Kill The President?

I of course, do not support any such thing. For one, that would leave Dick Cheney in charge of things, not only putting this nation in the hands of someone who shot their best friend, but also leaving us one heart attack away from the esteemed Dennis Hastert taking control:


"By restraining spending and by cutting the deficit, Republican policies are helping to keep our economy strong" -Dennis Hastert, apparently ignoring his party's rampant porkbarrel spending and the largest deficit in a century.

But Ben Metcalf of Harper's Magazine raises an interesting question:

Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?

In this day and age, it's not so certain such a statement wouldn't land your hippie ass in Guantanemo and earn yourself the label "20th Hijacker." Or at the very least, get you a face to face meeting with some pre-morning-coffee FBI agents.

Metcalf brilliantly posits that, while it may be illegal to threaten the President with death, judging by our own government's standards of legality, it is NOT a crime to write:

"I would like to kidnap George W. Bush and fly him to a prison in some faraway land where his ‘rights’ are no longer an issue, there to put a bag over his head and make him stand for hours on one leg while I defecate on his New Testament before chaining his arms to the ceiling until he dies of a heart attack, after which I will claim that he never existed?"

After all, doing those things to someone is clearly legal, according to our friend Attorney General Alberto, who refers to, among other books, Nazi/Russian/North-Vietanmese legal texts as his basis for constitutional interpretation.

But there's little hope of anyone actually doing that to Bush. Chances are, even a Democratic administration wouldn't allow him to be tried by the international community as a war criminal, despite the resume. I'll join Metcalf in saying I'd like to see the President and all the neo-cons get a taste of their own medicine, for America's sake. America is not the land of torturous opressors, and I'm damn tired of our leaders making the world think we are.

Meanwhile, we can only hope for the day when we will have a government that pursues the people who attacked us (Bin Laden and Al-Queda) instead of starting ill-planned wars against random countries with ZERO ties to those who attacked us.

We can only hope for a government which devotes resources to rebuilding cities in America wiped out by natural disasters (New Orleans) instead of devoting resources to bridges-to-nowhere and useless 700-mile fences (um, why are we talking about immigration when A MAJOR US CITY JUST GOT WIPED OUT INDEPENDENCE-DAY STYLE???)

We can only hope that one day we'll have a government who cares about the health of its uninsured citizens... instead of one that seeks to ban Siegfried and Roy from getting married.

Until then, we're stuck with Bush. Don't kill him, for the reason stated above. If you're going to kill anyone, make it Bill O'Reilly.