UK Paper Calls for Assassination of President!

[Robert Braun]

Dumb show

Charlie Brooker
Saturday October 23, 2004
The Guardian

Heady times. The US election draws ever nearer, and while the rest of the world bangs its head against the floorboards screaming "Please God, not Bush!", the candidates clash head to head in a series of live televised debates. It's a bit like American Idol, but with terrifying global ramifications. You've got to laugh.
Or have you? Have you seen the debates? I urge you to do so. The exemplary BBC News website (www.bbc.co.uk/news) hosts unexpurgated streaming footage of all the recent debates, plus clips from previous encounters, through Reagan and Carter, all the way back to Nixon versus JFK.

Watching Bush v Kerry, two things immediately strike you. First, the opening explanation of the rules makes the whole thing feel like a Radio 4 parlour game. And second, George W Bush is... well, he's... Jesus, where do you start?

The internet's a-buzz with speculation that Bush has been wearing a wire, receiving help from some off-stage lackey. Screen grabs appearing to show a mysterious bulge in the centre of his back are being traded like Top Trumps. Prior to seeing the debate footage, I regarded this with healthy scepticism: the whole "wire" scandal was just wishful thinking on behalf of some amateur Michael Moores, I figured. And then I watched the footage.

Quite frankly, the man's either wired or mad. If it's the former, he should be flung out of office: tarred, feathered and kicked in the nuts. And if it's the latter, his behaviour goes beyond strange, and heads toward terrifying. He looks like he's listening to something we can't hear. He blinks, he mumbles, he lets a sentence trail off, starts a new one, then reverts back to whatever he was saying in the first place. Each time he recalls a statistic (either from memory or the voice in his head), he flashes us a dumb little smile, like a toddler proudly showing off its first bowel movement. Forgive me for employing the language of the playground, but the man's a tool.

So I sit there and I watch this and I start scratching my head, because I'm trying to work out why Bush is afforded any kind of credence or respect whatsoever in his native country. His performance is so transparently bizarre, so feeble and stumbling, it's a miracle he wasn't laughed off the stage. And then I start hunting around the internet, looking to see what the US media made of the whole "wire" debate. And they just let it die. They mentioned it in passing, called it a wacko conspiracy theory and moved on.

Yet whether it turns out to be true or not, right now it's certainly plausible - even if you discount the bulge photos and simply watch the president's ridiculous smirking face. Perhaps he isn't wired. Perhaps he's just gone gaga. If you don't ask the questions, you'll never know the truth.

The silence is all the more troubling since in the past the US news media has had no problem at all covering other wacko conspiracy theories, ones with far less evidence to support them. (For infuriating confirmation of this, watch the second part of the must-see documentary series The Power Of Nightmares (Wed, 9pm, BBC2) and witness the absurd hounding of Bill Clinton over the Whitewater and Vince Foster non-scandals.)

Throughout the debate, John Kerry, for his part, looks and sounds a bit like a haunted tree. But at least he's not a lying, sblack person
ing, drink-driving, selfish, reckless, ignorant, dangerous, backward, drooling, twitching, blinking, mouse-faced little cheat. And besides, in a fight between a tree and a bush, I know who I'd favour.

On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. 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?[/i]

[Robert Braun]

Left-Wing UK Paper Pulls Bush Assassination Column
By Patrick Goodenough
CNSNews.com Pacific Rim Bureau Chief
October 25, 2004

(CNSNews.com) - Britain's left-wing Guardian newspaper said at the weekend that it and a columnist were sorry if anyone took offense at published remarks appearing to call for the assassination of President Bush.

In a column published in the paper's entertainment guide section on Saturday, Charlie Brooker wrote that Bush would probably win the Nov. 2 election despite the prayers of "the entire civilized world," thus proving that God does not exist.

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

By Sunday, the column had been pulled from the Guardian's website, replaced with a note saying that the final sentence of the column had "caused offence to some readers."

It said the paper associated itself with a statement from Brooker, apologizing for any offense caused by his comments.

"The views expressed in this column are not those of the Guardian. Although flippant and tasteless, his closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action -- an intention he believed regular readers of his humorous column would understand. He deplores violence of any kind."

Booth and Oswald respectively assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and President John F. Kennedy in 1963, while Hinckley tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

(Elsewhere in Brooker's column, the columnist compared Bush and Sen. John Kerry's performances in the recent televised debates, saying while the Democrat had looked and sounded "a bit like a haunted tree," he was, at least, "not a lying, sblack person ing, drink-driving, selfish, reckless, ignorant, dangerous, backward, drooling, twitching, blinking, mouse-faced little cheat.")

The controversy over Brooker's column came shortly after the Guardian ended a much-criticized campaign aimed at influencing next week's presidential election.

The paper handed out, to anyone who applied via its website, contact details of American voters in battleground state Ohio's Clark County, which Al Gore won by just 324 votes in 2000.

Although the Guardian portrayed its campaign as merely an attempt to urge registered voters of undeclared party allegiance in the county to use their vote in what was a very important election, the paper made little attempt to hide its strong preference for Kerry.

The campaign, dubbed "Operation Clark County" drew considerable interest, and the paper said it handed out more than 14,000 Clark county voter names and addresses to applicants from Britain and many other countries around the world.

But it also sparked strong opposition, with the newspaper being inundated with mail from unimpressed Americans.

A popular weblog based in Australia provided email addresses for more than 50 individual Guardian staff members and suggested they be swamped with messages.

Other "bloggers" suggested that pro-Bush people apply for voters' details -- the newspaper had promised to hand out each name and address only once -- to spare some Clark county residents the irritation of getting voting advice from abroad.

Hackers also broke into the Guardian website.

Guardian media editor Ian Katz wrote that newspaper staff received thousands of emails from voters in the U.S., some of them abusive - an onslaught which he said was "pretty unpleasant and inconvenient" for newspaper staffers.

"You couldn't fail to be a little shocked by the volume and pitch of the invective directed our way."

Meanwhile, the newspaper's reader's editor (ombudsman), Ian Mayes, reported Saturday that in an internal poll of Guardian staff, 44 out of 71 respondents were against Operation Clark County, 13 favored it and 14 were undecided.

Among reasons given for those opposed to the exercise was the view that intervention in the democratic processes of another country was not "legitimate newspaper behavior."

Mayes said the Guardian's editor had defended the campaign, saying "it was a crucially important election in the face of which many felt a sense of impotence."

The paper has ended the campaign. It also dropped plans to send the winners of a competition -- writers of the four best letters to the American voters -- to Springfield, Ohio, to observe the closing days of the election campaign. Instead the winners will be given a trip to Washington, D.C.

The exercise may have had an unintended -- if not unpredictable -- response, that of galvanizing the pro-Bush camp.

Ohio Republican spokesman Jason Mauk was quoted in the New York Post as saying: "The British are our loyal allies, but voters in Clark County are outraged at this tacky publicity stunt conducted by an anti-Bush publication to manipulate the vote in Ohio. It has backfired miserably and fired up our base. The Guardian did us a big favor."[/i]

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The original article may still be found on the Guardian website-- which is where I found it.

Leave it to the English to publish such overtly inflammatory garbage, then retract it with a fake apology, THEN complain about the "... volume and pitch of the invective" directed at the newspaper.

Bob.