Seeking humor in assassination

Blaming journalists for biased reporting isn’t unique. Adherents to all political ideologies accuse the media of aligning with their opponents. However, Washington Post syndicated columnist Esther Cepeda gives conservatives a leg-up in proving leftist favoritism in the "mainstream" media. Either that or she’s a total dunce.

Ms. Cepeda has issues with the audience at Rep. Paul Broun’s (R-GA) town hall meeting. Apparently, the audience laughed when one constituent asked, "Who’s going to shoot Obama?" In perfect media fashion Ms. Cepeda parlayed the incident, which the Secret Service investigated and deemed a poor joke, into a blanket hatred for Obama based on his race and a "perceived socialist slant to government" since he took office. What happened, she lamented, to the outrage against such incendiary language after Gabrielle Giffords was shot?

Esther Cepeda finds no humor in jokes about assassinating President Obama. I’ll second that motion. But where was she when jovial leftwing pranksters had George W. Bush all but in the grave? It would be naïve to think she suffers from poor memory. More likely she has selective memory, or she’s a prejudiced media stooge.

First, no one has forgotten about Rep. Giffords or her battle to recover from the Tucson shooting. It’s just that rational observers quickly realized that blaming the representative’s injuries on conservative speech was a media generated myth. Second, Ms. Cepeda should know that crude comments about presidential assassinations didn’t originate with Obama’s inauguration.

The left’s outrage over tasteless references to presidential assassination depends not on some newly discovered high moral plane but on who’s in the crosshairs. Remember how President Bush’s opponents treated him? He was labeled an international criminal and accused of single-handedly initiating a war Congress had authorized him to wage at his discretion. Yet Bush was an evil tyrant, a blood-thirsty liar and a despicable fraud. He was Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Kahn and Attila the Hun all rolled into one genocidal package. The left did more than joke about Bush’s death; they fantasized about it.

Review a photo gallery from an Iraq War protest march and you’ll find plenty of knee-slapping calls to punch Bush’s ticket to the Great Beyond. His opponents had no qualms with a movie depicting his death from a sniper’s bullet. In fact, Peter Dale broadcast such a film (Death of a President) on British television. Dale found the film "serious" and "thought-provoking," even defending the use of Bush’s likeness rather than a fictional president because "it’s absolutely legitimate to deal with contemporary named figures."

Ha! I get it! Quite the card that Peter Dale.

Amazingly, Dale’s attitude is tame compared to British columnist Rod Liddle. Liddle said the movie depicting Bush’s death would strike a popular chord in Britain and predicted the actor who played the assassin would drink free in any British pub. The movie’s theme, according to Liddle, was entirely reasonable.

What a jester! And the jocularity surrounding Bush’s demise wasn’t confined to crackpots at anti-war rallies and movie sets. It was available in printed form, too.

A novel titled Checkpoint also hinged on threatening Bush’s life. The main character, named Jay, pulled no punches with his hatred for George W. Bush or his desire to kill the president in a variety of torturous ways. "I’m going to kill the bastard," Jay railed at one point while promising Bush would be "one dead armadillo" at another.

How’s that for civility, Ms. Cepeda? Where was your outrage when Bush was the bull’s eye of death by a thousand jokes? Did you not care, or were you simply ignorant of this leftwing merriment? The latter is difficult to swallow.

I doubt Ms. Cepeda is a fan of the conservative media. Therefore it’s equally doubtful she would review such outlets to discover the left’s witty jabs at Bush. But she needn’t have soiled her hands with World Net Daily, Town Hall, or Newsmax to uncover the premise behind Death of a President and Checkpoint. She didn’t need to scour the archives at the Weekly Standard, National Review, the Limbaugh Letter, or (God forbid) Fox News.

The reactions to the previously mentioned movie and book appeared in the Washington Post, with nary a sign of condemnation from the writers, I might add. Yes, Ms. Cepeda, the same Washington Post that employs the cesspool of columnists in which you swim. Feeling slimy, Ms. Cepeda? Perhaps a bit foolish? You should! But I’ll bet the farm you don’t.

Ms. Cepeda’s outrage rings as hollow as Obama’s promise to wisely spend the public’s funds. Crass jokes about killing presidents aren’t new, they didn’t originate with Obama’s ascendancy, and they arise from all points of the political spectrum. Vitriol isn’t the "knuckle-dragging" conservative’s copyrighted material. Put aside your self-righteous indignation, Ms. Cepeda, and open your eyes to reality. The left is to spiteful venom what Fort Knox once was to gold bullion.

If Cepeda and her "progressive" media cohorts truly find no humor in joking about a president’s death the newspapers and airwaves should’ve been flush with condemnation when leftist cranks and nutcases openly advocated for Bush’s demise. Did it slip their minds? Or did they find more pressing matters to attend? Hardly! Most media outlets simply weren’t too concerned when Bush was the dead man walking. Maybe there is humor in assassination only when the president has an "R" beside his name.

This column first appeared at American Thinker.