Umm.
NO.
I am reluctant to provide the direct link: David Frum (!) has the details. Essentially, Scheuer was babbling about current US/UK policy, and finished up his not-actually-incoherent* screaming by quoting Seventeenth Century English republican Algernon Sydney, who got the chop** from Charles II for… well. Depends on who you ask. To be fair, the treason charges were dubious; to be equally fair, Sydney was in the pay of the French anyway, and the French were trying to urinate in Charles’ stewpot. You could make the case that Sydney should have realized that he’d get only one Get Out Of Jail Free card as part of the Restoration…
Sorry: Restoration politics is an interesting subject, and one that I expect that I’ll reading up a bit more on. The point is that Sydney advocated the assassination of tyrants as an acceptable method of political discourse. …All right, that is what he did. Michael Scheuer thinks that’s a lovely idea. …So noted. Scheuer also thinks that Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron are tyrants, and let’s not mince words: this was him passively-aggressively suggesting that somebody shoot both.
Umm.
NO.
Sometimes, people ask me, Why do you despise the antiwar movement so? I admit, I usually am slightly confused at questions like that: it’s like asking me Why do you hate being hit in the kidneys with a hammer? I’m like, Why don’t you? – because this is precisely the sort of behavior that I grew accustomed to coming from them during the Bush years, and I never really expected the hardliners to get any better once there was a new President. The Democrats, sure: I knew that they never meant all that stuff in the first place, as an examination of Barack Obama’s (remarkably inept) foreign policy will demonstrate. But the fanatics? Nope, they were going to stay vile.
As you can see.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: HECK yes the US Secret Service should stop by and have a chat with Micahel Scheuer. You never know.
*It took me a second to figure it out: Scheuer’s hatred of any particular Islamist regime is inversely proportional to the likelihood that it’ll go and attack Israel in the very near future. Guess Scheuer just can’t stay mad at people who want to go out and kill Jews.
**Not as part of the English Restoration: this all happened two decades later.
Meh.
I’m a big fan of the sword of Damocles, and feel that the head which wears the crown should rightly rest uneasy.
If Scheuer and his fellow-travelers have the courage of their convictions, I’m fine with that. I only hope they wait until Obama is safely out of office. Simply for the reason that the last thing we need is another Camelot myth.
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But I feel secure in my prediction that they do not have the courage of their convictions. In fact, as far as I can tell, their sole conviction is a reflexive antipathy to their country and culture, but a complete unwillingness to leave either.
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A public figure who came to prominence by saying outrageous things re-emerged from obscurity by saying something outrageous. That’s truly shocking.
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Obligatory note for the NSA: I do not want Obama assassinated. He’s doing more damage to his cause than anyone over here on the Right could ever hope to accomplish.
I absolutely do not want Obama to die before 2018.
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The Left – the loonie branch, at least – never got the idea that words have consequences beaten into their empty heads.
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Mew
There are plenty of reasons to not want Obama assassinated or to otherwise die in office, so I’ll mention a purely partisan one: since Lincoln was President, the Democratic Party has never won three consecutive Presidential elections except when the first winner dies in office. (JFK, FDR, etc). We should all hope that this trend continues for as long as possible; what’s worse than a Democratic President? Two Democratic Presidents.
Hey, who isn’t anti-war? I’m anti-war. What Monty Python said in jest, I will say with conviction:
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“It’s all very well to laugh at the military (or be anti-war), but when one considers the meaning of life, it is a struggle between alternative viewpoints of life itself. And without the ability to defend one’s own viewpoint against other perhaps more aggressive ideologies, then reasonableness and moderation could, quite simply, disappear. That is why we’ll always need an army…”
I’ve got to chime in on the ‘No’ bandwagon.
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The longer Obama has between leaving office and dying of natural causes, the more time he has to fritter away his wealth and prestige. The best scenario is poor, obscure, and with history less than fully enchanted with him.
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In addition, the killings of Presidents of the United States of America can only ever serve the interests of the Democratic Party and communist parties.
Your last phrase has some redundancies in it.
I think my wording is exactly correct.
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Consider the murder of Abraham Lincoln. At the time of the murder, the Democratic Party, while leftist and revolutionary, lacked many of the obvious cosmetic features of socialism or communism.
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By murdering Lincoln, the Democrats were able to destabilize and escalate things things where they could internally justify using confederate veterans to seize power. They did so, securing a power base mainly through terrorism and electoral fraud.
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Absent Lincoln, it is possible that the situation would have stabilized with the Democrats being forced to compete fairly for votes. Given the stigma of having started a civil war for partisan purposes, and then lost, this might have been a challenge.
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It is plausible that the Democratic Party, under such circumstances, might have become extinct inside of a few generations.
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The Democratic Party profited heavily from murdering Lincoln.