RW domestic terrorism, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

I understand the impression that Barack Obama must be in greater danger than previous presidents. The pugs are nuts, he's black, he is subject of a host of really weird conspiracy theories.

But I feel that 9/11 and the subsequent hypo-fascist presidency tore a hole in our sense of historical continuity. The Bush semi-monarchy made even criticism of the president seem like treason and he seldom exposed himself to the people even for questions, let alone peril, and that changed our sense of the office. (I remember when people were taking pot-shots at Gerald Ford like it was a carnival game!)

The Republican Revolution circa 1994 was no joke. Simply getting an inoffensive DLC Dem in the WH prompted the explosion of the Militia movement.

It was widely believed by RW nuts that Bill Clinton had been a soviet agent. Remember all the stuff about who he might have met with while on a student trip to Russia? They even illegally accessed his passport files. That's not any less loony than being a secret muslim. And, of course, it was widely asserted that Bill AND Hillary had murdered any number of people.

A man bent on suicide intentionally crashed his plane into the WH. He seemed to have been aiming at the oval office. IIRC, it was on the south face of the WH. Clinton was out of the country at the time. Condi wasn't there to say no one could have imagined such a thing. (An anti-aircraft battery was quietly installed on the WH roof. I have wondered if that was a reason the WH wasn't targeted on 9/11... but the fact that the capitol is at the end of the mall, which is conveniently like a big landing strip, was probably the real reason.)

The recent Secret Service leaked list of security breeches includes "a 1994 incident in which a man fired 29 rifle rounds at the White House from outside the perimeter fence before being apprehended." Ho hum. That story got about 1% the coverage of these party-crashers.

A sitting US Senator said that commander-in-chief Bill Clinton would not be safe from the troops if he visited a military base in the south.

And, of course, the RW leveled a federal building in Oklahoma City.

The domestic security world since 9/11 is actually eerily orderly. Long gone are the days when a guy could just walk up to President Reagan on the sidewalk and shoot him.

What has changed is that since 9/11 we are now primed to take the smallest thing, like suburban dilettantes brazening their way into a party at the WH, hyper-seriously.

This is a typical phenomenon: Heightened awareness of a problem makes the problem more rare in the real world while simultaneously making it seem more common. (For instance, the rate of pedophile child abduction is lower today than it was in 1980 but seems epidemic because the same cultural priority-shifts that led to decreasing it also led to more news coverage.)

[BeFree]

1. Seriously?

Who, besides the RW is taking those two seriously?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

2. Which two what?

[nemo137]

3. Party crashers, I think.