MURDER ON THE DISORIENTED EXPRESS. When the Perfesser said "GERARD VAN DER LEUN is worried about Obama" getting shot, I knew something was off. And I was right. Guess whose fault Van Der Leun says it will be if someone shoots the Democratic candidate?

And yet it is more probable that an attempt on Obama will be made than at any time in the last few decades. The country has been infected with Bush hate for so long, and the popular culture has been so infested with dreams and threats and "works of art" imagining the death of Bush, that extending that level of political hate to Obama is trivial.

In December of 2003, I wrote this item:

Where Bush Hate is Heading which began:
A minor moron moment making its way on the talk shows today are the new lyrics by Eminem:
"F--k money. I don't rap for dead presidents.
I'd rather see the president dead. "

Even though written to be brain fade of the month, Eminem's lyrics encapsulate where Bush Hate is heading.

Bush Hate, at the rate of festering intensity currently observable, is headed towards only one singular event: An attempt on the life of George W. Bush by an American citizen.

Since 2003 the incidents that have reinforced and promulgated this cultural poison have only proliferated...

That those who hate Bush have, over the past eight years, made an attempt on the life of Barack Obama more probable is not at all ironic. It is horrifying and to their shame.

It's not remarkable that these people think liberalism is fascism; that's a simple inversion familiar to readers of Orwell. Believing that the imaginary death of Obama is caused by imaginary assassins of Bush -- that sees and raises the Vonnegut of Mother Night. But Van Der Leun's proud offering of his spectacularly wrong 2003 prediction that Bush would be shot as proof of his prescience -- I don't know if Dostoyevsky jamming with Italo Calvino and Philip K. Dick could have come up with that. It is something to consider that our greatest feats of imagination these days are mostly in the field of psychopathology.

UPDATE. Nearly all of Van Der Leun's commenters are choice, but this is my favorite:

I just thought of something that sickens me.

It's obvious that if he were assassinated, as a martyr he'd advance their cause far more than as a mediocre president. They're deliberately PLANTING the idea, hoping some nut will take them up on him, allowing them to come down hard on the entire right.

I really hope I'm developing clinical paranoia.

Like the man said, there has never been anything false about hope.

UPDATE II. In our own comments, R. Porrofatto provides some historical perspective: "Were it not for a toxic mix of GDS (Garfield Derangement Syndrome) and fanatic adoration for the messianic Chester Arthur, we wouldn't have disgruntled postal workers to this day."