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In one of the latest but most distasteful efforts to mute criticism of President Obama's policies, a left-wing media "watchdog" by the name of Eric Boehlert is suggesting that conservative criticism of Obama could lead to his death. Trying to score partisan political points by raising a macabre scenario, Boehlert claims that there are similarities between alleged hatred of Barack Obama and opposition to John F. Kennedy before he was assassinated.

The obvious problem with his amateurish analysis, which has been published under the wild headline, "The Last Time Right-Wing Hatred ran Wild Like This a President was Killed," (web site) is that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist who was upset with Kennedy's attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. It wasn't right-wing ideology which inspired Oswald; it was Marxism.

This disinformation effort needs to be analyzed carefully to understand where the real threat to Obama may actually lie. If scribbling like that of Boehlert is taken seriously, Obama's life could be put more in jeopardy from the real extremists, who are on the left and in the Islamic camp.

I covered an October 25, 2003, anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C. which featured "Bush/Satan 2004" T-shirts and "Stop Bush" signs with the "s" in Bush made to resemble a Nazi swastika. I also photographed someone carrying a sign that said, "Bush is the Anti-Christ." But it didn't occur to me to write a story saying any of this constituted a threat to the President's life. That would have been a stretch based on dubious assumptions.

However, the reality is that some of the groups protesting Bush were communist and had foreign connections. One of them, the Workers World Party, had been investigated by the now-defunct House Internal Security Committee for its support of the North Korean regime and Arab terrorist groups.

While criticism of Obama and his policies has been intense, some of the strongest attacks on Obama have come not from the right, but from the left.

Consider, for example, the "Down With Obama's War in Afghanistan" (web site) front-page headline and story in the Workers Vanguard newspaper. This self-described "Marxist Working-Class Biweekly of the Spartacist League of the U.S." had previously warned that Afghanistan was to be "Obama's preferred theater of imperialist carnage."

Some of the same communist groups which opposed Bush's Iraq policy oppose Obama on Afghanistan.

While the Communist Party USA is strongly supporting the President, there are many on the far-left who despise him. Citing Afghanistan and other issues, some of the Marxist true-believers already view Obama as a sell-out.

For example, while the Marxists approve of Obama's alliance with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and the attempt to destroy the anti-communist government of Honduras, some are concerned that the effort isn't moving ahead rapidly enough and that the Pentagon is still pursuing a strategy "to regain control" of Latin America, in the words of Workers World, the newspaper of the Workers World Party. They are very upset by an administration decision to expand U.S. military access to Colombian bases.

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