Do you want to kill Metcalf for wasting your time?
But if I did, then you would have to kill me for wasting yours. It makes the whole world blind people.
No, I didn't actually bother reading the whole thing, your description and the first paragraph were enough to stop me from reading further.
Amen. I remember the shock and violation I felt about Reagan's being shot, even though my opposition to him could hardly have been greater.
My son's studying the civil war, and I've been trying to convey the sense of memory and trauma the country had for years after by reading When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed with him.
This is so grotesque.
Yeah. that article was so bad it almost made me long for another of Lewis Lapham's umpteenth column of shocking stories about how people he meets at Upper East Side cocktail parties are complacent reactionaries with some Mark Twain quotes. Almost. (Although, to be fair, the Baker article seems to be the best thing this cratering magazine has published ina long time...)
Well, though I guess dead people are also in some sense blind people.
Why did Harper's publish this? It just makes liberals look bad.
Well, Harper's is kind of awful.
I don't read it; I didn't know how awful it was. But I found this article impressively bad even in the context of a magazine rumored to be bad.
Because Lewis Lapham is terrible. I used to enjoy its fiction over the New Yorker's (or the Atlantic's, remember then?) but oi, Lapham's tanked it so thoroughly that I don't want to support it even for the fiction.
That's an awful article in many ways, but I'm not sure its premise is even correct. A credible threat against the President will be treated seriously, but so will a credible threat made against a private citizen. Threats against the President, perhaps, are more likely to be public, which might make them more likely to be scrutinized (and yes, the stakes are higher. Sucks, but the President's life is worth more than mine in every sense but the moral one, in which we're all kidlets of God, right?)
I'm pretty sure given the amount of blogs and comment boxes calling for Bush's head without the commenters even getting arrested [urinating dog! urinating dog!*] speaks that we're still okay.
Admittedly, [my art] has not yet shown itself able to maim and kill on a level commensurate with Judith's (which rates, at a minimum, 49,845 assists in the casualties quoted above)
Um, yeah, fuck this guy.
This is horrible.
I haven't looked it up, but I'm pretty sure that there's a statute making threats specifically against the President illegal in a manner that is not true of threats against a private citizen.
Sucks, but the President's life is worth more than mine in every sense but the moral one,
No it's not. The President's life is worth least of all Americans; at least with him (or her), we have a pre-defined spare. Maybe you've set up a plan of succession should you not be able to complete your duties, but most of us haven't.
18 USCS § 871
§ 871. Threats against President and successors to the Presidency
(a) Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits for conveyance in the mail or for a delivery from any post office or by any letter carrier any letter, paper, writing, print, missive, or document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States, the President-elect, the Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President of the United States, or the Vice President-elect, or knowingly and willfully otherwise makes any such threat against the President, President-elect, Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President, or Vice President-elect, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
Yes, but mine probably wouldn't make headlines and it's not like anyone really needs my dissertation to be done.
However, we also have
18 USCS § 876
§ 876. Mailing threatening communications
(d) Whoever, with intent to extort from any person any money or other thing of value, knowingly so deposits or causes to be delivered, as aforesaid, any communication, with or without a name or designating mark subscribed thereto, addressed to any other person and containing any threat to injure the property or reputation of the addressee or of another, or the reputation of a deceased person, or any threat to accuse the addressee or any other person of a crime, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both. If such a communication is addressed to a United States judge, a Federal law enforcement officer, or an official who is covered by section 1114 [18 USCS § 1114], the individual shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.
I'm sorry, disregard 17, that requires extortion in addition to a threat; the private citizen analog is here:
18 USCS § 876
§ 876. Mailing threatening communications
(c) Whoever knowingly so deposits or causes to be delivered as aforesaid, any communication with or without a name or designating mark subscribed thereto, addressed to any other person and containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of the addressee or of another, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. If such a communication is addressed to a United States judge, a Federal law enforcement officer, or an official who is covered by section 1114 [18 USCS § 1114], the individual shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.
Yes, but mine probably wouldn't make headlines
That makes his or her death valuable, not his or her life.
and it's not like anyone really needs my dissertation to be done.
Don't sell yourself short, my 47 year-old balding friend; as conservatives never tire of clamoring, ideas matter.
15 + 18 = Cala's life is worth the same as the president's, but federal judges are worth more.
Ideas may matter, but all my ideas are stuck in my head, and judging from my headache, they're lodged in my left optic nerve. (Or, I might need new glasses.)
silvana, cool -- but do all those require you to mail the threat before you are in trouble (if I'm reading them correctly). And it seems that threatening judges is worse than threatening Presidents, but both are worse than threatening private citizens, but only in the penalty, not in what constitutes the crime.
I read this on paper (Harpers does suck lately, but it occupies the evolutionary niche of a magazine I want to read, if you know what I mean), and I really, really couldn't figure out the point he was making. I suppose one possibility is that the writer is that Bush hater we keep on hearing about, who's really motivated by personal hatred of Bush rather than by what's substantively going on in the world.
