The attitude of the Grauniad paragraph cited is indeed indecent.
It wishes or calls for assassination of the US president,
and it has some very weird and spooky undertones of superstition.
Even if it is only half meant in joke it's indecent;
sadly enough, more probably it's serious.
Gautam's guesses about the possible reactions of the same newspaper
to some more justifiable assassinations of terrorists are probably
on the mark.
Up to there I think we agree.
But I don't follow to the conclusions.
That rag is not a moderate source of the "left".
They are pretty extreme in many ways.
So I deny that they represent a logical conclusion
of the positions of all of the left or of many liberals.
That paragraph represents only the ideas of an extreme wing,
one which is particularly impotent in the USA.
The wish to have them confounded is shared.
But it is a childish desire.
Shaming a journalist for an extreme left wing newspaper?
That's not a cause serious enough to choose a vote.
So I deeply disagree it is any good reason to decide to
vote for or against Bush.
That Grauniad's journalist is not any of the US
presidential candidates; Kerry and Bush are.
He's not even in any of the two campaigns.
And you know that Kerry would be apalled by the idea of a new
JWBooth, just as Bush would also be.
Kerry is an American candidate to presidency, after all;
one with decently good chances of winning.
An assassin planning to go for the president puts him
right now at the same risk as Bush.
So Kerry may take this kind of idea rather *personally* ...
Were the Republicans happy because of LH Oswald?
Of course they weren't.
Let's suppose an improbable but not impossible future event:
If Bush for some reason is elected for the second time in 2004,
and then is assassinated, Kerry's authentic followers,
the American Democratic party, will ask for justice against the assassin.
Reading this message was not useless, though.
It's good to remember that such extremist ideologues
of the left indeed do exist. They can be dangerous.
If possible, try to be careful so they don't reach power.
The good thing is, for this election in the USA,
that particular risk simply does not exist at all.
Other serious risks exist;
to be sure, some connected to the name of Kerry.
More connected to the name of Bush.
Ruben
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