The perils of being President are sinister

The perils of being President are sinister

By Don Valentine

          Our nation’s first African American President has experienced an exponential amount of death threats. Last week on Fox radio’s “F-S 1”, I heard the renowned radio host Larry King remark that his sources in the Secret Service complaining about the huge amount of death threats they have to investigate on President Obama.

It is a sad commentary on the baggage that still exists from the vestiges of slavery. This President is burdened with the largest amount of death threats in history. According to a 2009 C.N.N. article, President Obama’s death threats were 400 percent higher than any previous President. The U.K. based Telegraph reported that the President receives about 30 threats every day.

The marginally popular President Bush received approximately 3,000 per year according to Ronald Kessler, author of In the President’s Service. President Obama is getting about 12,000 per year.  Kessler writes that the Secret Service protocol is to diminish the reporting of these threats to damp down “Copy-Cat” attempts.

In addition, the Secret Service does not report the vast majority of these death threats to the President. In a 2012 article the St. Thomas University paper The Daily Kos reported that the Secret Service says, “The sheer number would be overwhelming and frankly distracting.” Faced with that cloud daily, one wonders how former New York Mayor Giuliani could say that “President Obama does not love America”.