Demonic (33 page)

The rest were political activists, who may have been crazy enough to be left-wingers but were not so crazy as to believe they were King Richard II.

Actor/peace activist John Wilkes Booth—not to be confused with actor/peace activist Sean Penn—shot President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, because, as he explained in a letter to his family, he was furious with Republicans for foisting the war on the South. He said he loved “peace more than life.” (But he really wanted to direct.)

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

Leon Czolgosz, who killed President William McKinley in 1901, was a socialist and anarchist inspired by a radical speech given by socialist Emma Goldman that same year.

Giuseppe Zangara, who plotted to kill both Republican president Herbert Hoover and President-elect Franklin Roosevelt, just missed shooting Roosevelt, killing Chicago mayor Anton Cermak instead. Zangara was motivated by his all-consuming envy of the rich and intended to assassinate “all capitalist presidents and kings.” This would have made him an ideal pick for Obama’s cabinet, apart from his habit of shooting elected officials.

Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a stone-cold communist ever since he read a communist pamphlet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as a teenager. Oswald studied Russian and moved to the USSR in his late teens. When his application for Soviet citizenship was declined, he slit his wrists. Oswald married a Russian woman, brought her and their child back to the United States, and planned to escape to Cuba, whiling away his days passing out
Fair Play for Cuba
leaflets. In other words, Lee Harvey Oswald was Michael Moore, if Moore didn’t hate guns and wasn’t a fat, disgusting pig.

Ginned up by publications of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, Oswald first tried to kill Major General Edwin A. Walker, a John Bircher. Oswald next plotted to kill former vice president Richard Nixon, but was waylaid the day Nixon was in Dallas.

So he shot President Kennedy. Upon his arrest, Oswald immediately called John Abt, lawyer for the American Communist Party, planning to ask Abt to defend him so he could use the trial to showcase his Marxist beliefs. (And who hasn’t used his one phone call after being arrested for murder to make arrangements to share Marxism with the world?)

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who shot at President Gerald Ford in 1975, was part of Charles Manson’s countercultural hippie cult. She pulled the gun on Ford because she was incensed about the plight of the California redwood.

Seventeen days later, Sara Jane Moore tried to kill Ford because, she said, “the government had declared war on the Left.” (Would that it were so!)

In the entire history of the nation, only two senators and two congressmen have been assassinated.
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Both the first and the last were killed by Democrats for political reasons, and the other two were killed for nonpolitical reasons.

The first member of Congress to be assassinated was Republican James M. Hinds of Arkansas. He was killed in 1868 by secretary of the Democratic Committee of Monroe County and Ku Klux Klan member George A. Clark. (This was contrary to initial reports on the
Rachel Maddow Show
that he had been killed by a right-wing anti-government Tea Partier.

Senator Huey Long was shot and killed in 1935 by Carl Weiss for no political reason, but apparently because Long had targeted Weiss’s father-in-law, a judge, for removal from the bench.

Senator Robert Kennedy was killed on June 5, 1968, by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian extremist angry with Kennedy for his support of Israel. Sirhan keeps coming up for parole these days and is hoping to be released in time to get his own prime-time show on MSNBC. (It was a strange name for an assassin, unless you think about it.)

The last assassination of a member of Congress was in 1978, when Representative Leo Ryan was killed by members of Jim Jones’s left-wing cult in Guyana.

Conservatives, we’re endlessly told, create “an atmosphere of hatred and fear.” This is as opposed to liberals who just go around shooting elected officials.

Among recent examples of political violence on a massive scale in this country—not rhetorical violence, but real violence—was that committed by the Weathermen and their ilk just a few decades ago. Not only were those people embraced by the establishment, they would be welcome today at any Democratic gathering. America’s current president launched his political career in the home of two such radicals who incited violence, set bombs, praised Charles Manson—and only through their own ineptitude avoided murdering anyone.

Guess which political group both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the FBI consider the most dangerous in America?
Moveon.org
? Tea Partiers? The Kennedy family?

The answer is: environmentalists.

Citing the $43 million in damage done in the past two decades only by the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front, the Southern Poverty Law Center concludes, “Extremists within the environmental and animal rights movements have committed literally thousands of violent criminal acts in recent decades—arguably more than those from any other radical sector, left or right.”
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In 2002, the FBI described the Earth Liberation Front as America’s most dangerous domestic terrorist group.
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There are other hard comparisons to be made. No conservative has ever charged at a liberal testifying before Congress, waving bloody hands in the witness’s face—as was done to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. (Or as liberals would put it if she were a Democrat: the
first black female
secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.)

No conservative has ever sneaked into a Democratic National Convention and heckled the speakers.

No Democratic politician has ever been rushed by a conservative and hit in the face with a stupid sign, as was done to Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul in 2010. Indeed, no conservative has rushed anyone, other than maybe a laggard waiter.

No conservative has ever thrown food at a prominent liberal. This is done all the time to conservative public figures. Limiting this review of liberal food-throwing to the baked dessert section—and liberals throw all sorts of food at conservatives—liberals have thrown pies at
William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, Milton Friedman, Bill Kristol, David Horowitz, and G. Gordon Liddy, among others.

No conservative has ever demonstrated outside a private citizen’s home. This is done repeatedly by liberals—to the Duke lacrosse players;
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to AIG officials;
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to Republican House speaker John Boehner;
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to a Wal-Mart developer;
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to a Bank of America executive (who was a Democrat, but SEIU didn’t care);
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to Wisconsin governor Scott Walker; and to Wisconsin State Senate leader Scott Fitzgerald.
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(And that was despite a union rule prohibiting work on Tuesdays!)

