Liberal radio host Thom Hartmann was really irritated at a Mother Jones article that laid out how Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition had a mailer with a poll asking if President Obama was a "more serious threat" than Nazi Germany or Japan in World War II, and if the public believed Obama had "communist beliefs" to the left of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. But any right that Hartmann had to be mad about hyperbole fizzled when he offered his own hyperbole in response.
Hartmann connected this letter to a Virginia murder-suicide from a man said to have killed his family because he was distraught in part over a second Obama term. Hartmann also claimed "there have been I believe the latest number is either eight or ten credible conspiracies to assassinate the president that have been broken up the Secret Service and the FBI so far, I mean this is an all-time high." Hartmann said the right wing is much more likely to shoot its enemies and compared the "Ralph Reed fundamentalists" to the radical Islamists of the Taliban: (see the end of the video below)
Why is it? This is an interesting question. You look at the history of right-wing movements and left-wing movements -- why is it that the right-wingers seem to be more inclined to violence, and it seems, if you look at the political history of the United States, who are the people who actually get assassinated? Jack, Bobby, and Martin. I mean, they’re the liberals....
Frankly, I think it's because the right-wing mentality is grounded in fear, and, by the way, this is true whether we're talking about the right in the United States, the Ralph Reed fundamentalists, or whether you're talking about the right in Afghanistan, AKA the Taliban. Right-wingers are all about fear and control. And they use that. And that sometimes leads to really, really bad consequences.
At the end of 2009, even the liberal blog TPM reported that Mark Sullivan, the director of the Secret Service "refuted stories that President Obama has received more threats than previous presidents...'The threats are not up,; Sullivan said, adding that they receive about the same amount of threats against Obama as they did for presidents Clinton and Bush."
