No racism to see here, folks. Move along, please.

by David Safier

Remember during the presidential primaries, how the government gave Obama Secret Service protection earlier than any candidate in history? It was because he received many more death threats than any presidential primary candidate in history.

Couldn't have anything to do with race, could it? I don't know what else it could have to do with, but there must be another explanation. Wise talking heads tell us the wingnut Obama haters aren't motivated by racism.

Now that he's President, Obama has received an "unprecedented number of death threats" — 4 times the normal level for a sitting president. But maybe that would have happened to any Democratic President in today's political climate, I don't know.

Wait a minute, is that supposed to make me feel better, that the desire to kill any Democratic President is at record levels?

Oh, then there's this: "a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of antigovernment fervor."

I can only see two explanations. The simplest one is, the fact that a black man is sitting in the oval office has brought the latent and not-so-latent racism of a sizable portion of the nation bubbling to the surface, enraging them to the edge of violence. The other option is that it's not about race. It's that we have a growing extremist right wing faction that openly embraces violence and is willing to consider taking up arms as a reasonable option if it doesn't like the direction the country is heading.

Either explanation, or a combination of the two, gives me reason to fear the right wing, not for the ideas I disagree with, but for its potential to take up arms and form bands of vigilantes and homegrown terrorists to wreak havoc across the country.