actually has a history of Maoism and ties with China. Not to mention that the Socialist International also includes various ruling parties in Europe.

Actual socialist (as in, explicitly Marxist) internationals would be the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (Unity & Struggle), which has, for example, the ex-guerrillas of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador; whose Democratic People’s Movement has 5 seats and 4% of the vote in the legislature. There’s also the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (which the RCPUSA is a part of) and the various Trotskyist Fourth/Fifth Internationals.

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201Dave Surls on Sep 3, 2009 at 7:59 pm:

“Don, my observation questions the very premise of Zombie’s essay — was the protester at the top of this story actually detained for threats against Obama, or something else such as disorderly conduct?”

Like I said, you didn’t have a point.

“HAGERSTOWN — The United States Secret Service on Wednesday interviewed a man who stood near the entrance of Hagerstown Community College holding signs that threatened President Obama’s life.”

“U.S. Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin held a town hall meeting on health care reform from 1 to about 2:15 p.m. Wednesday at HCC. Someone called in to report the signs between noon and 1 p.m., Capt. Pete Lazich of the Washington County Sheriff’s Department said Thursday morning.”

“The unidentified man was holding one sign that said “Death to Obama” and another that said “Death to Obama, Michelle and his two stupid kids,” Lazich said.”

“Lazich did not see the signs, but a Secret Service special agent confirmed the wording was that, or similar.”

“The first name of President Obama’s wife is Michelle. He has two school-age daughters.”

“Deputies detained the man and Secret Service agents interviewed him, Lazich said…”

http://www.herald-mail.com/?cmd=displaystory&story_id=228604&format=html

Get a clue. People saw the signs, and alerted the police. The cops arrested the guy for carrying the signs, and then handed him over to the Secret Service.

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202Squanto McButterpants on Sep 3, 2009 at 10:28 pm:

Or maybe he was detained for disorderly conduct …

http://washingtonindependent.com/55049/a-readers-encounter-with-the-death-to-obama-protester

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203Squanto McButterpants on Sep 3, 2009 at 10:54 pm:

Wow, here’s another hilarious example of fail from Zombie. He cites a Slate article as proof that a protestor was not arrested for his anti-Bush views, but if you actually read the article, it says exactly the opposite. Check it out:

http://www.slate.com/id/2107012/

Bursey was originally arrested on a trumped up trespassing charge, but once the authorities realized that wouldn’t stick since he was standing on a public street, they then charged him with refusing to leave a “restricted area” (despite the fact that hundreds of pro-Bush people were there).

So in the end it WAS his sign that got him arrested. Zombie has just provided the counter example that he was demanding. Nice work!

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204Dave Surls on Sep 3, 2009 at 11:33 pm:

#201

The stupidity of the left knows no bounds.

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205Squanto McButterpants on Sep 4, 2009 at 3:22 am:

And on that note, I’ll leave this thread to the frothing wingnuts. Have fun Dave!

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206phoenixgirl on Sep 4, 2009 at 4:06 am:

{{zombie}}

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207MacGruber on Sep 4, 2009 at 8:32 pm:

Dave, how old are you?

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208Dave Surls on Sep 4, 2009 at 11:01 pm:

“Dave, how old are you?”

Old enough to read and understand a simple news story.

Man carries sign which might be construed as a threat to our president.

Man is arrested for doing so.

End of story.

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209MacGruber on Sep 5, 2009 at 2:05 am:

So, about 19?

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210Homunculus on Sep 6, 2009 at 12:36 am:

Well done, and well put together. That took a lot of work and I appreciate the effort. It was stimulating.

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211Anonymous on Sep 6, 2009 at 8:57 pm:

“So, about 19?”

What’s your i.q. have to do with anything?

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212MacGruber on Sep 6, 2009 at 10:59 pm:

LOL. I knew this board was filled with a bunch of spoiled kids.

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213bigfurhat on Sep 8, 2009 at 11:15 pm:

@177
-Umm… Sarah Jane Moore, who tried to kill Ford said that “she was convinced the government declared war on the left.’
-Squeaky Fromme was a LEFTIST. Not my problem if she was a lunatic, you seem to have a chicken/egg quandary here. You figure that out.
-John Wilkes Booth was a Democrat. The Republican was for preserving the Union, remember? He was also an actor - nuff said.
-Guitea was batshit, fine.
-Czolgosz is CLEARLY a leftist. he would fit in nicely with todays progressives. He felt an inequality which allowed the wealthy to enrich themselves by exploiting the poor. It’s as if Obama pulled the trigger.
-Lee harvey Oswald from “fair play for Cuba” to “expatriating to Russia” it’s certainly difficult to identify his politics (rolling eyes.) His attempted assassination of General Walker, an anti-communist, kind of seals the deal here.
-Zangara attempted to kill Roosevelt saying he was on a mission to kill all capitalists. Sounds like Michael Moore.
-Truman’s attempted assassins, Collazo and Torresola, were members of the Marxist group FALN.
-Sam Byck, who tried to kill Nixon was a black panther wannabe and believed the government was conspiring to oppress the poor.
There were numerous other attempts at assassination where the people were clearly motivated by mental illness. Of the ones which weren’t, NONE were made by right-wingers. The others are either CLEARLY left-wing or “debatable.” There are NONE clearly right-wing.
Keep in mind, I didn’t originate this post. I made it as a rebuttal to the claim that “History says that Right Wingers have a higher tendency of acting out their rage than Liberals do.”>>>
An odd claim unless you rewrite history. I won’t say Truman was acting on rage, but he did kill hundreds of thousands with 2 bombs.
Don’t bother with the tit for tat type post, the lefty made the sweeping claim, did he not?

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214Anonymous on Sep 9, 2009 at 7:28 am:

Good work zombie, but you left off this glaring omission where they actually show HOW TO KILL BUSH!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEQOvyGbBtY

Was anything said? Of course not. If this was aired today about Obama, this show would be immediately cancelled, the actors thrown in jail, and the network sued.

