As it relates to Connie Carmichaels Comments
March 01, 2005
TURNING POINT?
Of all the forms of murder that rip the fabric of society, an organized political assassination is by far the worst.
Obviously, this thought is prompted by Monday's murder of U.S. Judge Joan H. Lefkow's husband and mother in her family's North Side home. Yet just as obviously it's important to add that police haven't linked those slayings to followers of imprisoned white supremacist leader Matthew Hale, who was convicted last year of soliciting Judge Lefkow's murder.
We don't yet know why attorney Michael F. Lefkow 64, and Donna Grace Humphrey, 89, were shot multiple times in the family's basement. Among other possibilities, they may have been victims of a wandering sociopath, a startled or murderous home invader or a killer with a grudge against the family unrelated to Judge Lefkow's position.
What we do know is that the ability of judges and other public officials to make decisions without fearing for their lives or, worse, the lives of their loved ones is key to our way of life.
We know that fear is corrupting, corrosive, malignant, metastatic. It's toxic to freedom, the enemy of justice.
We see more than our share of mayhem in this country-random, predatory; purposeful, senseless. But what we don't see, or haven't seen in a long time, are orchestrated hits on key government, law enforcement and business officials of the sort we associate with third-world thugocracies and nations nearly paralyzed by terrorism.
American assassins and would-be assassins of the last several decades have tended to be lone nuts - your loopy John Hinkleys, pathetic Mark David Chapmans and deluded Squeaky Frommes - and not particularly threatening to others.
The few and isolated exceptions prove the rule: The November, 1973 assassination of Oakland's Public Schools superintendent Marcus Foster by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army and the June, 1984, planned slaying of liberal talk-show host Alan Berg by three members of a white supremacist group are two that come to mind.
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