Man wants to kill Obama for not doing enough to help black people
November 27th, 2010 3:57 am PT
By Marc Schenker, Vancouver American Politics Examiner______________________________________________
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Man wants to kill Obama for not doing enough to help black people. A South Carolina man has been arrested for threatening to want to kill President Obama for not doing enough to help out black people. Michael Stephen Bowden was arrested just last week for saying that he would want to shoot Obama if he could get Obama up against a wall. Refreshingly, Bowden was not deceptive about this when questioned by the Secret Service, bluntly admitting that he in fact did utter said threat and actually repeating the same threat right in front of the Secret Service agents. Currently, Bowden is being held at the Spartanburg County jail without bond and pending an investigation into his mental state of mind.
Curiously and contrary to what might be expected, Bowden is in fact a white man, 78-years-old and a Navy veteran. His status as a veteran played a part in him drawing the attention of the Secret Service, as he was in a Vetarans Affairs clinic on only November 16 when he started telling a nurse about his desire to shoot Obama. According to the sworn statement by a Secret Service agent, Bowden told a mental health nurse that he was seeing himself traveling to Washington, D.C., to shoot Obama for not doing enough to help black people. Apparently, mental health issues have been known to the VA since April of this year when they suspected he may be suicidal.
As you may expect, Bowden’s family, especially his 40-something son (who still lives with his parents, by the way), is trying to shift the blame for Bowden making the threat to kill Obama to…the VA! That’s right. According to his son, the VA is the big, bad bully in all this, and his dad—even though he made the threat in front of the Secret Service agents—was just the poor, poor old-timer who was just trying to get attention. That cleary sounds like a laughable reach to me.
The son’s, Kerry Bowden, ludicrous reasoning is that his dad was afraid that the dear old VA was going to ignore him for another month—so he had to make this threat against Obama to get attention. Well, if true, that plan really worked excellently, didn’t it? Because now, Bowden doesn’t have just the VA’s attention—he’s also got the Secret Service’s attention and the criminal justice sytem’s attention, to boot. I’m not buying that absurd reasoning as it appears to be more of a way to plan the old man’s criminal defense than it does a legitimate excuse. Unsurprisingly, the son is also playing up the apparent, mental illness aspects of the dad, again, probably as more of a defense strategy down the road.
While the Bowden family plays up the so-called mental illness of the dad, I think what’s more important is that Bowden said he was going to kill Obama because of his lack of doing enough for the black community. I could be wrong here (doubt it, though), but it appears that Bowden wanted to kill Obama because Obama was not directing enough handouts, subsidies and taxpayer money to blacks in the form of big-government programs. After all, what else can it mean for Bowden to want to kill Obama because he was not doing enough for blacks to Bowden’s liking?! To be sure, Bowden actually has statistical data on his side proving that Obama has indeed failed blacks: Blacks are the one major worker group whose unemployment rate is higher than any of the others. To me, it could look like Bowden is just an ideological zealot.
Interestingly, while Bowden’s son (you know, the one who still lives with his parents and is in his 40s) claims that his dad was also a former New York policeman and firefighter, both departments could not find any records that actually proved what the son is claiming.
Copyright © 2010 by Marc Schenker
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