I see by memeorandum, and elswhere, that the Left is off on the Obama Assassination fantasy again. It isn’t the first time, of course — there were several spates of it during the last year or two — but those all died out pretty quickly. Eric Boehlert at Media Matters appears to have kicked it off, but this one is being picked up by the full chorus, and looks likely to last a while. Ed Driscoll at Pajamas Media has a fisking.

The reasons being bruited about are transparently factitious. It passes any kind of rational belief to imagine that a group of people whose attitude toward the Previous Occupant ranged from “somebody kill the SOB” to “will no one rid us of this turbulent Texan?” is genuinely concerned about the morality and ethics of Presidential assassinations. But if that’s not it, what is?

It really isn’t all that hard to see. They don’t have George Bush to kick around any more, the race card has become so tattered and threadbare that even the more thoughtful leftists are questioning its validity, and the thinkers at the DNC and their advisors and toadies are frantically casting about for something, anything, else. As usual, though, It ain’t that simple! For the real reason the notion pushes to the forefront of their thinking processes, look no farther than what they’re using as a scarecrow to front their “concerns:” the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The parallels are indeed eerie. JFK was propelled to candidacy by people still smarting from past ethnic stereotyping and discrimination — Irish Catholics in his case, largely of the working class. I well remember the front-porch and barbershop arguments, among people who knew nothing about the Roman Catholic Church except that the preacher said it was bad, over whether or not the Pope could or would tell a President Kennedy what to do. In the South of 1960 it was a serious issue, and the Democratic Party took it seriously, sending people to explain in words of one syllable and offering Lyndon Johnson as a counterweight.

As a candidate, John Kennedy was a campaign organizer’s dream: movie-star looks, an easy, sophisticated manner, the ability to deliver stem-winding speeches with utmost sincerity and gravity, a resume that was quite creditable in a minor way and could be easily inflated into more than was really justified, and a highly camera-friendly family. His opponent was a career politician, the opposite of photogenic, with a frumpy wife, a somewhat-annoying voice, and a close association with the Previous Administration. Sound familiar?

And six weeks into his Presidency people across the country, most certainly including Democrats, were looking at one another and thinking, Oh, shit, we have really screwed the pooch with this one. The man had the attention span and the historical grounding of an ADD ten-year-old; he agreed with the last person he’d talked with, depending on how vehement they were; he was filling up the posts of Government with feckless relatives, party hacks, and courtiers; the only way to avoid outraging the country with his <ahem> extracurricular activities was to declare them “non-newsworthy” and enforce that in any way necessary. In the last truly bipartisan effort American politicians have ever made, Republicans and Democrats joined with one another and the Press to keep as much of the reality concealed as possible on the ground of preserving the good reputation of the United States. When the Democrats betrayed that deal by issuing the “Daisy” ad against Goldwater, it nailed the coffin-lid down rather thoroughly on any possibility of further “bipartisanship”.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, cited even by the Right as an example of decisive action, was handled the way it was because Kennedy had by then so thoroughly fouled up the Cuban situation — after making a major campaign “plank” out of handling it better than his predecessor had, because of greater understanding of the “root causes” — that the rest of the Democratic Party was telling him he had damned well better get this one right. Domestically, Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency had effectively begun sometime in the late summer of 1961, leaving Kennedy to screw Marilyn and pose with his loving family for the cameras, but only the President can handle foreign affairs at that level; a Vice President would simply be ignored, and Lyndon, the prototypical “local” politician, didn’t have the chops for it anyway.

I will tell you what every Democratic Party theorist and advisor knows but will never breathe, even to his or her spouse in the dark of night: If John Kennedy had not been assassinated and had completed his term, Barry Goldwater would have been elected President in 1964 and re-elected in ’68, Lyndon Johnson would never have been President and might have failed of re-election to the Senate, the history of the World for the past half-century would have been entirely different (not necessarily better, but different), and we wouldn’t have (or need) Jimmy Carter as the emblem of a bad Presidency.

And that, my friends, is why the Democrats are pushing assassination pr0n. Barack Obama is making Jimmy Carter look like Metternich and JFK like Robespierre, in retrospect, and they didn’t even have the forethought to stick a Lyndon Johnson in as backstop — the very thought of Sunny Joe as an effective backup generates guffaws. This Administration is crashing, burning, and leaking radiation and noxious fumes all over the place, and the only way to keep it from being a millstone around their necks for the next two decades is to end it, and end it soon. We don’t have a method for recalling a President (there’s impeachment, of course, but nobody’s going to buy incompetence as a “high crime”), and they couldn’t use it if we did; not only would it be an admission of defeat they aren’t willing to make, they’ve specifically declared any such thing invalid (vide Honduras). Absent Divine intervention — lightning or meteor strike, the Earth opening and swallowing the guy up in mid-oration — the only possible solution is bullets, bombs, poison gas, and the like.

Fair warning to Democrats and disillusioned former Obamaphiles: DO NOT EXPECT US “WINGNUTS” TO CLEAN UP YOUR TRASH FOR YOU. If you think Barack Obama is in danger of assassination, look to your own nutcase extremists — to the frustrated hyper-progressives whose complaint is that Obama has moved too far to the Right or hasn’t moved Left fast enough, to the Lee Harvey Oswalds and “Squeaky” Frommes, to the Kos Kidz and Huffington Huffers declaring “public option or fight”. If the Secret Service feels it needs more bodies for the duty of “catching the bullet” intended for Barry, they need look no farther than the nearest Right Wing Conspiracy for volunteers. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of kooks and loudmouths who don’t know how their bread is buttered, but their leaders do and have been passing the word: We want this man to live forever, to serve as an emblem of Progressive politics at least that long, and (in the words of a Jack Vance character from the Sixties) we want him safe as a forty-ton statue of a dead dog.E