But you know, we’re just all racist, crazy wingnuts who are just mad we “lost”. Yeah, that’s it…

There’s also this where the “actor” talks to kids about Bush in an extremely derogatory way, but yeah, we’re the nuts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-Fe-IwAPA8&feature=PlayList&p=1C5CF1B59FC8F9BE&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=18

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215Richard on Sep 9, 2009 at 7:28 am:

Good work zombie, but you left off this glaring omission where they actually show HOW TO KILL BUSH!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEQOvyGbBtY

Was anything said? Of course not. If this was aired today about Obama, this show would be immediately cancelled, the actors thrown in jail, and the network sued.

But you know, we’re just all racist, crazy wingnuts who are just mad we “lost”. Yeah, that’s it…

There’s also this where the “actor” talks to kids about Bush in an extremely derogatory way, but yeah, we’re the nuts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-Fe-IwAPA8&feature=PlayList&p=1C5CF1B59FC8F9BE&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=18

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216NH on Sep 9, 2009 at 5:12 pm:

Face it liberals don’t have a leg to stand on.

Anything is fair game after seeing this! Thanks for posting it.

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217NH on Sep 12, 2009 at 8:56 am:

If you’re all watching the march today you will see there is no comparison to the hateful signs that we see here thanks to the Zomb.

Also, a lefty who likes abortion just killed two people and intended to kill a third.

I think that makes us 6-0 in the violence dept, with the liberals winning.

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218Helen on Sep 12, 2009 at 9:14 pm:

Thanks for this. I consider this a good post with sound information. I will note though that one of your heinous protesters with terrible signs is featured throughout the display holding several different signs. It also looks as though many of the pictures were from a single rally. No matter. I appreciate your comment that NO ONE should be able to hold up signs that talk about killing a President. I agree.

To make your post analysis more thorough, I suggest you look at the difference in the use of the internet between the two presidencies. The 2008 election build up marked a new turning point in the popular use of the internet to spread political messages and images. I believe this is why you see such a disparity in the coverage of these hate posters, and that it is no big conspiracy. Simply put, there just wasn’t as much coverage of protests with hate posters on the web until this administration, and that meant there was less coverage of it in other forms of media as well. Also, the Tea Party protests are allowed to happen with much fewer restrictions than former protests of liberals against the GOP and Bush - remember the incredible clampdown on peaceful protests at the RNC Convention in Denver even last year? Hence - less protesting allowed, less coverage.

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219Anonymous on Sep 13, 2009 at 1:08 pm:

Death threats toward any sitting president are appalling whether we agree with the president or not. The death wish signs against Bush were inexcusable as are the signs against Obama. I do have one quibble with your post, however. According to my cousin, who is actually in the Secret Service and serve the past as well as the current President, all death threats against Bush, including the ones at protests you have cited here were absolutely investigated. Most of the kinds of death threats or wishes you have illustrated in your post are not found to be legitimate threats, but they were investigated. Where are you getting your information that they were not investigated?

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220Squanto McButterpants on Sep 13, 2009 at 2:15 pm:

So zombie says the protestor mentioned at the start of the story would “likely” be charged with threatening the president. On what basis did you conclude he would “likely” be charged? Was he in fact charged? Or was that all BS to make the story more dramatic?

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221Lubertus on Sep 14, 2009 at 1:29 pm:

Абалдеть!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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222Squanto McButterpants on Sep 14, 2009 at 8:41 pm:

So, you want pictures of people threatening Obama’s life with signs at protests and not getting arrested? Here you go …

http://www.flickr.com/photos/42406957@N04/3912801437/

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223ayla on Sep 15, 2009 at 2:59 pm:

I appreciate you trying to divert attention to both issues, and I agree it is unfair how treatment of the presidnets have differed both in positive and negative ways. But just to play devil’s advocate:

firstly, maybe the authorities are more stringent now that they have learned from the previous administration how serious death threats can be; had it been in the converse order, then perhaps Bush threats would have been taken more seriously. additionally, race does play a role unfortunately. Before these strong protests even came out, people were muttering about the posibility of him being assasinated. Of course the secret service is going to be more alert, because there is supposedly more at stake or more reasons for him to be harmed, than Bush did. I am not justifying that, but it is definitely a notion people have. Even if not all the violent sentiments toward Obama have not been expressed in posters, they are present elsewhere. I’ve met and seen numerous people both out in life and online, so livid toward Obama that they have begun to not so much focus on his policies, but as him as an individual. Not everyone, but a large percentage of ignorant easily swayed individuals are going beyond criticizing his actions, and simply degrading on him as an indivdual. That is when it transcends politics and just becomes an issue of hate in my mind; at least with the Bush threats most of it was motivated because of “his” war, a tangible political issue. With Obama, it is largely motivated by things which have not transpired yet, such as the hypothetical event of a total government take over, change of our way of life, and the rise of a totalitarian government. I don’t think the same amount of malice and hatred was present during Bush; I’ve heard far too many people veer off from debating his politics, and dive into debating his moral character, denouncing him because he is “muslim, a fasciest, socialist, communist, unpatriotic, and…the antichrist”. People LITERALLY beleive he is the antichrist, and not figuratively, either like with the Bush depictions of him as a devil. There was almost a sense of humor (albeit mean spirited) in some of the Bush propoganda; this time around it is incohesive, and malicious, with strong imagery which may not be accurate, but is very effective in inciting fear, xenophobia, and ultimately hatred.

Another thought, the Bush pictures are an accumulation of 8 years in office, as opposed to 9 months; naturally one will have more to show than the other.

that’s just my two cents, not claiming to be right here (afterall I was only 11 when bush came to office, so my scope of political knowledge can only go so far) , but just wanted to offer another opinion.

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224Squanto McButterpants on Sep 15, 2009 at 4:54 pm:

alya, that’s the most intelligent post in this thread. Thank you.

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225Jeff on Sep 15, 2009 at 6:17 pm:

The major weakness of the analysis is the lack of evidence. Do you have data on the number of actual threats to each and number (and percentage) investigated by the Secret Service? Anecdotes can be misleading.

