Landrieu To Be Let Off Scot-Free?

Remember this outrage from just five days ago?

Louisiana Democrat Senator Mary Landrieu threatened President Bush with physical violence this morning on ABC's Sunday morning news program This Week.

"If one person criticizes our sheriffs, or says one more thing, including the President of the United States, he will hear from me - one more word about it after this show airs and I - I might likely have to punch him - literally," says Landrieu.

Apparently the Secret Service doesn't think it's any big deal:

The U.S. Secret Service won't say whether it's investigating Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu after she threatened to "punch" President Bush earlier this week during a fit of anger over Hurricane Katrina. "She might have been joking," Secret Service spokeswoman Lorie Lewis told NewsMax on Wednesday, after being told of Landrieu's comments on ABC's This Week.

"Joking"? Wow. Seems like every time a liberal threatens a conservative, they're always awarded that excuse. Remember all the "assassinate Bush" jokes and bumperstickers and Off-Broadway plays and books from last year's presidential campaign? We were told to laugh them off, weren't we? And do you recall back during the Clinton impeachment hearings, when actor Alec Baldwin publicly called for the assassination of both then-House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde and his entire family? Oh, he was just making a funny. Hyuk-yuk-yuk.

Remember a few days ago, when I wrote this?

[C]an you imagine what the press reaction would have been if, say, Jesse Helms had threatened - not in a private, off-the-record setting (think Trent Lott at Strom Thurmond's birthday party) but on national television - to physically attack Bill Clinton?

That must have been a repressed memory, because here was the real-life answer to that question:

The agency took a tougher stance on Senatorial threats in 1994, when then-North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms joked that President Clinton "had better watch out if he comes down here. He better have a bodyguard."

After a media firestorm erupted - with some pundits complaining that Helms had committed treason - the Secret Service swung into action, launching a full blown investigation into whether Helms' statement indicated that someone in North Carolina planned to assassinate the president.

"We have followed up on the comments and [have] spoken with the senator's staff," a Secret Service spokesman said at the time.

And Helms didn't personally or directly threaten Clinton, either. Yet that is precisely what Mary Landrieu did, and in a fit of anger, even if it was partially or wholly contrived. But the Secret Service, and naturally the Extreme Media, just yawns.

Or perhaps the latter is too busy committing "treason" themselves to notice:

And the press, which rushed to condemn Helms, has pretended not to notice that Landrieu's outburst is part of a rising tide of hostility towards the Bush White House where normal boundaries of criticism have fallen by the wayside.

In recent days, Democrats have complained that the Bush Administration response to Katrina was "criminal." On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the president himself was "dangerous" for the nation.

Surveying the storm damage on Thursday, Vice President Cheney was interrupted twice during an outdoor television interview by a man who shouted: "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Vice President."

I'm going to make a prediction. It's one that I've kept to myself for the past year, even since the rash of domestic left-wing political terrorism that unfolded during the 2004 home stretch, but seems too prescient in the wake of this disgusting post-Katrina BS.

There is going to be an attempt - perhaps more than one - by a member or members of the American Left to murder President Bush. I pray to God I'm wrong, and if not I pray to God they fail and are themselves cut down with swiftness and agony, but there will be one or more attempts. Indeed, I'm amazed there haven't been some already. Because there comes a point, a Rubicon, beyond which political rhetoric can't get any more despicable or hateful and mere words, no matter how angry and bitter, no longer suffice to vent partisan insanity. And Bushophobia crossed into the fabulous land of bananas a looooong time ago, far worse than anything the Right ever harbored, much less hissed at, Bill Clinton.

As Mark Steyn observed yesterday on Hugh Hewitt's radio program....

Whereas on the left, the main strategic aim was to position this thing as something that would damage Bush. And they've become as insane about this President as the nuttiest Islamists are about the Jews. You know, when you hear imams talk, an Australian imam the other day accused the Jews of poisoning the bananas that are on sale in Muslim stores. And that's how crazy you've got when you've the left saying that...raising questions about whether the Republican Party had the Army Corps of Engineer deliberately blow up the levees in New Orleans.

And we know what Islamists do to Jews, now don't we?