If he has some more free-speechy related point, which I suspect, I couldn't make it coherent enough to guess exactly what it might have been.
do all those require you to mail the threat before you are in trouble
Isn't that what it takes to make it a federal rather than a state crime, the mails being federal and all?
The reason that the requirement is of the mail is because (I think) once you use the U.S. Postal Service, this is a federal apparatus, and thus (something something commerce clause something something), it is legit to make this a federal crime.
But I don't understand 22. Isn't the penalty for threatening the president 5 years, private citizens 5 years, and federal judges etc. 10 years? Or am I missing something?
Oops, you're right, I was reading the extortion clause, which says two years.
24: Yes, but it's not a straightforward free speech issue then. Mr. I-Suck-At-Writing in the Harper article acts as though the goons will get him for writing the article. Maybe the Fluffy Shrill Police, but the federal statute says 'no mailed threats.'
(And yeah, my understanding is mail is how the feds get involved in everything. Commit a crime? State problem. Commit a crime and buy a stamp? Feds!)
Followup to 18:
18 USCS § 1114 covers
any officer or employee of the United States or of any agency in any branch of the United States Government (including any member of the uniformed services)
So, it looks like you could get 10 years for threatening the president under that statute, as he is clearly "an officer of the United States." Huh. So why the fuck do we have § 876(a) anyway? I hate Congress.
But aren't copies of the magazine containing the threat going to be sent through the postal system?
Does a timestamp count as a stamp? FEDS! silvana hates Congress!
Harpers does suck lately, but it occupies the evolutionary niche of a magazine I want to read, if you know what I mean
Harper's did used to be good, didn't it? Or was I just less discerning back then?
24: I think I see what he was trying to say. The president-related statute says "or knowingly and willfully otherwise makes any such threat against the President," separate from the mailing clause.
So if you make a non-mailed threat against a private person or federal judge etc., you're golden, but not if against the president.
necessary & proper plus interstate commerce can usually get the job done without resort to the postal service. But the statute was probably written when those clauses were interpreted differently.
30: It really did. I don't know that it was ever reliable as the voice of authority, but I remember thinking of it as a useful source of thoughtful journalism and writing. Now, it seems like every issue has a couple of WTF moments like this one.
And now, w00t! As I'm reading this this means no compromise either, but I could be wrong.
We dropped The Atlantic but kept Harper's. Yeah, Lapham got kind of Bus Uncle, but I'd enjoyed him in the past. When Max Ascoli's The Reporter folded in the sixties, my dad's subscription was converted into a Harper's one. It could be good, but so could Altantic.
The problem isn't that the president's life is worth more than any other person's, or that his death is more important: it's the king's two bodies, people. Like Tia said, it's not that he, the person, is unequal; it's that the killing of him, the institutional role, is a political crisis, and undermines the system of governance (or something like that).
Atlantic isn't so hot these days, either. The letters page (arguably the best section) is neither as entertaining nor as informative as during Mike Kelly's hey-day. I understand that they just went through a headquarters change, but the format has become predictable: Caitlan Flanagan/Christopher Hitchens inflammatory back-of-the-book piece paired with Bowden military journalism/a Fallows wargame. Plus, once every two years or so Ken Pollack releases in three parts the first chapter for his book, The Case for War in the Next Adjacent Country on the RISK Board.
Hey yeah, 34 is good news. Didn't Frist say that the rest of the 2006 legislative agenda would be dedicated to stopping the gays, the death tax, the embryos, and the Mexicans? Does that mean that we're halfway through this ridiculousness?
37: Plus they publish Mark Steyn.
38: I think Frist's idea is to do it over and over till he goes home.
37: Those are the reasons for our droppin Atlantic, Harpers remains a little more unpredictable. New Yorker which I did not grow up with, appears to be the best general magazine, and may have been for a very long time.
MacLeans and Saturday Night the Canadian equivalents to this type of magazine, which I did grow up with, have probably gone downhill too. Didn't that plagiarized bit on the Da Vinci Code by Mark Steyn appear in MacLean's?
I read the Atlantic at the gym this morning, and it says that philosophers make better businessmen than MBAs so nyah.
The Case for War in the Next Adjacent Country on the RISK Board.
This pwns. 'Smasher pwns.
lternately, it could be The Case for War Because The Diplomatic or Cultural Victory in Civilization is for Liberal Pussies.
37 nails all my reasons for dropping the Atlantic as well.
And the Atlantic's critics haven't even mentioned Benjamin "as a lifelong liberal, I believe that gutting abortuion rights is OK as long as nobody I know will be affected" Wittes and Stuart "as a lifelong liberal, I think Bush v. Gore was amodel of principled jurisprudence, Ken Starr a model of rectitude and restraint, and since Am Alito is a nice guy he therefore can't be a staunch conservative" yet...