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226knowerseeker on Sep 16, 2009 at 9:00 am:

Something else to consider is the type of people making the death threats. Liberal hippies tend to have a much larger bark than bite, and any physical threats they make are not likely to be followed through. Redneck conservatives, on the other hand, are violent people who usually express their violence through gunning down defenseless animals (otherwise known as “hunting”) but can be quick to turn their guns on other human beings. I spent my high school years in a redneck town, and the experience was like being in a war zone or a gang-run ghetto.

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227knowerseeker on Sep 16, 2009 at 9:02 am:

Also, how many of the Bush protestors actually brought guns to the protests?

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228Dave Surls on Sep 16, 2009 at 3:37 pm:

“Liberal hippies tend to have a much larger bark than bite, and any physical threats they make are not likely to be followed through. Redneck conservatives, on the other hand, are violent people…”

I dunno about that. I don’t see too many right wingers shooting at presidents.

Places that are chock full of liberals tend to be a lot more violent than places that aren’t (there are some exceptions…Marin County, for example is real peaceful).

http://stats.doj.ca.gov/cjsc_stats/prof07/00/11.pdf

San Francisco, home of the 60’s hippie movement…and, also the murder capital of California…and San Francisco is not exactly what you would call redneck conservative.

“I spent my high school years in a redneck town, and the experience was like being in a war zone or a gang-run ghetto.’

Something tells me you haven’t spent a whole lot of time in the ghetto.

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229Anonymous on Sep 17, 2009 at 2:20 pm:

Thanks for compiling this. I’ve referred to it multiple times in debates. It’s incredibly convenient.

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230Dave Surls on Sep 17, 2009 at 4:27 pm:

I’m not slamming on hippies, btw, seeing as how I am one.

Still have long hair.

Still wear tie-dye.

Still listen to the Grateful Dead.

I’m a hippie…just not a left wing hippie.

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231jeff on Sep 17, 2009 at 5:23 pm:

AMAZING. FOR 8 YEARS BUSH WAS PROTESTED. AND THE TEA BAGGERS HAVE ALREADY MET THE QUOTA 7 MONTHS!!! AND I’M SURE HALF THE POSTERS OF KILL OBAMA!!! AREN’T FROM THE SAME ONE GUY.

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232Don-Quixote on Sep 17, 2009 at 6:21 pm:

Wow I am amazed this thread is still chugging along. I will have to check it more often.
#222 Squanto and #223 Ayla.
First Squanto, your picture is really, really lame. Your not helping your case. Where is your proof that guy was not arrested? Two can play your game buddy.
What is your response to the movie the leftists put out showing the assasination of Bush? Gimme a break. The media in this country howled about Wilson calling Obama a liar. What would they say about a mock movie showing that kind of rubbish? You dont seem to get that treament of this kind is wrong with ANY president. The Media just pays attention more when it’s someone that they are ga-ga for.
Zombie proved his point. Deal with it.
Ayla you may have seen a “sense of humor” in Liberals treament of Bush, I for one did not. How can you say that after looking at Zombies pictures? Sure some of the material is mocking and sarcastic but the fact remains HE WAS OUR PRESIDENT! The media and the new left is screaming about Obama being treated with some of the uglyness that was once given to Bush. Have you ever heard the phrase what comes around goes around? Disagreeing with the president is one thing but threatening the president no matter what the party is wrong. These Acorn fools and far left wacko’s are simply reaping a little of what they sowed for eight years under the Bush presidency.
In my opinion it simply reflects the general coursening of society, but that is a discussion for another day.

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233Don-Quixote on Sep 17, 2009 at 6:26 pm:

#228 Dave
Dave, Liberal counties are often the big cities, which frown heavily on self-defense. Look at Chicago or Washington D.C. You can’t own a handgun in either and they have some of the highest murder rates in the country. When your a bad guy and you break into a house where the people arent supposed to defend themselves it’s kinda easy picking you know? Crime rates are way down in most conservative neighborhoods because people know that they just might get shot. Just my opinion.

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234Anonymous on Sep 17, 2009 at 6:33 pm:

So Whats the point.

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235Brent on Sep 17, 2009 at 7:30 pm:

mickster
“Geez,you’re right. Some these signs are appalling. On the down side tho Bush did lie us into a war that has cost $1 trillion + dollars and claimed going on 5,000 american lives. So if you were pissed enough about that to carry a sign I wouldn’t blame you the right to be immensely angry. On the other side Obama has written no legislation, nothing has been passed, and if you read the pending legislation you would realize that the facts of the bill contradict the lies that so many believe. So use your head for something else than a place to attach your hat.”

You claim that Bush lied, but the most quoted reason is the Yellow Cake that was talked about in his state of union address. He stated that British Intelligence belive that Iran was trying to purchase Yellow Cake. This was not a lie. Brittian Intelligence still stands by their claim. In addition, most democrats voted to go to war. They had access to the same intelligence that Bush had. It was President Clinton who also claimed while in the White House that Iraq had WMDs. It was the leader of Iraq who made every impression that he had WMDs. It was the leader of Iraq that locked out the inspectors. It was the UN that wrote 17 resolutions against Iraq for WMDs. It was congress that voted to give Bush approval to go to war. You can claim that Bush lied, but it was not a lie that got us in that war. If it was, Clinton, the UN, congress and a whole lot of others where fooled by the lie. You could argue that it was a lie that got us in the war, but that lie was by the Iraq leader who was using the threat of WMDs to control his people. After all, he had already used WMDs on his own people in the past.

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236Anonymous on Sep 18, 2009 at 6:32 am:

Alas, so much work and the mind numb obamatrons will never ever admit to anything. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you throw at them. They will always believe they have a way to pick up the clean end of a turd.

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237Anonymous on Sep 19, 2009 at 1:46 am:

Good research on the threats against GWB. He was, after all, the Worst President Ever™.

Your theory that the increase in threats is due to the liberal media’s reporting on them doesn’t work for me, because I’m a liberal and I know the media is not liberally biased.

In my experiece the only people who think the media is liberally biased are people who have a problem about liberal–as ofen as not, people who foam at the mouth when they talk about liberals.

