Only to thin-skinned bum boys at the Stranger.

It's all fun and games until somebody shoots the president.

Why is it always Indiana? So glad I moved.

I’m sorry but these thinly veiled threats of violence from the far right are just that, threats. They are meant to allude to violence as a means to an end .. can you imagine how the right would respond to ads that invited voters to “take out” “lock and load” “target” etc President Bush? Hell, we were told disagreeing with the President was almost an act of treason and now with Obama in office all that respect the office jargon is gone.

There are plenty of "thinly veiled threats" as well as straight up threats that the teabaggers and GOP drop almost daily, but this is hardly one worth getting too worked up over.
Sure, it's meant to slightly conflate violence with the president, but it's one of the least offensive ones they've come out with.

When they call Obama a "socialist" they're basically saying he's a communist. They're too cowardly to call him a communist directly because people who aren't in their lunatic base would immediately see how ridiculous that is.

@1 - Oh, bless your heart, you think you're upsetting anybody. Or is your idea of anybody's worst nightmare tedium and a waste of space?

I like this message. Not only does it tell all the Jared Loughner's in the country how they can be national heroes, but it also takes the one of the biggest accomplishments of the Obama administration that teabaggers genuinely support, and strip away all of Obama's responsibility for it. As it turns out, those Navy SEALs just happened across Bin Laden, with no direction whatsoever from the chain of command, and killed him entirely of their own volition. Obama didn't even know what was going on until he passed everyone gathered around the television on his way to the mosque.

Personally, I think it's just advertising by stupid people, for stupid people. But then again, a lot of crazy people are really stupid.

I reckon that when your conversation with your peer group constantly takes up the subject of assassination in a wistful, longing tone, you begin to lose a sense of what will come across to other people as advocating violent overthrow of the government.

This campaign season has degenerated into a war over metaphors, inferences, and out-of-context clarifications.

I just wish we could have a long clear discussion of what "socialism" actually is. People on different parts of the political spectrum in this country aren't even using the same words to mean the same things... we really need to recalibrate our political terminology.

But of course, it will never happen. The US is too big, and it is far too convenient to have a confused and emotionally excitable populace.

As Edward Bernays, father of modern "PR", once said: In the US "the meanings of words have the stability of soap bubbles." There's a lot invested to keep it that way of course.

I think it's worth noting, that while this can be seen as a dog-whistle call to far-right hate groups, it's important to contextualize how the right-wing communicates.

Even to the average right-winger, the language of action is steeped heavily in jingoism. If the left wing is 'come together, unite, break barriers' the right-wing is 'divide, conquer, charge!'

It doesn't surprise me that the right-wing would phrase voting as a process like warfare, and not phrase it as simply voting. They'd never phrase it as voting. Everything comes back to their fetishization of warfare.

They are calling the President a Threat To The Republic, and equating him with Osama. That's all unacceptable. But it's not fair to say their prescribed remedy is violence; it isn't, it's voting.

Still, the way they're describing Obama will inevitably lead the unhinged and the credulous to contemplate violence, perhaps even to commit it.

@13 When you view the world through the lenses of fear and greed and believe everyone else does too, are convinced that everything is a zero sum game and that there are no win win outcomes, then yeah, "divide, conquer, charge" logically follows.

No point in compromising, diplomacy is a waste of time, the only answer is to bomb em.

It is a simplistic and appealing world view, "I must win so you must lose" and "if you get something I already have I must be losing it so you must be fought to the death".

#8 - Ha!

Dominic,

"..so far up these assholes' assholes that agents can perform a gastric biopsy."

You slay me.