More Assasination Talk

It's hard for regular folk to understand, all this talk of assassination. Normal people just expect Barack to lose, that's all. No one wants a return to the 1960's, and given that those horrible events were forty years ago, few people are thinking that way.

Except for those who long for the sixties - people who came of age and were politically awakened by the anti-war movement, whose identities were formed around it. Barack Obama excites passions in them that they haven't felt since the assassination decade, so they project all their Kennedy feelings onto Barack.

So when Hillary Clinton made some innocent remarks about Bobby Kennedy's assassination last week, it touched a nerve. For the irrational exuberance crowd, Barack and Bobby are merged into a single, archetypal symbol - you attack one, you attack them both. And the symbol is so highly idealized that by using Bobby's slaying as an historical reference point Hillary was soiling sacred turf.

Thus, the atmosphere is charged, and it probably wasn't such a good idea when Fox News Pundit Liz Trotta stepped into the Huckabee zone on Sunday:

Fox contributor Liz Trotta, a former Washington Times editor, was being interviewed by host Eric Shawn for Fox News on Sunday when she said: " And now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama, uh Obama. Well, both, if we could."

Trotta's apology might have made things worse when she used carefully coded language (isn't that what the wackos will think?) to bring race into the conversation:

"It is a very colorful political season, and many of us are making mistakes and saying things we wish we had not said," added Trotta.

Be gentle with liberals you encounter today - even though this isn't happening in the real world, in their worlds this is as real as the mud at Woodstock. Bobby is back, and they're sure they're going to have to live through his assassination again.