Liberals never think the media is liberally biased. If the media were liberally biased, the liberals would know–and they would be happier with it.

Note also that
1) GWB was the most unpopular President in American history, while Obama remains popular. How odd that deat threats would increase under a popular President.
2) the rate of hate hate crimes, violence against Hispanics, and gun and ammo sales have also skyrocketed since Obama took office. This is consistent with the theory that the right are sore losers who are simply having a hissy snit.

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238Perry Logan on Sep 19, 2009 at 1:48 am:

Whoops. That last comment was from me. Didn’t mean to be anonymous.

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239Herm on Sep 19, 2009 at 8:05 am:

And a Maori tribesman once set a bush on fire while lighting his pipe - and was not investigated, as far as I can tell.

Continuing to pretend that full-blown racism is not driving the threats against Obama is not laying the groundwork you desire. The threats against Bush were not racist in nature. The threats against Obama are racist-driven.

If you had a point to make, you failed. Maybe you should try fiction. Oh, wait, you just did.

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240Dave Surls on Sep 19, 2009 at 9:23 am:

“1) GWB was the most unpopular President in American history”

Also the most popular president “in American history” (if popular means highest approval rating)…or at least the most popular since Gallup started polling back in the 1930s.

What does that tell you?

Americans are a fickle lot…and, that’s about all it tells you.

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241earl on Sep 19, 2009 at 10:47 am:

concidering how the history of racism. and the threats to Obama during the presidential race… there is a distinct differance in the two scenarios.. with bush.. thats self explanitory… with Obama. it has a great smell of racism especially given the fact that people were actually showing up carrying weapons to speaches and to town halls.. the right wing causing a lot of this due to its own bigotry and more than likely ties to kkk ideaology.. makes this whole argument moot.. you cannot compare what happened with Obama with what and why people were calling for bushes head..

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242Dave Surls on Sep 19, 2009 at 12:24 pm:

#241

The above would likely cause a logician’s brain to melt.

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243Anonymous on Sep 20, 2009 at 2:39 am:

Incredible……I can not believe the blatant double standard

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244Loren on Sep 20, 2009 at 7:21 am:

Interesting, after yet more great research, the end argument will still likely be that all people who dislike Obama as president are racist. Logic problem anyone? President Obama is black, therefore all protests are racially motivated. Ridiculous. I’ll tell you right now. When I first heard Obama speak, I noticed he was very charismatic and he had big ears, not that he was black. Did I notice subconsciously? Most definitely, as I do believe most people would in the way they would notice a person is short or tall without necessarily forming judgments to that fact.

It is both unfair and illogical to group what I would believe to be the majority of Obama protestors in with those who are racist. However, death threats against the Commander-in-Chief, no matter if one personally agrees or disagrees with the Presidents policies, are unacceptable and unpatriotic. The United States has a system in place to allow these people to express their distaste in policy. It’s called voting and protesting, the freedom of speech and to peaceably assemble.

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245Dave Surls on Sep 20, 2009 at 10:53 am:

“President Obama is black, therefore all protests are racially motivated.”

Half of African descent, which means that only 50% of anti-Obama protests are racially motivated.

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246JD on Sep 21, 2009 at 10:31 am:

#241 Earl

I for one only disagree with the policies formed by President Obama’s white heritage. I’m still giving his black heritage the benefit of the doubt…. I’m white, does that absolve me of the racist claim? Or since I’ve stated that I’m not racist does that automatically make me racist by ignorance?

KKK Ideology? really? Which party still has a former member of the KKK sitting in a Senate seat? I’ll give you a hint….it’s not the racist right wingers.

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247sloreali on Sep 21, 2009 at 11:43 am:

Почитала очень много интересных мнений. Многих поддерживаю

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248Bart on Sep 21, 2009 at 6:45 pm:

If the threat level against President Obama is greater than it was against President Bush, might I suggest it could be because the type of yahoos who make those kinds of threats have a lot more time on their hands now that President Obama has thoroughly flushed the economy down the toilet?

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249Bill Eastland on Sep 22, 2009 at 8:44 am:

Zombie–You have done a great service to those of us who struggle to convice our fellow citizens that civility in public discourse is the preferable route to the resolution of political differences. I am glad I found your site, I will cite it often.

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250D on Sep 22, 2009 at 7:40 pm:

A sign that says “Death to Obama” is a hardly a direct threat against the President (or anyone else’s) life. There is therefore nothing for the Secret Service to charge the sign holder with.

My God, Zombie! You display all the stupidity typical of conservatives. A law which grants presidents (and those in the line of presidential succession) protections that the law would NEVER grant an ordinary citizen must be enforced, why it just must be, simply because some Congress put it on the books. And then you give it the most authoritarian interpretation possible.

Get out of California. Living with the Lefties there is obviously driving you insane.

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251Pascal on Sep 23, 2009 at 5:40 am:

Let’s be honest here. No one believes the President is being threatened. Just as no one believed Bush was being threatened by signs and protests.

What we have is another run-of-the-mill gotcha on the Democrats who never wander outside the safe walls of “mainstream media” and were shocked to see anti-Obama signs on their browser home page (i.e. CNN). An occasional glance at Drudge or Fox or the NY Post over the past 20 years would have informed Dems that “Death to (insert POTUS name here)” is nothing new and certainly not racist.

Adding insult to injury, the lamest of the Democrat foot soldiers post to boards like this one with incoherent logic about why their signs AREN”T threats and anti-Obama signs ARE threats. It’s really very embarrassing.

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252granddadfrog on Sep 23, 2009 at 6:34 am:

Your point is well documented. We are very aware of the double standard of the left-leaning media, and that is one of the reasons that these papers are beginning to fail. Americans are realizing that the media has been twisting the news, not reporting it. As for Bush being the worst president ever, this is the opinion of college professors, the overwhelming majority being liberal–the same as the main-stream reporters.

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253Dave Surls on Sep 23, 2009 at 9:19 am:

“Let’s be honest here. No one believes the President is being threatened.”

We’ve had 44 presidents, and four of those have been murdered while in office.

