The New York Times is resurrecting the Obama-as-martyr-in-waiting narrative. You think that Dallas byline is a coincidence?

DALLAS — There is a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to rally: Will he be safe? In Colorado, two sisters say they pray daily for his safety. In New Mexico, a daughter says she persuaded her mother to still vote for Mr. Obama, even though the mother feared that winning would put him in danger. And at a rally here, a woman expressed worries that a message of hope and change, in addition to his race, made him more vulnerable to violence.

Democrats are corporately committed to the myth that America is a pit of racist hatred and violence:

“The national and international profile of Senator Barack Obama gives rise to unique challenges that merit special concern,” [Rep. Bennie] Thompson wrote. “As an African-American who was witness to some of this nation’s most shameful days during the civil rights movement, I know personally that the hatred of some of our fellow citizens can lead to heinous acts of violence. We need only to look to the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and 1968 presidential candidate Robert Kennedy as examples.”

The New York Times story did not contain a single example of a credible threat against Obama. As a measure of the real danger presidential candidates face, this sort of coverage is worthless. As a cudgel to bludgeon commentators on the right, though, it’s a handy tool, as Radio Equalizer has pointed out. Writing in the lefty Huffington Post, The New Republic’s Robert Brustein waxed wacky on the subject of Bill O’Reilly:

The recent chilling encounter in New Hampshire between Bill O’Reilly and an Obama aide was a forecast of how easily mad dog media men can stimulate mad dog hit men. In this case, O’Reilly played both roles. … what safeguards do the government have in place to prevent some ravenous red state acolyte from deciding there is no place in American politics for a man with African blood?

O’Reilly is a lot of things–but “hit man”? That is shameful stuff, reminiscent of President Clinton’s clumsy attempts to link talk radio to the Oklahoma City bombing. And as for that “African blood” business, it’s been a long time since white racism was a leading cause of political violence in the United States. The most recent large-scale ethnic attack I can recall was perpetrated by African Americans against Korean Americans in Los Angeles in 1992. As former Crip gangster Najee Ali told the Christian Science Monitor: “We wanted to hurt [Koreans] physically, economically, raise their insurance rates – anything we could for payback.” That’s the sort of thinking that leads to political violence. The Times and like-minded media compound the problem with their vaporous storylines, which flatter paranoia and encourage the presence of racial chips on shoulders.

It pays to keep in mind that the last time an American president was shot, the would-be assassin was inspired by madness and the dystopian Hollywood fantasy of Taxi Driver. The time before that, the culprit was the communist Lee Harvey Oswald. Robert Kennedy was killed by an Israel-hating Palestinian immigrant on the first anniversary of the Six-Day War. We have a lot of crazy people walking the streets of this nation, but John Wilkes Booth is no longer among us.