I would like to respond to Jim Bailey’s editorial of Sept. 30 entitled “When men of cloth pray for a president’s death.” While the behavior of the two “pastors” described in the essay is reprehensible, I am left wondering where was Mr. Bailey’s indignation when much more influential people were publicly calling for the assassination of President Bush. I would like to quote at some length from an article by Victor Davis Hanson, which appeared in today’s National Review Online:

“...the sudden liberal worry that conservatives in general have gone over the line in legitimate opposition to Obama’s rather radical agenda is not only unfair but amnesiac, given that not long ago any means were deemed tolerable for the noble ends of destroying George Bush, not defeating him, but destroying his character entirely.

“We all recall the Nazi/brownshirts outbursts by Gore, Soros, Byrd, etc., the Alfred Knopf novel “Checkpoint” about killing Bush, or the Toronto Film Festival award-winning docudrama about killing Bush, but perhaps we forget there was no outrage from the Democratic congress or the New York Times at all that and worse. In addition, we may have forgotten the New York play “I’m Gonna Kill the President” or the creepy Guardian column by Charles Brooker published on the eve of the 2004 election:

“The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr., where are you now that we need you?”

“At about the same time, one Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was tried and convicted, inter alia, for planning to kill George Bush. The only explanation I can offer for this syndrome, why there was this intense level of hatred and assassination talk in so many different media and genres, and so much present hysteria about criticism that in comparison is tame, is that many continue to believe it was a noble thing to vilify (and worse) Bush and it is a sin to criticize Obama. In other words, ends justify means, and sophisticated, murderous hatred in novels, films, plays, and op-eds is to be judged differently from Tea Party and town-hall middle-class anger.”

The double standard never ceases to amaze.

Dan F. Ippolito

Anderson