Maybe he's trying to protect his family...
What if President Obama took on Fox News to call attention to how its violent rhetoric is a threat to his family? I'm reading that the Secret Service is overwhelmed because Obama and family have been the target of more death threats than any President in history.
We all know that Fox ramped up so much anger and fear that people were showing up at healthcare debates armed with guns and rifles. A prominent Democrat had to install bullet-proof glass in his office because of death threats back in August during the height of the tea party hysteria.
It certainly isn't difficult to link up blatant fearmongering and the violence prone segment of our society. What about the murdered census worker?
From boston.com: "The unprecedented number of death threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret Service, according to government officials and reports, raising new questions about the 144-year-old agency’s overall mission.[..]
Obama, who was given Secret Service protection 18 months before the election - the earliest ever for a presidential candidate - has been the target of more threats since his inauguration than his predecessors.
Two days before Obama’s appearance at San Francisco fund-raisers on Thursday, a 59-year-old Northern California man was indicted on charges of sending a racist, profanity-filled e-mail threatening to kill Obama and his family. The rambling e-mail included specific references to Michelle Obama and the phrase, "do it to his children and family first in front of him,’’ according to the indictment.
The Southern Poverty Law Center says that antigovernment militias and white supremacist groups have strengthened in recent years, responding to an increasingly diverse population and what they see as an expanding government. [..]
"A key difference this time is that the federal government - the entity that almost the entire radical right views as its primary enemy - is headed by a black man,’’ the report said. "One result has been a remarkable rash of domestic terror incidents since the presidential campaign, most of them related to anger over the election of Barack Obama.’’
Threatening language has also found its way into talk radio broadcasts and social networking websites, raising fears that individuals not normally considered threats to the president could be incited to violence.
For example, the Secret Service in recent months has investigated a poll posted on Facebook about whether Obama should be killed. It has interviewed a Florida radio talk show host after a caller mentioned ammunition, target practice, and the president, and federal officials have raised concerns about several instances in which protesters carrying weapons showed up at Obama events, including a man at an August town hall in New Hampshire.
"The racist extremist fringe is exploiting themes that strike a chord in the mainstream more than we have seen in the recent past,’’ said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino, citing several elected leaders who have questioned whether Obama is a US citizen eligible to be president.[..]"~~
Fox News constantly feeds their millions of viewers all this anti-Obama, anti-government crap as gospel. Dangerous stuff, especially in a gun saturated society, where people are unemployed and angry...and looking for someone to blame.
It's time to get real about how ramped up the crazies are, and who exactly is doing the ramping.
Fox News basically created the tea party movement and promoted all of those teabagger and townhall events. Looks like an activist organization to me. They organized thousands of people to defeat a piece of healthcare legislation....just so the President would have a legislative failure.
And get this - it's not working! We're going to get healthcare reform anyway. They've wasted a lot of money and energy trying to stop something that's just not going to be stopped.
So, way to go President Obama, for calling out Fox for the reactionary propagandists they really are. Sen. Kerry learned the hard way about trying to remain above the fray when those big lies were being pushed on Fox by the swiftboaters...which ultimately helped defeat his presidential run.
When you come right down to it, Fox News and its ownership are a lot more dangerous to American freedom and democracy than al Qaeda, or communism, or any of those other outside forces.
BTW - Media Matters gives a few good examples of Republican violent rhetoric from the last few months.
Media Matters also has a long and varied accounting of Fox mangling of facts here...