I would regard anyone carrying a sign saying “Death to Obama” as a threat.

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254fierclymoderate on Sep 23, 2009 at 1:04 pm:

Perhaps all of us, left and right, should stand up to these fringe-based radicals (left and right) to allow room for a substantial dialogue. We all risk making a mockery of our own parties and ideals by directing so much petty attention to -who got in trouble for what, who is the medias favorite, whose signs were more offensive or threatening- While this essay was a good
reminder for keeping our hypocrisies at bay, and our senses alerted regarding the ethical treatment of politicians from both parties, I wished for more concrete examples in terms of arrests (or lack thereof) of Bush protesters and would have appreciated citations for all mentioned stats. However, I felt this article lacked the hostility and cruelty that has been so evident particularly as of late, during the Bush presidency, and perhaps for the majority of our political history. While this essay certainly had a undercurrent that flowed in Republican favor, I still believe it to be constructive, to the point, and informative. However- let our comments here reflect the same professionalism. The bickering, the name calling, the vindictive attacking does no benefit to either party. We belittle ourselves to the level of the fringe and our opinions begin to reek of ignorance and partisan propaganda. It is well and good to point out the flaws of the media, but to a point. We must force ourselves to acknowledge the real problem. We must pay regard to the notion that media’s coverage of these outrageous displays of so-called “patriotism” would be irrelevant and non-existent if we made it our goal to stop the threatening, unpatriotic displays made by these radicals (again, left and right). Our silence can be just as threatening. And if both parties claim to be figure-headed by intellect, fairness, and justice - then let us, the people who these parties represent, begin to embody these principles in attempts to gain something substantial for our country to work towards. We must learn to conduct diplomatic conversations and refrain from deeming the other side as evil. Hitler should in no way be attached to the names of our elected officials (right or left) and we must remember the atrocities of our worlds history and be sympathetic to the parties afflicted by those events. I don’t want to deem anyone incapable of holding an intelligent conversation or pigeon-hole anyone (right or left) into the stereotypes that their party projects. However - If we cannot accomplish this on a a comment board via the internet, I worry that death-threats against the President (past, present, and future) will be another unfortunate reality of the political status quo.

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255ritetrack on Sep 23, 2009 at 1:12 pm:

i still, to this day, can not get a reasonable explanation from a liberal/democrat as to why pelosi and the dems didn’t stop the war in iraq…. they came to power and pretty much “owned” congress during bush’s 2nd term… they could have cut off funding and stopped the war at any time, but they didn’t…

the only conclusion that i can find (by doing my own research) is that it was political… they raised holy hell about bush, about chaney… they all joined in with some of the most despicable rhetoric, threats and actions towards a sitting president…. their antics, words, and threats were criminal… they cause civil unrest among the people…and they loved it…. yet they never did anything to de-fund the war…. bunch of cowards and weenies… whole lot talk… no action….. empty and devoid of all conscience, of all substance, of any morals

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256Pascal on Sep 23, 2009 at 2:17 pm:

“We’ve had 44 presidents, and four of those have been murdered while in office.
I would regard anyone carrying a sign saying “Death to Obama” as a threat.”

Your logic escapes me. This page has hundreds of pix of “Death to Bush” signs and he WASN’T assassinated. It seems easier to prove the argument that protestors with harsh signs are likely NOT to be a threat.

To wit, crying about “threatening signs” only serves to squelch protest and limit free speech.

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257Ivyfree on Sep 23, 2009 at 3:57 pm:

I’d like to point out that most protests against Bush were not reported at all. It took me a couple of years into the Bush maladministration to find political blogs and realize that no, the rest of the US did NOT love Bush, there were plenty of people out here who realized what an incompetent, meanspirited oaf he is- it’s just that none of it was making the mainstream media, who were so busy being all patriotic and asskissing that they wouldn’t show protesters… until Bush’s actions were so egregiously vile that even the MSM, conservative though it tends to be, were forced to occasionally comment on it.

No. I do not support death threats against Bush. However, I do believe he should be arrested and tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and, if found guilty, executed. But it should be done legally. Only where can you find an impartial jury when three-quarters of the world’s population hate his guts? I’ve thought for some time that very few humans have been hated as much as Bush is. What kept him safe isn’t the Secret Service (who have announced a 400% increase in death threats from Bush to Obama), but the fact that nobody conscious wanted Cheney in the presidency.

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258Dave Surls on Sep 23, 2009 at 5:08 pm:

‘To wit, crying about “threatening signs” only serves to squelch protest and limit free speech.’

Boo hoo.

I’m all for squelching protest and limiting free speech when it comes to calling for the president’s death.

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259Dave Surls on Sep 23, 2009 at 5:31 pm:

“However, I do believe he should be arrested and tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and, if found guilty, executed.”

Who cares what terrorist-loving, leftist traitors believe?

It isn’t relevant to anything in the real world.

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260Pascal on Sep 24, 2009 at 5:54 am:

As a conservative, I ask all posters to forgive the rantings of Dave Surl on this board. While he may share many valuable views with conservatives, he appears to be of that reactionary, volatile ilk that finds a liberal conspiracy in everything and a field of battle in every gray area of debate.

I guess it’s the Beck-Hannity-O’Reilly influence that compels otherwise thinking individuals to brandish their swords and respond emphatically to virtually any topic that they can include in the “conservative-vs-liberal debate”. The FoxNews hosts serve a great purpose and have mobilized people against terrible threats like healthcare reform, but some of us are a little tired of encountering the combative cable rant style at every turn and on every comment board.

Conservatives are smarter than liberals. Conservatives are defending liberty and free markets. But, damn it, I wish they’d “pick their battles” or “dial it down a notch”. It’s starting to look like a club even its founders might resign from.

