How Many Racists Are We?

Whether you voted for him or not, Barack Obama is the president of the United States.

He is our president. And therefore we should all be worried that he is apparently the recipient of so many disturbing death threats that the FBI has now had to create a special and highly secret task force to investigate them all.

Some of the threats, according to investigative reporter and author Ronald Kessler, who just updated his book, "In the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes With Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect," are believed to be from domestic or international terrorists. But many of the assassination threats are thought to be inspired by good old fashioned, homegrown, evil racism and lobbed by haters who have no real connection to politics.

In the first printing of Kessler's book, this highly acclaimed veteran of reporting on national security and intelligence matters revealed that threats against President Obama were up almost 400 percent compared with the average 3,000 threats George W. Bush received each year when he was president.

Today, it's apparently gotten so bad the chronically understaffed and underfunded Secret Service is getting help from this new investigative task force because each and every threat must be diligently checked out.

Kessler reports that the evil has spread outward into the upper echelon of the administration, and there are now some 40 members of Obama's team under Secret Service protection, compared to 32 under Bush.

I know some out there reading this will blame Obama's politics, his programs, or his economic, education or health care wish lists for the rage that spills out in the form of senseless threats. But that doesn't make logical sense to me.

If one is angry about a politician's policy stance, you vote the man out of office next election — you don't scrawl a death threat about a "free public hanging" and post it on a tree, as someone did in Idaho awhile back. You don't plaster a wall with racist graffiti targeting our first African American president, as was done near the North Carolina State University campus. And you certainly don't do what a convenience store employee in Maine did — namely, invite customers to join a one dollar betting pool called, "The Osama Obama Shotgun Pool."

No, those kinds of threats and many more the Secret Service and the FBI refuse to describe for fear of inciting copycat activity come from hatred of other races.

The Obama presidency was supposed to have marked the start of the beginning of the end to our racial divide.

Both situations make me sad.

You might be surprised what the Secret Service constitutes a threat. It's a federal offense, according to the criminal code, for "anyone to willfully make a true threat to injure or kill the president of the United States." What exactly is a "true threat?" It's anything deemed "serious ... as distinguished from words used as mere political argument, idle or careless talk, or something said in a joking manner."

I was raised to respect the office of the president of the United States even if I don't like everything the person does and says, even if I don't like hardly anything the person does or says. I'm uncomfortable with the glib way in which so many of us toss out pithy phrases intended to disparage our presidents. It's somehow become an almost daily occurrence to hear our relatives, friends and neighbors launch vicious verbal attacks on the occupant of the oval office.

Gerald Ford was an ineffective, clumsy oaf. George W. Bush was stupid. William Jefferson Clinton was nothing but a skirt-chaser. I can't think of any recent president who hasn't been labeled in some pejorative way. But, with Barack Obama it has crossed a line and escalated into something much uglier and potentially deadly.

I'm all for citizens speaking their mind — in an intelligent way. Complain about the state of our do-little Congress. Yell at the top of your lungs that the White House is pushing a plan that you think will harm our country's future. But keep it civil, and remember when we engage in personal attacks and presidential name-calling we tell the world its OK to disregard our commander in chief. Worse, we teach our kids the nation's top leadership spot is not important. Most importantly, it denigrates the office for every other president that comes after the one we don't happen to like at the moment.

The discourse as it stands now diminishes us as a people. And if the criticism crosses the line — and assassination is the center point of the discussion — it's criminal.

Pass it on.

Visit Diane Dimond's official website at www.dianedimond.com for investigative reporting, polls and more. To find out more about Diane Dimond and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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