During one visit to Williamsburg, a
Secret Service agent spotted Hinckley, who was supposed to be going to a movie, walking to the theater and then going into a nearby bookstore. According to what Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Chasson told Friedman at a hearing, Hinckley “entered the Barnes & Noble nearby where he began to browse . . . Mr. Hinckley looked at books about President Reagan and about presidential assassins. He then
shuttled back and forth between the bookstore and the movie theater.” Hinckley later misled his treatment
team, telling them that he had seen Captain America, even raving about the fi lm. “The psychiatrists at Saint Elizabeths, who are invested in the art of psychiatry, want John Hinckley to take these trips and to eventually live alone to prove their theories of so-called remission or cure,” diGenova says. “John Hinckley will be mentally ill for the rest of his life. He is incurable.” DiGenova says Congress should fi x the
problem by passing a law that requires lifetime incarceration in a mental facility for anyone found not guilty by reason of insanity of assassinating or attempting to assassinate a president. Because the law would govern a civil or involuntary commitment, it could be applied retroactively to Hinckley, diGenova says. “To put any president at risk with him self-medicating in Williamsburg is absurd,” diGenova says. “I just don’t think that we can allow somebody who tried to nullify an election with a bullet to roam freely with no supervision but himself.”
Ronald Kessler, chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax, can be contacted at
ronaldk@newsmax.com Pamela Kessler contributed to this column.
Beltway Bits By Ronald Kessler
A KINDER COULTER On TV, Ann Coulter is an attack dog. But in person, it’s quite a diff erent story. Behind the scenes, the conservative author is warm, gracious, and charming. She is known to give presents to her editors at Crown Publishing. And she’s a thoughtful guest: After a TV appearance, she emails the producers to thank them.
CIA CRITICISM The CIA is often criticized for not having a crystal ball. Why didn’t it know that Mikhail Gorbachev was about to let the Soviet Union collapse? Why didn’t it know that the Arab Spring would begin with a man torching himself to death in Tunisia? Since the principals did not
know beforehand what they were going to do, these events obviously could not have been predicted by the CIA. Nor is it reasonable to criticize the CIA, as some have done, for not knowing immediately that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had died. In a police state, it’s virtually
impossible to penetrate a dictator’s inner circle.
HOLDER WRONG ON ID CHECK Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.’s recent objection to state laws requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls is “absolutely absurd,” Joe diGenova, the former U.S. attorney in Washington, tells Newsmax. In December, Holder issued
a public warning that a growing number of states that have passed voter ID laws could disenfranchise minority voters. “Are we willing to allow this era — our era — to be remembered as the age when our nation’s proud tradition of expanding the franchise ended?” Holder asked
in a speech at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. In Crawford v. Marion County
Election Board, the Supreme Court in 2008 upheld the constitutionality of Indiana’s law requiring photo ID to vote. DiGenova says: “At a time when we’re trying to do everything we can to identify who is in the country, why they are in the country . . . it is so fundamentally simple to want to assure ourselves that the people who are voting in elections are citizens and have the right to vote.”
DAVID FRUM BASHES CONSERVATIVES Liberal television anchors love having David Frum on their shows. That’s because he pretends to be a co nservative while bashing them.
The latest
CONSERVATIVE? Frum has dissed Fox News viewers.
example came in December when Frum took a shot at Fox News
viewers. Frum told Howard Kurtz on CNN’s Reliable Sources that “people who watch a lot of Fox come away knowing a lot less about important world events.” In a recent New York magazine
column, Frum accused the conservative media of running an “alternative knowledge system” of “pseudo-facts and pretend information.” He off ered no specifics on CNN
to back up his claim, of course, and Kurtz, a solid media reporter, said, “You’re tarring with an awfully broad brush there.”
FEBRUARY 2012 | NEWSMAX 23
ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT/HULTON ARCHIVE/ARCHIVE PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES FRUM/BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/GETTY IMAGES NEWS/GETTY IMAGES
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