WTF?
So I would pit the President, the Secret Service, the FBI, and vindictive a-holes on the Internet who call the FBI to complain about online rants.
But I don’t want to be visited by the SS. So forget I ever mentioned it.
PS–Any snitches here on the SDMB?
I followed your link. Without any evidence as to whether this person’s rant was harmless or not I really can’t take a side on this one.
If the person was ranting on what a tool Bush is then the SS stuff is pure bull.
If the person was advocating violence against the Prez then no one should be surprised if another reader considered the rant to be a potential threat.
I haven’t read through all of the comments, but in fairness it doesn’t say in the entry itself what exactly she said about the president.
I mean, if she wrote something stating that she was going to purchase an assault weapon (hooray AWB lapse) and march to DC to “take out Chimperor Bush” or something, then yeah… I can see why the Secret Service might take issue with it.
OTOH, If she was simply ranting about how incompetent BushCo is, then it was absolutely an injustice.
Old news, man.
And you convienently left out the clarification, which includes:
It’s ok to “pit” the president (It’s been done. Repeatedly, if you hadn’t noticed.) as long as you don’t make anything that could be construed as a threat.
The sky is falling! Or…things are the same as they’ve always been and you’ve never been allowed to threaten the President.
I’m sorry. Could you speak into my collar and repeat what you just said slowly. 
No worries. The S.S. said what was said could be construed as a threat. As long as you don’t threaten the President, you can say as many mean things about him as you want.
I read part of the original post. It was written as a fairly impassioned prayer that God would kill Bush (maybe not phrased as “kill”, I don’t recall), and about what an evil man Bush is/why he needs to go. Now if I saw that in the journal of someone I knew, I’d just kind of nod my head, knowing they’re rational and not really going to go off the deep end. But if I saw that in any random other journal, I might well wonder. And I’d say it’s the Secret Service’s job to investigate stuff like this, to figure out who’s just an overly emotional liberal who thinks that Bush is the enemy, and who’s a nutjob who might just come to believe that he or she is the instrument of God’s wrath.
I know a person who is a hardcore lefty and a Reagan-hater. In 1984 (I think) he was planning a trip to Ireland at the same time that Ronald Reagan was going to be there.
So this person contacted Washington (repeatedly) and asked for - nay, demanded - a copy of Reagan’s Irish itinerary. He was surprised when a group of hardfaced Secret Service men showed up on his doorstep (he lives with his mother). They asked him some tough questions for several hours. He explained that he only wanted Reagan’s itinerary because, “I hate the SOB and I want to make sure that, wherever he is in Ireland, I can avoid him.” <snicker>
Anyway, the Secret Service men finally decided he was a harmless ass and they left. To this day, the idiot has no clue why they were interested in him.
My point is: The Secret Service has the right to check up on these things. That is their job. In the SDMB BBQ Pit, there is a rule against wishing death on anyone. I assume that applies to the President of the US, as well - *especially * the President.
OK, this is the part I don’t get. Why especially the President. He’s just another citizen. He’s not God, he’s not the king, he’s not irreplaceable. If anything should happen to him, we have another (at least in theory) capable man ready to step in and do the job. Why put him on a pedestal above all the other almost 300 million citizens of this country?
P.S. He shouldn’t be allowed to have traffic stopped during rush hour, either.
Do you mean why does the Secret Service take death threats against the President more seriously than death threats against the guy at the corner store down the street?
If so, then I can suggest an answer. While the President is theoretically replaceable, it’s in the same way that my kidneys are theoretically replaceable: doable, but a serious pain in the ass. The Vice-President may be able to step in, but there still will be a whole lot of serious consequences to the economy, the state of national security, and to the mood of the populace. Not to mention that the President is just a bigger target than most other people.
Gratuitous tu quoque involving haircuts aboard Air force One coming up in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . .
I think the refrence was due to the fact that while wishing death on someone in the pit is an infraction of board rules, threatening the president with death is a federal crime.
Could be wrong.
Okay, I know what a tu quoque fallacy is, I know what a haircut is, and I know what Air Force One is, but that sentence still didn’t make any sense to me. Is there some context that I’m missing here?
Well, not really, I understand that, I think. Let me try to put it better.
It’s an attitude I get that the President is above us all, that the mere fact of his being president makes him better, more special than the rest of us. I have respect for the office, but it’s filled by one of us - one of us that worked hard and got lucky. He’s not an incarnation of the country.
I shook hands with Jimmy Carter once, and I’ll never forget it. I’m sure that if I shook hands with George Bush I’d never forget that either. It really is something to shake hands with the President of the United States; it’s special. But they’re just men.
Does that make more sense?
Bill Clinton once held up traffic at Los Angeles International to get a haircut. Or so the story goes.
I agree. This isn’t like in ancient times, where the leader was an incarnate deity. I can see confiscating some Egyptian guy’s papyrus scrolls and giving him forty lashes if he said something bad about the pharaoh, but not this.
There’s a screen capture of the anniesj post somewhere online, but I can’t find the link right now since it was posted on another message board that’s down right now. Someone with better Google skillz than me might be able to find it. IMO it wasn’t any more inflammatory than most of what was said here during the election. And I seriously doubt that webloggers would actually go after the president; would someone in charge of a paramilitary group bent on assassination be so stupid as to put their intentions on a public website? Even if it was under a “lock” like LJ? Then again, I’m sure this was just a plot to keep bloggers on their toes and keep up the public anxiety level. I don’t think the Secret Service is really scared of nerds who spend hours working on their blogs or posting on message boards. Hardcore webloggers’ carpal tunnel syndrome precludes them from firing a weapon.
Yes, it does.
Aha. Thanks.
Did you miss point #5 of her post? She suspects something far more mundane, that someone on LJ who dislikes her decided to fuck with her life.
I disagree. The office holds the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. That’s not a ego statement as much as a fact that has to be dealt with. The person in that office has a life that is carefully scheduled out day by day. It’s a big damn inconvenience for the locals anytime the President is traveling but it sure makes a lot of sense to keep him on schedule.
And his life is more important that yours or mine. The individual deaths of either one of us on the job will not affect commerce, markets, or national security as much as the death of a president. As US citizens the country provides our lives with protection but I can very well understand that more effort is put into the protection of the President’s life.
I would never advocate assassinating President George W. Bush.
It would be ineffective, tactically.
Shooting Mortimer Snerd is futile if you leave Edgar Bergen alive.