You either trust the system, the process(es) and safeguards in place, have the patience to wait out the election cycles to see if change is coming your way…or you don’t.
In which case, any kind of revolutionary ardor can be justified. Self justified.
Depending upon how many of your 300 million+ fellow citizens agree with you (or not) will determine (years later, by historians) whether you’re anarchist cranks, terrorists, and traitors, or Patriots and The New Founding Fathers of the Second American Republic.
Suspension of elections doesn’t necessarily mean the dissolution of Congress. If enough of the major political figures in the rogue president’s party are in on the power grab, he could suspend all elections, cementing his party’s hold on power, and still keep Congress running as a rubber stamp for his actions.
Here is the thing: the act of assassination results in outrage. The effect of that outrage is to stoke sympathy toward the victim, strengthening the position of his supporters. Hence, removing the “immediate threat” almost always establishes a worse situation than what was addressing. Assassination is simply a bad idea because it creates backlash. It is like trying to fix a stuttering engine by whacking the head with a sledgehammer. You end up worse off than you were.
To anyone actually considering this “remedy”, please reconsider. You will make life much worse for everyone.
Fair 'nuf, and I’m not trying to absolve either of the things they did as Wehrmacht officers for the Nazi regime.
But it was their (eventual!) disaffection with said regime that led them to take the actions that they did.
You can argue, quite legitimately, that perhaps it was, “Day Late, Dollar Short” on their part.
Then again, you can also argue, “Better Late Than Never.”
WRT the topic at hand, yes, it is morally better to be opposed from the outset, if it is truly warranted (as opposed to merely being butt-hurt because things didn’t go the way certain people wanted things to go).
But the remedy, via established due process, is probably quite preferable to…more extreme and immediate measures. See eschereal’s post for just the practical/pragmatic reason(s), if not the moral/ethical ones.
Was that blindly partisan comment really called for, or did you just see an opportunity to throw in an insult of liberals, and do it for shits and giggles?
I think that, here in America, one should never assassinate government officials. It is un-American- it essentially nullifies the concepts on which the country is founded.
Besides that, when I imagine my adult life, past or future, and imagine a hypothetical assassination of the president, things always become worse. Sometimes a lot worse. Are you familiar with the Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria?
Even under the most extreme conditions the assassination won’t take down the whole system, the assassin’s life will certainly be ruined, and the odds of success are remote at best.
What if Zombie Hitler arrives and convinces Americans to elect him president, even though he is demonstrably German (rising as a zombie legally counts as birth, a law Zombie Hitler coincidentally lobbied for, and since his grave was transported to Missouri for the event, well, technically…), and proceeds to behave exactly as one would expect? Even then, I say no. If you still think you are going to take a crack at it, well then I definitely don’t know you and anyway I’ll be busy running the other way.
It is just to use violence only in self-defense, and then, only in relative proportion. There are many cases when it is satisfies these conditions but is impractical, feckless, and/or counterproductive.
So, given that hypothetical, I think that I can safely say yes, those old boys (survivors of D-Day, Bastogne, etc.) wouldn’t bat an eye at putting a 30-06 FMJ through the brain pan of even that duly elected President.
