Who Didn't See This Coming?

The two yahoos who decided they could kill Obama didn't really think it through:

Two white supremacists charged with plotting to behead blacks across the country and assassinate Barack Obama while wearing white top hats and tuxes were likely too disorganized to carry out the plot, authorities said, and their planning was riddled with blunders.

Paul Schlesselman, 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark., and Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells are accused of dreaming up the plan. While authorities say they had guns capable of creating carnage, documents show they never got close to getting off the ground.

Among the blunders: They drew attention to themselves by etching swastikas on a car with sidewalk chalk, only knew each other for a month, couldn't even pull off a house robbery, and a friend ratted them out to authorities.

This is not to say that you don't take threats like this seriously - good work by the Secret Service. But there's a lot more sophistication to their efforts nowadays, and two idiots with a Hitler locket and a dream aren't going to be successful by accident.

That said, let's take a long look at hate crime laws over the next couple years.

Militia Watch

I think that the bit about an Obama assassination should be taken out of this neo-Nazi plot to target African-Americans. Clearly they had already plotted a significant portion of the effort to rob a gun store and shoot up a couple predominantly black high schools in Tennessee. But the Obama part of the deal was more like a "I know, and then we'll get in our cars and drive to Obama's house" kind of thing. Still serious, and I'm glad law enforcement worked in this case and they were caught, but the assassination part feels more aspirational than anything.

This is an example of the ever-present prospect of violence around race in America. I'm undecided on whether an Obama election would help or hurt.

Let It Not Be 1968

I think this is a residual, subconscious fear that a good number of Americans have when thinking about an Obama Presidency. It's a by-product of assassinations past as well as the fact that he's an African-American. However, I guess this guy in particular also talked about shooting Bush, so there's just a wackadoo element out there. I do think our Secret Service is actually pretty disciplined and takes these threats extremely seriously, and I'm confident they'll continue to do their job well.

Checking In From Gotham

Hey all, so I've been bumming around New York City for a couple days, as I'm in the area for a wedding. The city really appears to empty out on holiday weekends, so contrary to what you might think it's a good time to be here. Just got out of the Whitney Biennial (guess what, this year the curators decided to highlight self-referential "art about art"! Because it's such an undercovered subject in the modern art world), and now we're hanging at a coffee shop.

On the Hillary/RFK thing, I do think she was making a general point about nomination fights being protracted in recent history, but at Doris Kearns Goodwin pointed out today on Meet The Press, even that premise isn't true. In 1992, Clinton had wrapped up the nomination by April and Jerry Brown was just hanging around without any hope of catching him. And in 1968, Kennedy didn't enter the primaries until mid-March, I believe, and when King died on April 4 RFK was campaigning in his first primary test in Indiana. So comparing pre-1992 primary fights with post-1992 ones is just spurious. This is heavily front-loaded and the math becomes more apparent earlier.

That said, she has every right to stay in the race. But the reference to the Kennedy assassination, which she's actually done several times, is bad form, and I think she really ended up blowing it. I sensed some movement toward a unity ticket in the past few days before the comment, and now I don't think that's going to be at all possible. And it's really all her fault. The blind ambition on display is typical of anyone running for President, but there's something very wrong about an allusion to the assassination of a candidate in the context of a justification for staying in the race. And a Vice President just shouldn't ever draw the kind of attention to himself or herself that she clearly would, and she hasn't shown a lot of tact in the spotlight. So that's done. The unity ticket is dead.

Was Moe Green Hit At The Tropicana Too?

I had seen this earlier in the day, and forgot about it, and then a Kos diarist reminded me that Benazir Bhutto wasn't the only former Pakistani Prime Minister marked for death today.

At least four supporters of former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif were killed Thursday when unidentified gunmen fired at his party's procession in the outskirts of Islamabad, local press reports said.

Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), was due to address election rallies in the eastern Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, some 30 kms south from Islamabad.

A procession was taken out to welcome Sharif when unidentified gunmen opened fire from a house at Karal Chowk on the main Islamabad airport road, the PML-N said.

Let's add these facts into the mix as well:

• In an email that was only revealed after her death, Bhutto blamed the Pakistani government for their failure to adequately protect her on the campaign trail, going so far as to say she would hold Musharraf responsible for anything that happened to her.

• Nawaz Sharif said the same thing.