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261Anonymous on Sep 24, 2009 at 6:45 am:

Good article. I think there is a difference though. Not a difference to excuse either side but a difference in the stigma that an effigy of Obama carries as opposed to one of Bush. Frankly, I don’t think people believe protesters who carry effigy of Obama that they are doing it purely in the name of politics, again, not that that would excuse it either, but after all the talk of race and religion that we saw in opposition of Obama, it only adds to the tension. When I look at a picture of a lynching effigy of Bush, something as superficial as race doesn’t even come to mind, whereas an assassination effigy of Obama clearly brings back a bad history. That’s not to say there isn’t a history of presidential assassinations over political issues, but I think the idea of assassinations over race makes people EVEN MORE uncomfortable, let alone the idea of assassination at all.

I don’t think it necessarily has anything to do with the media other than them trying to play on sensationalism. This is a gold mine for them.

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262Dave Surls on Sep 24, 2009 at 8:44 am:

“As a conservative, I ask all posters to forgive the rantings of Dave Surl on this board. While he may share many valuable views with conservatives, he appears to be of that reactionary, volatile ilk…”

LOL.

Yeah, I tend to get a little testy when some idiot is going around carrying a sign calling for the death of President Obama, his wife and their two children.

First of all, it happens to be illegal to do that. Second of all, neither President Obama, his wife nor their two kids have done anything that merits calling for their deaths.

Also, I haven’t done anything wrong, so I don’t need to be forgiven.

“…that finds a liberal conspiracy in everything”

No, I don’t find a liberal conspiracy in everything., If I did, I would say so. LIke a lot of people, I see a bias in the way that the so-called mainstream media reports news, and the reason that I see it is because it exists.

“and a field of battle in every gray area of debate.”

Hey, sport, if you don’t want people to disagree with your opinions…then don’t express them.

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263Anonymous on Sep 28, 2009 at 6:35 am:

This Web page or rather “scrollpage” is really out of date as far as web design is concerned. Content is very interesting however. Web site should be designed so the reader can navigate through content more easily.

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264Mike on Sep 29, 2009 at 1:20 am:

Funny how it’s okay to threaten Bush for nearly 8 years but when it comes to Obama the shit hits the fan.

Liberals are pussies

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265partisanshipkills on Sep 29, 2009 at 9:53 am:

jummy 64 to inform you lenin didn’t actually believe that communism would work as stated, “Although the NEP successfully rebuilt industry and re-established agriculture, it provoked ideologic discontent in the Russian Communist Party that later allowed Stalin to reverse Lenin’s pragmatic mixed economy NEP.”

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266partisanshipkills on Sep 29, 2009 at 10:03 am:

Ridge also admitted that Osama assisted in Bush’s reelection due to the releasing of another of his videos, which helped give the administration to raise the threat level and some, God knows why, miracle temporarily raise his popularity and get him re-elected. Also Ridge also doesn’t necessarily say this but Osama considered Bush his greatest Taliban enlistor.

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267Timur on Sep 29, 2009 at 2:19 pm:

Одни комплементы, хоть бы кто чего умного написал…

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268Anonymous on Sep 30, 2009 at 5:11 am:

I want you to know that I am so very happy that you have this web page, I read todays NYTimes and that Super Lib Tommy Friedman is expressing his fear of barrys well being do to the right winged hate mongers. He never had a similar fear under 8 yrs of “W”. I actually wrote to him today and sent him your link….Our Pres has all the media support any human could dream of yet he is not being supported by the PEOPLE. Imagine if they would actually tell us truth & facts about this guy and his friends & his poor policies…..be strong and continue with what your doing.

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269Anonymous on Sep 30, 2009 at 11:12 pm:

f–k bush, rnc, dick, rush, fox network, rednecks, 8 years of fuc up’s! if something happends 2 tha big “O” u will see race roit like none seen before! get a life!

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270Anonymous on Sep 30, 2009 at 11:15 pm:

also fuc mike & tha rest of them sore loser!

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271TyrannyResponse on Oct 1, 2009 at 6:55 am:

FANTASTIC and GEAT JOB!

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272Jim Anchower on Oct 1, 2009 at 9:27 pm:

If blogs were a scent, this would be a fart.

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273Vasmosn on Oct 1, 2009 at 10:34 pm:

Zombie, I appreciate greatly this post. I don’t agree with your premise but it certainly gives one something to think about. I am disappointed however, in how you claim to try to be neutral and dispassionate and yet resort to bashing liberals anyway. I thought that this would be the place to actually discuss and try to reason out why there are such differences between liberals and conservatives but it can’t happen in such an atmosphere. While I’m here, I feel I have to comment on a few errors in the thread. While Abraham Lincoln may have been a Republican, he was FAR from a conservative, as were most Republicans then. If you examine what the term “conservative” means and take it out of the current day context of equaling Republican, you’ll see that. In much the same way, the current member of the Senate that was in the KKK is a holdover from that time when it was the Democrats that were the true conservatives. The Black Panthers are a poor choice to illustrate violence from the left, as there was much more violence thrust upon them than they gave out, and by our own government as well. Finally, I am really disturbed lately by the knee-jerk reaction that the words “socialism” and “communism” seem to bring. It is not as if these are the words to summon Satan but you would think so from listening to some people. These are SYSTEMS devised by human beings just as capitalism is. None are perfect and I believe that for the most part, it is who and how each system is implemented that makes it “good” or “bad.” Keep in mind, these aren’t even forms of government but economic systems. With government, I think most people agree that democracy is best but there have been other systems that have served its people well just as there have been some pretty bad democratic states. To put it in a Christian perspective, heaven will NOT be a democracy but I think it will be well-run. Again, I really appreciated seeing the other side of the issue and I will have to readjust my own thinking some. Not that much, but some. Perhaps when all the name-calling dials down there could be some meaningful conversation.

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2745th Estate on Oct 2, 2009 at 9:47 am:

zombie,

Having done some pretty nifty photo-shopping myself ( not to falsify, but for satirical purposes), with my eye I don’t see any falsifying manipulation in the photos you’ve posted ( and I’ve looked at ‘the contextual’ galleries too) and the accusations of Photoshop manipulation that some commenters have made here are noticeably arbitrary and noticieably absent of evidence to support such claims.

