The three things that could kill the President

with John Butler

English Pravda's forum is the on-line discourse equivalent of a carnival freak show. Racists, conspiracy theorists, people with mental illness, anti-semites, combinations of all of these - you name it and they have it.

But one post struck me as not being entirely ridiculous:

Is Biden to retrace the steps, and the fate, of the Archduke?

Now, the Vice-President has already completed most of his trip to the Balkans (thankfully) without incident, but this visit must have been a security nightmare.

To be assassinated, a few things need to be in place.

a) Somebody must want you dead

b) You must go to a place where they can make you dead

c) You must be sufficiently naive to allow them the opportunity to make you dead.

Now Biden is apparently something of a hero to the Bosnians but maybe not so much to some Serb nationalists - exactly the same type of people who did the job on old Franz Ferdinand.

But more likely, one feels, Biden - or someone like him - would be a target for fringe groups associated with the very large populations of Muslims in the region. Am I being islamophobic here? Let's have a look at the evidence.

But - I hear you ask - why would islamists want to do away with those nice appeasing folk in the Obama administration?

I don't know, maybe you should ask the guy who was planning to kill Obama in Turkey just a little while ago. And exactly how rational are those who support suicide bombings anyway? As the television shrink Dr Phil likes to say, the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour.

I am not here to predict that Obama will be assassinated - nobody knows. But if it was to happen, you would bet on it happening in Europe where violent incidents are erupting just about every week.

Of course, the same issues applied to George W Bush, but the difference is precondition c) - namely, he was under no delusions that appeasement could make either himself or the nation he represented safe.

Nobody can predict what will happen to President Obama. But to me, the place we are at in history combined with the kind of naivety the Obama administration displays would make his assassination at the hands of Muslim extremists entirely unsurprising.