This week Hillary gave them what they wanted: she ‘invoked’ (whatever the heck that means) the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. They’ve been waiting for something like this. The blogs have been buzzing for months with what fellow Townhall columnist, Mark Steyn calls, “Obama assassination porn;” that is, detailed fantasies in which Obama is felled by an assassin’s bullet, often in mid-speech.
Messianic political movements always have this kind of stuff, the suffering servant of the people, who lays down his life for them, felled by the military industrial complex, or the CIA or Halliburton or the establishment. Che, Bobby, Jack, Abraham and now Obama.
Never mind that Che was killed because his rival Stalinists in the Bolivian Communist Party left him under-protected, or that Bobby was killed by a Palestinian who saw the Kennedys as too pro-Israel. Jack was murdered by a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Lincoln, of course, was murdered by an actor who felt that the President had appropriated unconstitutional powers under the excuse of war time. In fact, assassination has been far more closely associated with the political Left in American history than the Right. Even FDR was the victim of an attempt by a man who was troubled by income inequality under American capitalism. So was McKinley, but in his case the assassin succeeded.
Obama supporters have been hinting about lack of adequate secret service protection since before the primaries began. The Service denies any the accusations. But since in the eyes of his followers Obama is the next Martin Luther King, and since many on the radical Left believe that King was purposely left unprotected by law enforcement, Obama assassination scenarios have been quite common on the web. Don’t believe me? Google ‘assassinate Obama’ and see for yourself.
Of course, now, after this week’s gaffe, your first couple of hundred references will be about Hillary’s comment. As far as I can tell, she was making the point that primaries are long and uncertain things and that for this reason she should feel free to keep plugging away at the nomination. She used two historical examples, 1968 and 1992. Yes, Bobby got into the primary late, so what? The point is that the primary itself lasted a long time. She said that this example came to mind because Ted’s illness put the Kennedy’s woes top of mind for her. Yes, she mentioned this scenario to Time Magazine before the cancer announcement, so what? She didn’t say that this was the first time she had thought of this point, only that it came out in this case because she had the Kennedy family on her mind.
She was, of course, incredibly stupid. Did she not see how the cyclone of hard Left hatred for her and the hurricane of Obama’s messianic image would combine into a perfect storm of outrage from the Left? Apparently not. Of course, every cloud (and by extension, every perfect storm) has a silver lining. For Obama this gaffe means more Kennedy comparisons. He was already JFK (in style only--Jack’s politics are far to the right of contemporary Dems). Now with Teddy fading and Obama subbing for him in an upcoming college commencement speech, the passing of the torch to a new generation will be theatrically reenacted.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member