SEDITION?

A plot to kill the President (The Telegraph, September 9th, 2004)

Few novelists feel obliged to defend themselves against charges of complicity in a possible murder, but the gentle, mild-mannered Baker has recently had no choice. In his latest novel, Checkpoint, a would-be assassin discusses with a friend the killing of George W. Bush. [...]

Reading Checkpoint, it is not easy to find signs of Baker's empathy with Bush; the book burns with anger at what the President has done. Bush's political programme horrifies not only Jay, but also Ben, Jay's friend and interlocutor - who is, Baker says, "fairly close to me".

Ben tries to talk Jay out of his homicidal scheme; he has a hard time of it. The only point at which Jay hesitates is when Ben explains that if he kills Bush, then Dick Cheney will become President. So someone will have to kill Cheney. "Maybe some kind of tiny scorpion that climbs up his leg just as he's being sworn in, bites him, he slumps . . ." suggests Jay enthusiastically. But Cheney's successor won't be any better, so the killing will have to go on . . . and on. This gives Jay pause, but even as he recognises the political futility of assassinating Bush, he is implacable, insisting that Bush must die - and he, Jay, must be the one to wield the weapons that cause his death.

Those weapons are so crackpot that no reasonable person is going to take Checkpoint as a blueprint for murder. But, I suggest, quite a lot of unreasonable people might.

And on this subject, the number of unreasonable people appears to be growing fast.