Let me just say this to start: Every morning my first prayer is for the safety of our president. I loathe the idea of violent rhetoric. If you want my opinion, and face it, you don't...but you'll read anyway, the man outside one town hall who had a sign that read "time to water the tree of liberty" and who also displayed a gun...though he broke no laws....he should have been questioned by the Secret Service. Most of the Republicans that I know have had the intellectual honesty to call that guy an idiot.
I want to comment also and ESPECIALLY about the man in Washington County, MD with the horrible sign calling for the death of Obama and his family. It looks like he ripped the top off of his 30 pack of Bud and scribbled the words, nonetheless, the Secret Service is right to question him.
When my parents relocated back to the States after our time abroad, they searched a long time for a house. Finally, they found one that was perfect, bought it, and moved in. I joined them there later.
It turned out that the town seemed quite unfriendly. I overheard one local couple who owned a business in town saying terrible things about a black family walking down the sidewalk of the historic town. It turned out that this couple was active in the KKK who, according to common knowledge, had a camp nearby in the mountains. That couple was ardently and staunchly Democrat. They displayed every Democrat's political sign proudly in their windows at election time.
The town was white. The local Lutheran minister decided to challenge the problem by moving in and sponsoring one black family. To be honest, I felt bad for those kids. Shortly after this happened there was a credible rumor that the KKK was planning a march down Main Street. The street where we lived. I was horrified and told my father that if they came, I would be standing on our front porch with a sign repudiating them.
They never showed up. I'm sure it's because they feared me. (I'm sure.)
What's the point here, you ask? The town in which I lived was in Washington County, MD...a short distance from Hagerstown, where the "death to Obama" sign was displayed outside a townhall by what looks to me like a skinhead.
But on to this CBS story. It's frankly, awful. It is tying these townhall protests to white supremacists and making the health care debate story, once again, about racism, violence and fear. The story is not about race.
I hope nothing happens to Obama...it would be a tragedy and a disaster, but what you've got here is an insistence by some that the uprisings questioning the healthcare bill are, by some kind of corollary, tied to a dangerous racist & violent sentiment towards Obama. This is crap journalism, that is also mongering fear.
You have to go to the very last paragraph to get what is INCREDIBLY relevant to interpreting the story. To quote:
While officials told ABC News that the President's daily threat matrix has yet to reflect a sharp increase in threats, White House officials privately admit deep concern and have told the Secret Service to keep security tight, even if Obama objects. In short, the final paragraph reveals that the entire story is based on speculation and bunkum and that the official information shows that there isn't an increased threat. I think my college journalism professor would have given this story an F and said it was deliberately misleading, unobjective and, frankly, crap.
And as to the final line of the story...Obama OWES it to every American to go along with the recommendations of the Secret Service in every circumstance. No objections.
No comments:
Post a Comment