Journalist Advocates Murder of Presidential Candidates

Syndicated newspaper columnist Kathleen Parker said the following in her column that appeared this morning on townhall.com:

Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot. ..."

As you will see if you follow the townhall.com link, the quote has since been redacted, from 'shot' to 'slapped' (with a redundant quotation mark was added in the process). But you can't stuff your rewritten history down the oubliette so easily; the original still exists, as a screenshot and as a cached copy from a browser.

As commenters on Eschaton and Counterspin Central point out, in redacting her quote of her "friend and former Delta Force member," she deliberately misquoted her source, either originally or in the revised version. This is a cardinal sin of journalism.

A third possibility, of course, is that she fabricated the quote completely. That's another cardinal sin of journalism.

Any way you look at it, quoting a death threat against presidential candidates contributes to the climate of extremism and intolerance that has surrounded the American conservative movement for the past decade. If people think that to write such things is not beyond the limits of civilized discourse, sooner or later some people are going to start thinking that taking such actions are also within the limits of civilization.

Parker (or her editors) evidently quickly discovered that she had in fact crossed that line, and clumsily brought her back within bounds.

But a commentator who "focuses on social issues related to family, children and gender" probably oughtn't be testing the acceptability of political murder in the first place.

(via Atrios and Hesiod)

Update 11/2/03: Atrios points out that the Boulder Daily Camera has run Parker's column in its original criminal splendor.