A shot was heard, or at least a loud noise, around the world last week. It was sounded through the Internet and will probably be tracked down by some of the fiercest lawmen on the planet.
Some nut sack, likely one who leans hard to the right, set up a poll on Facebook, asking, “Should Obama be killed?” The message conveyed by such an abysmal action for whatever reason is, “How stupid can we get?”
Of course, the vilest insinuation is that it’s OK to kill a president, or any other human, because we don’t like what they stand for. If the antic was meant to be funny, the poster missed the target.
Although Facebook took the page down within a few hours, the bullet had already left the rifle and the Secret Service would like to “talk” to the person who pulled the technological trigger.
While no actual bullets have been fired yet, the crackle from this pseudo gunshot is not only a slap in the face of civilization; it’s also a tragic howling from ghosts of presidential assassins past. A threat against a sitting U.S. president is cause for consternation. We’ve been there before, from Lincoln to JFK. Their deaths served no purpose but to throw a nation into mourning.
In light of the recent rowdy “town hall” meetings about health care reform, a Facebook page like this is disturbing on several levels. Either to show off or to intimidate, numerous loonies across the U.S. exercised their Second Amendment rights to bear arms — in cities where gun toting is legal — wherever President Barack Obama spoke.
We’re still scratching our collective heads trying to determine the reasoning behind bringing AK47 and AR15 automatic weapons to a high school hosting the president in a public debate about health care, but that’s another topic.
Equally disturbing about the Facebook posting is that the perpetrator assaulted us all by shooting another hole through the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment is the most assailed of all rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.
Even presidents who take the oath to defend the Constitution try to wriggle around the First Amendment, as we saw with former President George W. Bush and Patriot Acts I and II.
Let’s face it, members of our society run the gamut between MIT-ready and Jerry Springer Show rejects. When shit-for-brains chose to ask if Obama should be killed, he or she also made a case for an already intrusive government to be more intrusive — to strip even more our individual liberties. We have no short supply of idiots willing to display a penchant for dumb-assery.
When it gets as stupid as the Facebook murder poll we can only hope the Secret Service gets its suspect and penalizes them accordingly.
Whatever the Secret Service does about the situation, rest assured it will be reading all of our Facebook postings from now on.