I commend your extensive thought and extensive research on this —despite the Internet’s facilitation of such research it still takes a lot of time and time waits for no blogger, given the unfortunate trend to post first and often (a cue taken from the mass-media).

However, there’s a lot in your post with which I find considerable fault, and I’m working on a post of my own in that regard. But thanks for your inadvertent contribution to a subject that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while. Having found your post I’ve found found some initial suppositions in my draft-notes to be in need of adjustment or indeed invalid, so many thanks for the perspectives and sources you have provided in your article which should improve mine .

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275Anonymous on Oct 3, 2009 at 2:52 am:

Bush will go down as the most hated US president ever….Flawed policies and greed for oil..

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276Anonymous on Oct 3, 2009 at 6:23 am:

Bush was a great President!

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277the problem child on Oct 5, 2009 at 5:01 pm:

Some interesting research you have here. I must question your starting premise, however, that the Secret Service is relying on the media to the exclusion of other sources (or even largely relying on the media) for information about threats. I believe that a great many of the “tips” the Secret Service receives are from private citizens. Perhaps you need to consider that while President Bush, for a time at least, had the support of the people, it was a passive support. The American people did not feel fiercely protective of President Bush. President Obama, on the other hand, has inspired much more “active” support; his supporters care about him as a person as well as as a politician.

I do think that media reports have played into this: When MSM reports a 400% increase in threats to the President, his supporters are more likely to view threats to him as genuinely threatening (whether they are right or wrong in this assumption) and the consider it worth taking the time to take a cell phone picture or bookmark a blog, and pop off an e-mail to the Secret Service.

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278Anonymous on Oct 5, 2009 at 6:24 pm:

man, you need to get a life.

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279KilgoreTrout on Oct 7, 2009 at 1:05 pm:

Threats/hatred to Bush were politically driven. Threats/hatred to Obama are politically, racially, and religiously driven. Conservatives simply have more hate in them right now.

Oh the media isn’t trying to scrub stories about threats?
http://mediamatters.org/blog/200909250006

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280TCL on Oct 8, 2009 at 2:32 pm:

The Kill Obama Facebook poll “shocked and dismayed” many of my liberal friends. I too was interested in pulling together photos showing Bush Hatred. Zombie, I have to say, has the best collection I’ve seen so far. (I borrowed some of the pictures on this site for one blog entry.) I thought I would contribute to the cause as well so I pulled together a few Kill Bush screenshots from Facebook.

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281Anonymous on Oct 10, 2009 at 3:21 am:

I recall an 80ish-year old man being questioned by the Secret Service because he made an anti-Bush comment and many others. I also think you did not fully cover the number of threats against Obama at the tea parties and town hall meetings. A guy showed up with a loaded gun, he was questioned but still. I f someone had shown up with a gun at a Bush event he would probably have been sent to Guantanamo, no trial, no nothing.

According to the Secret Service Obama receives 400 times as many death threats as Bush did. So, I leave it at that.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/5967942/Barack-Obama-faces-30-death-threats-a-day-stretching-US-Secret-Service.html

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282hughjass on Oct 10, 2009 at 11:29 am:

You just follow the same guy around and take pictures of him with different poorly-written signs? I’m convinced.

LOL!

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283Anonymous on Oct 11, 2009 at 10:33 pm:

You are an idiot. Do you not remember the thousands that were arrested en mass at large protests? The people confined to “free speech zones” or the people in NYC at the republican national convention that were just swept up on the streets in kept in holding for days?

Go fuck yourself you idiot.

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284Anonymous on Oct 12, 2009 at 2:41 pm:

What it comes down to is the ludicrous double standard. Has Cindy Sheehan quit protesting? No, she has not. Why is that fact no longer “newsworthy?” Ask the lovely and talented Charlie Gibson:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/ABCs-Charles-Gibson-to-Cindy-Sheehan-Thanks-for-your-sacrifice-Now-get-lost-53803917.html
I fully agree with free speech; I think the President of the United States at this point in time is fully unprepared to handle the job. He is making Carter look successful, and that is a shame. On the other hand, you get what you pay for.
He was elected, and if you disagree with his policies you are a racist. So knock it off and just start agreeing.
What are you, a racist?
At some point it becomes the question of “Have you stopped beating your wife?”
A.Yes, I think the guy has terrible ideas; I am a racist.
B. No, he is a great guy but did nothing (ever) to deserve the Nobel Prize. I am still a racist. And apparently I beat my wife. Even though I am unmarried. I likely beat my non-existent kids as well.
I should hate myself.

There is no answer that appeases the media now.
CNN fact-checked Saturday Night Live and broadcast the results.
There are two answers to any qustion at this point in time;
Q;Why is it so cold?
A; Global warming
Q;Why is it so hot?
A; Global warming
Q;Why does it rain so much?
A;Global warming
Q;Why doesn’t it ever rain?
A;Global warming
The polar bear population has increased 5-fold over the last 20 years. Please inform Mr. Gore.
Q;Why do you dislike Obama?
A;Global warming-sorry, I could not help myself with that one.
Actual A; Well, he has not kept 1 campaign promise. Lobbyists, earmarks, Afghanistan, gay rights, extradition, unemployment numbers, reform for ethics…the list is huge.
He is not good for the country, to make a long story short.

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285Anonymous on Oct 13, 2009 at 10:26 am:

The U.S. Code can say whatever it wants, but that law has been nullified by the SCOTUS again-and-again. Death threats are protected speech under the First Amendment.

The only time it’s not protected is when you’re carrying a gun or knife or other weapon, in which case the threat is not just speech, but a potential murder about to happen.

