Tea party terror

President Truman was in office when I was born. He was the target of gunshots fired by two Puerto Rican independence activists. President Kennedy was assassinated. Gerald Ford was the intended target of a shooting and Ronald Reagan suffered life-threatening wounds. Gunshots were directed at individuals thought to be Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. Assassination attempts against Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama were foiled during or in close proximity to the attempts.

Every president since Hoover has been the victim of an attempt on his life, except Eisenhower (the attempt against President George H. W. Bush occurred after he left office). President Bush 43 was also the target of a serious attempt on his life in the Soviet Republic of Georgia in 2005. The president of the United States is always in harm's way. All of the would be assassins had political leanings, although only the attempts on foreign soil can credibly be linked to political movements.

Even the lunatic fringes have their own lunatics. This brings me to recent speculation about the extremist underbelly of the Tea party movement. The speculation is fueled by a twisted form of inductive reasoning. Timothy McVeigh was an anti-government terrorist. Some Tea party participants express anti-government sentiments. Ergo, Tea party supporters are terrorists.

Someday, a mentally disturbed person will once again set off a bomb or shoot at a president. If this action comes sooner rather than later, the action will likely be laid at the feet of the Tea party movement.

Any movement can potentially spawn maniacal violence. It's happened before. But the violence usually erupts from movements that both rationalize violence in advance and are inclined to defend it later.

Tea party protesters may disapprove of the government and they express their disapproval in a sometimes raucous and inarticulate fashion. But so far, the whole of the movement has set four fewer bombs than Bill Ayres alone and criticized the government in a generally constructive, albeit somewhat angry manner.

This pre-emptive strike against dissent is a dangerous game played by self-centered people, They are not alerting us to a new danger. History informs us that violence is always somewhere in the mix and grandstanding makes no one safer.