Thomas Friedman's Assassination Revisionism

The Bush years... remember the civility?

Thomas Friedman writes in the opening line of his column "I have actually been to this play before" which is so much like Senator John Kerry's line on NPR this week of "I have seen this movie before" when he excuses the President's denial of troops to General McChrystal. In both cases, left leaning minds are using this phrase as a precursor to amazing dishonesty.

Thomas Friedman has played to the liberal fantasy of a right-wing kook taking out President Obama by citing his experiences in Israel, where a right-wing Israeli assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin because of the Oslo accord's land for peace deal. Friedman tries to draw parallels between the demonstrations there and here, citing Nazi comparisons and people waving Lyndon LaRouche signs. He states that opposition politicians winked at the acrimony, therefore encouraged the assassination.

He doesn't name any Republican leaders who are winking at the Lyndon LaRouche signs and he seems to forget that Americans have been trained to compare Presidents to Hitler, and threaten assassination, by almost nine years of liberal assaults on President Bush. What took him so long to get offended?

Thomas Friedman also left out that Rabin's assassin, while despicable, was going to lose his home along with many other Israelis because of Rabin's land for peace deal. It wasn't really signs in bad taste, so much as the government unhoming people that lead to the terrible events that day.

But why go to Israel to see what will happen in America? Why not look at our own political violence and examine the record? He didn't write about that because the record at home is bad news for his scaremongering column. In the United States, we have had four Presidents assassinated. Three Republicans and one Democrat. Three of the four assassins were Democrats or leftists. One, Charles J. Guiteau, while he did join a commune for a short time, was clearly insane. He assassinated President James Garfield, the 2nd President to be slain in office.

The first and most famous executive assassin is John Wilkes Booth, a Democrat and famous actor who hated President Lincoln. He was of the mindset that Lincoln had overreached in his executive powers and destroyed the country, a refrain the left continues today over the Bush years. Even our President and Vice President have made contributions to this line of thinking. Google "Sic Semper Tyrannis Bush" and read who is winking at violence against our executive office holders.

President McKinley's assassination was carried out by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. He was influenced by radicals Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, who would later defend Czolgosz's actions.

In 1963 President John F. Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dealy Plaza. Oswald was young Marxist who joined the Young People's Socialist League and traveled  to the Soviet Union is order to obtain citizenship there. He was denied and in time, returned to the United States, where he continued his pursuing his socialist beliefs. Between the assassination of President Kennedy and his arrest, he also murdered Officer J.D. Tippit.

Lee Harvey Oswald also made an attempt on Major General Edwin Walker before the Kennedy assassination or Officer J.D. Tippit's murder. Oswald learned of Major General Edwin Walker's right-wing activism through a copy of the Worker, a Communist Party newspaper to which Oswald subscribed. The October 7, 1962, issue of Worker warned "the Kennedy administration and the American people of the need for action against [Walker] and his allies." Oswald considered Walker a "fascist."

It's pretty clear that three out of the four Presidential assassins came from left field. So how about some of the more famous attempts on our Presidents? What was the thinking of those failed assassins?

First let's be clear, the majority of famous assassination attempts were made by crazy people. As in truly mentally ill. o Aside form the those one was a Chicago connected gangster and one was an Armenian National. The rest are below:

Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, attempted to assassinate President Harry Truman. Officer Leslie Coffelt was killed in a firefight that ended their attempt.

Samuel Byck, who really should be in the crazy category, was convinced that Nixon's government was oppressing the poor. This is a theme the left is obsessed with and various themes of economic oppression can be heard in the maxims chanted at protest after protest. Imaginary class warfare is the number one talking point of the violent leftist.

Sara Jane Moore attempted to shoot President Ford. Upon her release, she claimed her actions were "motivated by radical revolutionary politics."

Then we finally get a so-called right-wing wannabe assassin. Francisco Martin Duran fired 29 rounds from as assault rifle at the White House from hundreds of feet away. Duran claimed to have listened to right-wing radical Chuck Baker, who almost nobody ever listened to. He also claimed that he "was trying to destroy a "mist" that was connected by an umbilical cord to an alien being he encountered in the Colorado mountains. Duran, they said, believed it was his duty to destroy the mist, which was controlling the White House, to save the government and the world."

I put Duran into this group because he claimed to be a talk radio listener and I didn't want liberals leaving empty handed. It's pretty obvious however, that a guy who sees an alien mist, attached to an E.T. via an umbilical cord, is clearly not playing with a full deck in the first place. I just figured it would be nice to throw Thomas Friedman a bone, no matter how small.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of violence against our Presidents has come from the left and that three out of four of the murdered were Republicans, seems lost on the so-called calls for calm today from the likes of the Nancy Pelosis and the Thomas Friedmans. Just for the record, when Nancy Pelosi shamefully used the Harvey Milk assassination as a cudgel warning of what might happen now, she seemed to forget that Harvey Milk's assassin was also a Democrat.

Every liberal publication and television show is erupting with President Obama's future demise, yet a quick glance at the reality of American politics paints the opposite picture. Even the more famous attempts, if you include the crazy people, it's six to five, Republicans up by one. Republican Presidents are going to be the most likely targets of political violence, period.

Aside from his attempts to scrounge up the "oppression" of President Bill Clinton's impeachment and the "cloud" under which President G.W. Bush was elected under, Friedman uses this faux cautionary tale as a vehicle to plant Birtherism in the fringe right's camp. Too bad the Birther issue began with Democrat Phillip Berg, a 9/11 Truther and Hillary supporter. Friedman and everyone else in media who has even glanced at the birth certificate issues knows this. Especially Friedman, who I believe is far to well educated to have sunk to the disappointing low that is this column.

To close out his smear job with a conciliatory tone is almost a parody on the level of an Onion News Network piece. Thomas Friedman had to travel across the globe to a tiny country almost fifteen years earlier to find a narrative that he could put on this hatchet job. The history of his own nation was filled with too many inconvenient truths. When President Obama said "the time has come to set aside childish things," Thomas Friedman wasn't paying attention.