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286Anonymous on Oct 16, 2009 at 12:46 am:

Sorry Zombie, but your comparison of death threats against the presidents overlook various significant points of distinction, including this very obvious one: Most of the photos you present in which protesters call for Bush to be killed were captured in 2007 and 2008, meaning toward the end of his second term, when people had reasons to be upset about his policies (which isn’t to say that their calls for his head are appropriate). He did lie about WMD in Iraq. He did fuck up the Katrina response. He did politicize the justice department. He did fail to capture bin laden. He did fail to prevent the worst recession since the Great Depression …
I can understand if people don’t like Obama’s policies, if they’re worried about losing Medicare benefits, if they’re worried about not being able to buy guns, if they’re worried about not being able to say prayers, etc. — but none of their fears are at all rational, because Obama has signed no laws that affect Medicare, gun purchases, prayers, etc.
So why do they want to kill him less than six months (summer Tea baggers) into office without his having signed any significant bills?
I agree that threatened violence against the president is an improper (and in some cases illegal) response to political disagreements, but the comparison of the Bush haters from 2007/2008, when Bush was in office 7+ years, and the Obama haters, when he was in office less than 7 months, lacks a sound foundation.

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287Anonymous on Oct 21, 2009 at 12:27 pm:

The chief difference was that GWB is a decent man and knew that his opponents weren’t capable of doing anything they were not told to do on their own. On the other hand, this administration knows that true patriotism differs from whiny juvenile tactics used on the Left since American Patriotism historically reacts in kind against a formidable attempt to change the fabric and traditions of this nation. The “Silent Majority” has been jostled and really “Big Sticks” stand at the ready if and when the APPROPRIATE conditions coalesce. This is not a threat; this is an historical fact. I hope peace prevails forever. But I’m also mature and educated enough to know it would be the first time in American History that was the case.

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288soundbounder on Oct 22, 2009 at 4:23 pm:

How come when I Google “arrest threat President Bush” I see all kinds of cases where people were arrested for protesting President Bush.
One couple was even arrested for wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt.
To claim that no one was arrested for protesting President Bush is bogus!
What a distortion of history!

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289zombie on Oct 22, 2009 at 4:43 pm:

soundbounder: How come when I Google “arrest threat President Bush” I see all kinds of cases where people were arrested for protesting President Bush.
One couple was even arrested for wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt.
To claim that no one was arrested for protesting President Bush is bogus!
What a distortion of history!

I see you failed basic reading comprehension.

Read the title of the post again — “Death Threats Against Bush at Protests Ignored for Years” — then actually read the essay, which makes it perfectly clear that I’m talking about threats AT PROTESTS only.

What’s “a distortion of history” is you purposely trying to distort what I wrote in order to dismiss an imaginary argument.

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290r4 card on Oct 24, 2009 at 2:05 am:

Hi ,
I am so very happy that you have this web page, I read todays NYTimes and that Super Lib Tommy Friedman is expressing his fear of barrys well being do to the right winged hate mongers.

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291Corby on Nov 6, 2009 at 9:16 am:

Considering that the right is much more likely to actually kill someone based on their political/religious beliefs (see: Holocaust Museum, abortion doctors, etc), death threats from them are much more credible, steeped, as they are, in racism and bigotry.

Also, there’s that little fact that they’ve been buying up ammunition in some misguided attempt to save their gun rights even though Obama has done NOTHING to stop them (and likely will DO nothing to stop them), and Fox News tends to rile up the base to a frothing frenzy with as many lies and distortions they can pack into a “opinion” show, and again, the threats start to become more credible.

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292TheFrankFactor.com on Nov 6, 2009 at 11:30 am:

Zombie, interesting thread and this is off topic but… you said you came from or previously had some association with the Left and don’t necessarily wear a Republican hat (paraphrasing) . After a casual perusal of your site can you share what, if any, Liberal, left-leaning, Progressive views you might have? I, umm, can’t really get there from here.

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293Aj on Nov 18, 2009 at 3:50 pm:

Why this boilerplate? I’m asking surely for curiosity. Did your attorney suggest that you put in this boilerplate?

“Let me make this perfectly clear:

I am not publishing this essay in order to make excuses for anyone who has threatened President Obama, or who plans to threaten him in the future.

This is not some wrongheaded attempt at a tu quoque logical fallacy; in other words, I’m not trying to claim that death threats against Bush in the past justify threats against Obama now.”

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294Scotty on Nov 24, 2009 at 8:22 am:

You lost any journalistic integrety with the following passage: “Yet for reasons that are not entirely clear, none of those Bush-threateners at protests was ever arrested, questioned, or investigated (at least as far as I could tell)”.

Example: The Yankees have never won a World Series (at least as far as I can tell).

The point is, you then say anything that you want without doing the research. Do you actually believe that not a single anti-Bush protester was arrested during his term? REALLY??? Doing a quick Google search (that’s true journalism, eh?) finds several stories of anti-Bush protestors being arrested even after the 2008 election. To assume that no one was arrested while he was in office is ridiculous. Of course, you wouldn’t have a story then.

Gosh, I sure hope the Yankees can win a World Series some day!

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295Nokiaman on Dec 20, 2009 at 4:06 pm:

Very useful post.Thanks!

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296jorzef on Dec 22, 2009 at 5:45 pm:

There is, of course, another explanation which is just as plausible: the media did not want to show opposition to a war-time president; they wanted to give the impression that the country was united behind the president and the wars the US was fighting.

Seems to me, the media is playing up dissatisfaction with Obama–people are mad as hell, is the message.

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297lefty twoshoes on Jan 21, 2010 at 9:27 am:

nice photos. however. there is are a few things you’re leaving out.
1- not to excuse the actual “death threats” [mostly made by one bearded guy, as far as I can tell] but, most of the anti bush rhetoric was directly related to the invasion of iraq. many of these same people would have reacted to obama in a similar way had the invasion happened during his admin. sadly bush earned much of the anger by his actions, while simply getting elected was enough for many of the threats against obama to materialize. you are presenting a false equivalence. angrily protesting and threatening a president initiating a bloody invasion and occupation is somewhat more understandable [but not excusable] than protesting a president who did not.

2- you claim that “every” threat against obama is followed up on. perhaps you could produce the FBI credentials that show you are in a position to be privy to the info to make this claim.

3- wanted “dead or alive” is not a “death threat” neither is burning a likeness in effigy

4- your “rape” analogy is problematic. I’ve been digging, and as far as I can, tell there has not been anything CLOSE to a 400% increase in the amount of reported rape after rape prevention classes -your comparison is a bit of a red herring.

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