Keeping away from the question of whether Barack and his policies will be good or bad, and sticking to your original question, should we be afraid of Barack Obama being assassinated, let me point out that virtual all assassination attempts in recent US history have more to do with mental illness than with policies. Hinkley didn’t have policy objects to Reagan, nor did Squeaky Fromm when she tried to shoot Ford.
Worth mentioning also is that despite death threats, and plenty of terrorists who would love to knock off W, the Secret Service has been pretty darn effective in recent years. Other than the loss of JFK, I can’t think of a protected president that has been killed in modern times. (Okay, Reagan was shot, but he did survive)
Now, to the question of does Barack being a minority raise his chances of assassination? For a minute, let’s put on our tin foil hats, and let’s buy into the notion that these assassination are conspiracy plots put in motion by a secret cabal who controls the financial world. If this conspiracy theory is true then being a minority has little to do with it. As a matter of fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if this cabal isn’t thinking, “Hey you know a minority president would help keep people thinking that we don’t exist. I mean after all who’s going to believe some guy named Barack Obama is being controlled by us?” Following this line of thinking, I think the most likely candidate to take a bullet is not Barak, but Ron Paul. Can you for one second imagine what our cabal would be thinking if Ron Paul were to actually be viewed as a contender??? My god, they’d be having a fit.
Okay, as much as I enjoy the tin foil hat, guess I should take it off and provide a couple of other views. First is that there are plenty of white male rednecks, (myself included) that would be glad to have a non-white male president, because quite frankly I’m tired of the talk about how white males have messed everything up. Let someone else mess it up for a while, and stop blaming my ethnic group. And to be honest yeah, I’ve got the typical guilt that comes from being named after a man who owned slaves. It’s the same reason we voted to let the Indians run our casinos.
And, if I want to ignore the guilt thing, there is also the bit that I was raised in a nice family where manners were stressed. And quite frankly, if someone other than a white male wants the job, then by george, maybe we should let them have their turn. It’s only polite.