• The Bhutto attack occurred in Rawalpindi, home of a large military garrison, described by Peter Bergen today as akin to having an assassination occur right next to the Pentagon.

• The ties between the Pakistani military, the ISI (intelligence services) and radical Islamist groups like the Taliban are legion.

• Obviously, knocking off the top opposition leaders makes it easier to consolidate rule, as does a terror attack that could postpone elections or lead to a restoration of martial law.

So, while you can't exactly say Musharraf pulled the trigger on Bhutto, you might be able to make a case that he was at a family baptism at the time and may have smiled a bit hearing the news from Tom Hagen.

This, by the way, is our major ally in South Asia in the war on terror, someone who stood to benefit this much from a terrorist attack.

Taste Of Your Own Medicine

It's amazing how crazy these right-wingers get when forced to defend their own beliefs. Case in point: the Instapundit.

It's finally happened.

The mainstream media finally sees Putz for what he is: not a moderate, reasonable "non-partisan" -- but a hard-right extremist. Columnist Paul Campos not only takes Putz to task for his assassination fantasies, he does so by equating him Ward Churchill -- exactly the right analogy.

See, Reynolds claimed that we should be quietly killing Iranian atomic scientists, as if that's possible. And now Paul Campos calls him on it.

Murder is the premeditated unlawful killing of a human being. Glenn Reynolds, the well-known University of Tennessee law professor who authors one of the Internet's most popular blogs, recently advocated the murder of Iranian scientists and clerics.

Of course Iran is not at war with America, but just as Reynolds spent years repeating Bush administration propaganda about Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, he's now dutifully repeating the administration's claims about supposed Iranian government involvement in Iraq's civil war.

Moreover, even if Iran were at war with the United States, the intentional killing of civilian noncombatants is a war crime, as that term is defined by international treaties America has signed. Furthermore, government-sponsored assassinations of the sort Reynolds is advocating are expressly and unambiguously prohibited by the laws of the United States.

Instapundit's amazing first reply is that Iran in fact HAS been at war with the US since taking hostages in 1979. Scott Lemieux gets this exactly right:

My question: when does he start calling for Michael Ledeen to be put on trial for high treason for helping to sell arms to a country the U.S. is at war with?

Ledeen and half the Reagan Administration, you mean.

Insty's second reply was printed today in the Rocky Mountain News, and Blue Texan does a nice job of eviscerating it.

Your false dilmmea! ("I'm just sayin'--isn't it really more reasonable to kill a few scientists and mullahs than nuke the whole country?"):

Campos chose to devote an entire column (“The right’s Ward Churchill,” Feb. 20) to a blog entry of mine from last week, in which I wondered why the Bush administration wasn’t acting covertly to kill radical mullahs and atomic scientists, rather than preparing a major attack on Iran. (Silly me, I thought this was advocating a less warlike approach).

Your apples-to-oranges comparison! ("Heads of state and terrorists" = "scientists and religious leaders"):

History first: There’s nothing beyond the pale about suggesting assassination and covert action as an alternative to warfare. In 1998, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Joseph Biden, D-Del., asked the government to look into assassination as a means of dealing with terrorists; Sen. Chuck Robb, D-Va., suggested assassinating Saddam Hussein the same year. On Jan. 3, 2001, Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., introduced legislation to facilitate the assassination of terrorists.

And finally, your bogus WWII analogy! ("Just look at what we did to those Nazis when our nation was at war with them!"):

“Similarly, the September 1944 Allied bombing raids on the German rocket sites at Peenemunde regarded the death of scientists involved in research and development of that facility to have been as important as destruction of the missiles themselves. Attack of these individuals would not constitute assassination.”

This might be the first time Reynolds has been called out as a violent extremist. It's something he employs on a regular basis, and he can't take being on the other side. Especially when it was done in such a fact-based way. We've had a similar imbroglio with Mark Steyn, who said this...

Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can't buck demography -- except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out -- as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can't outbreed the enemy, cull 'em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia's demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.

And then tried to backtrack and say he wasn't ENDORSING ethnic cleansing there, just predicting it as an outcome. Charming man. Humorously, one person that leapt to Steyn's defense was Instapundit himself, who has said in the past that genocide is "unavoidable."

It's amusing to see these people try to run away from their own words. They've been tarring their enemies with the foulest rhetoric for years, even decades, and now it's coming back to haunt them.