When the Bank of America officer’s young son was trapped, alone and terrified, inside his home with fourteen busloads of Service Employees International Union thugs pouring out onto his front yard to protest, the police refused to arrest the trespassers so as not to “incite them.”
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His parents had both worked in the Clinton administration. Even liberals know that they are in danger of a physical assault only from their fellow liberals. But they still playact terror of anti-ObamaCare protesters.

It is possible that, somewhere, at some time, an audience of conservatives has shouted down an invited liberal speaker—though no such incidents come to mind. But it is not possible that conservatives would defend or embrace the hooligans. Conservatives think civil society needs to be, you know, civil.

We are not counting the voices in Maureen Dowd’s head that heard Representative Joe Wilson shout, “You lie, boy!” rather than “You lie!” during Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address. First of all, we’re in trouble if people can be found guilty for what Maureen Dowd knows they really meant in their hearts—especially since Maureen seems to base her experience of the world on having recently read
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. Second, if Democrats are going to be interrupting the president’s speech every three minutes with raucous standing ovations, that makes it a participatory speech. A rule condemning Wilson’s two-syllable shout-out “You lie!” would mean that only one side is allowed to participate. Third, and by the way, Wilson was roundly condemned by everyone but me and quickly apologized.

Liberals, by contrast, defend and even celebrate outrageous behavior on their side. By now, it has become so expected for liberals to aggressively disrupt and shut down conservative speakers that people hardly
notice it anymore. They shout down conservatives with alarming frequency on college campuses—those crucibles of enlightenment—and are invariably protected by college administrators.

No conservative has ever tried to stage a “citizen’s arrest” of a political opponent. Republican presidents and their staff are constantly being threatened with “citizen’s arrests.” In 1984, liberal nut and third-party presidential candidate Sonia Johnson stood in front of the White House announcing that she planned to make a citizen’s arrest of President Reagan for “war crimes.” This was based on Reagan’s invasion of Marxist Grenada to rescue American medical personnel trapped there. Many considered this the high point of Sonia’s presidential campaign.

A few years later, Greenpeace employee Terry Fernsler showed up at the Westin Hotel in Seattle, where President Reagan was speaking, and tried to make a citizen’s arrest for his “war crimes” against the communist regime in Nicaragua in violation of “international law.”
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In 1987, the liberal group Pledge of Resistance plotted to kidnap a federal official in a “citizen’s arrest” if President Reagan invaded Nicaragua or El Salvador.
¹³
Then, again, in 1988, liberal protesters at the G-7 meeting in Toronto tried to make citizen’s arrests of both Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, presumably for preventing the worldwide triumph of communism.

The incidence of citizen’s arrests came to a suspicious halt throughout the Clinton presidency—rape and perjury being deemed “personal matters” rather than “crimes”—but, strangely enough, the trend came roaring back for the second President Bush.

Liberals tried to make a citizen’s arrest of President Bush in Britain in 2001 for crimes against the planet;
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at the European-American Summit in June 2004;
¹⁵
again in 2004 in Ottawa;
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and back here in the good old U.S. of A. at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York (on the grounds that he was “responsible for the misfortune of everyone who’s disabled”).
¹⁷

Anti-war protesters issued warrants for the citizen’s arrest of Bush in the United States,
¹⁸
in Britain (for having caused “grievous harm to thousands of people in Iraq”),
¹⁹
and in Paris, where a mock arrest was made of a Bush impersonator in lieu of the real thing.
²⁰

Even after Bush left office and happiness reigned throughout the
world, liberals stormed a luncheon where Bush was speaking in Alberta, Canada,
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and so many protesters threatened to derail a scheduled January 2011 Bush speech in Geneva that the event had to be canceled.

Even Bush’s advisers have been—and continue to be—threatened with citizen’s arrests, including Bush’s UN ambassador John Bolton at the Hay Festival in Wales in May 2008—years after the end of his employment with Bush.
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Bush adviser Karl Rove has been repeatedly threatened with citizen’s arrests—by the Des Moines Catholic Workers Party when he was giving a speech in Iowa,
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by a college student when he was giving a speech at Oberlin College,
²⁴
and by liberals throughout the country who show up to disrupt his book events, which are often canceled because of the liberal hordes.

Conservatives make documentaries of people talking, explaining things, arguing points. Michael Moore makes documentaries showing him trying to make citizen’s arrests or otherwise ambushing private citizens.

These aren’t just a few random nuts that might turn up on either side of the political spectrum. Otherwise, conservatives would be staging citizen’s arrests of Bill Clinton for allegedly raping Juanita Broaddrick, of Al Gore for committing fraud when he babbles about global warming in the middle of a blizzard, and of Joe Biden for “Recovery Summer.” Conservatives wouldn’t do it.

If someday, someplace in America, a conservative mob ever shuts down a liberal speaker, tries to make a citizen’s arrest, throws food at a liberal public figure, or assaults a congressional witness, it won’t be defended by other conservatives. You won’t find conservatives writing letters to the editor praising nitwits trying to make a citizen’s arrest, saying they “deserved a laurel,” as was said in the
Toronto Star
about the violent Reagan and Thatcher protesters.
²⁵
You won’t find a Republican U.S. attorney general refusing to prosecute Republicans captured on tape standing outside a polling precinct, making armed threats on election day. You won’t find a Republican member of Congress defending a criminal for dropping a cement block on a trucker’s head.