Memories of Another Receiving Line

The big deal about the party crashers at the White House is a very big deal.

They thought they played a big joke on the Obama Administration and the Secret Service. What they did, in all likelihood, boils down to two things.

First, they probably served to restrict a very accessible President's accessibility. If someone got that close with peaceful, even humorous intentions, well.....?

Second, they served notice of a reminder of another event that took place at the beginning of the last century. William McKinley was in a receiving line in Buffalo, when Leon Czolgosz took a derringer he was hiding beneath a handkerchief--pretending to cough into it--and shot McKinley twice in the stomach. It took him eight days to die.

That's how it happens; with an everyday event, with a President who loves his country, loves the people in it, and loves to keep meeting them (his wife, too, don't forget).

And there are dozens (literally; check the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report) of groups out there that are neo-Nazi, pseudo-religious, skinheaded people who love guns and don't like it that a black man is currently President--not to mention the kind of individual, acting alone, who tried to shoot up the Holocaust Museum, and the people in it, last spring in Washington, D.C.

So I'd like to say thanks to the couple who daringly played their little practical joke for access to a receiving line. They may have saved the President's life.

Mister Mark