On CNN’s American Morning today, host John Roberts asked RNC Chairman Michael Steele about the Facebook poll that asked “Should Obama be killed?” — which the Secret Service is investigating — and whether it was “spawned by racism.” “No, I don’t think,” replied Steele, adding that he’s “always very careful about going down that road, you know, so blindly and so quickly.”
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"Not to say that it’s about the color of his skin or his background, ethnic background or whatever, but threats against this president are at a level 400 percent higher than they were against former President Bush,” replied Roberts. “What explains that?” Steele was skeptical of Roberts numbers, saying “how do we know that?” When Roberts said it came from the Secret Service, Steele largely dismissed the concern:
STEELE: Well, I don’t — I don’t know — I don’t know that because I don’t have a report to compare that to. The Secret Service has it. I haven’t seen that publicly put out there statistically to show that.
Roberts 400 percent statistic comes from Newsmax correspondent Ronald Kessler’s book, In the President’s Secret Service, for which he had unprecedented access to the agency. “A lot of those threats are racially based,” Kessler told the New York Daily News. “So there is a real basis for concern.”
http://thinkprogress.org/Clown! Dangerous clown!