I’ve been thinking about this lately - Bush seems to be the most universally hated president of the past 100 years or so. Moreso, he’s one of the most actively dangerous, as he’s done so much to harm the U.S. already and is looking to do more in the name of his Iraq war.
Why hasn’t someone tried to assassinate the guy yet? There HAS to be some nutjob out there who would have been provoked by all of this to the point of opening fire. I mean, even Reagan got capped for far less.
Is it just that Bush is so well-insulated and that his security is so great?
I will attempt a serious answer to this. Ronald Regan got shot for much, much much less. He was shot for being President when John Hinckley decided the way to impress Jodi Foster was to shoot the president. Since then, the Secret Service have taken measures to prevent a similar psycho from getting near the President.
Oh, totally - that’s what I mean. If a president could get shot for that much less, aren’t the chances of a universally-hated president way higher for getting blasted on?
Your answer is logical, but I think it speaks more to the prevention of successful assassination attempts. The fact that there’s much better security around wouldn’t stop someone as disturbed as Hinckley from trying, regardless of the slim chance for success.
It makes me wonder if there are people who are caught in the early stages of planning such an attack that we never hear about.
Seriously, at this stage it would be pointless politically as the next election isn’t far off. Probably there are much easier and equally useful tagrets for terrorists, whilst people with reasons of revenge might wait until he is an ex-president with less security. So he just has nutters to worry about. Frankly, I think nutters will either kill someone they know, someone at random, or someone with great charisma/loved by the media. George W doesn’t fit any of those criteria. The only criteria he does fit is for a murderer who wants to go down in history, in which case other targets that would be almost as historical are likely to have far less security and be much easier to kill.
It Ronald Reagan had been successfully assassinated, George H. W. Bush would have become president. If George W. Bush were assasinated, Dick Cheney woould become president. I think that’s Dubya’s insurance policy.
I don’t think my question is as nutty or controversial as you guys are making it out to be - haven’t most presidents had assassination attempts, or at the very least major security scares? It seems like with all of the nutjobs out there, we’d have heard about more people trying to get at the guy, but we haven’t. I was just wondering if he’s particularly well-protected.
Political assassination just isn’t in the American character, thank goodness.
Booth can be seen as an extension of the Civil war.
Guiteau shot Garfield for a mixture of political and personal reasons. He was “a stalwart of the stalwarts”, but was personally disappointed that Garfield didn’t give him a job. Also, he was likely nuts.
Leon Czolgosz was an anarchist, practically reenacting a similar European murder.
We may never know why Oswald shot Kennedy, but communism seems the simplest answer.
So we’ve got two followers of now practically defunct ideologies, both operating at times were their ideals were in violent struggle against the mainstream, which is only true now for radical Islam, one disgruntled patronage seeker, that system is more closed now, and one diehard from a war. We simply don’t assassinate people because we’d prefer the other party in office.
Now, if you’re asking me why more insane people haven’t made a rush at the president anyway, I couldn’t tell you. That’s a question for psychologists.
Yeah, but I think it’s even considered illegal just to theoretically discuss it. If you said anything that could be remotely construed to indicate you wanted the President dead, you could get in serious legal trouble.
(I think… is that just some kind of commonly accepted to be true thing that’s not really true?)
I’ve not seen anything in this thread advocating the assassination of anyone, or saying that someone is likely to assassinate anyone. So if an FBI agent were to read this thread, I doubt if the agent would be troubled by it.
The Secret Service arrested a man for approaching Vice-President Cheney at a public event and criticisizing the Iraq War. Sure, the man was released after three hours in jail and posting bond, and the charges were dropped three weeks later, but I personally don’t think the Secret Service cares much for the Bill of Rights.
Where are you getting this from? I read every post between this and the OP at least a couple times to be sure and nobody–I mean N-O-B-O-D-Y-- is saying anything even remotely like that.
