Newspaper That Printed Letter Calling For Obama’s Execution: Oops!

FILE - In this Dec. 3, 2014 file photo, President Barack Obama listens to a question during a meeting with leading CEOs to discuss ways to promote the economy and create jobs, at the Business Roundtable Headquarters ... FILE - In this Dec. 3, 2014 file photo, President Barack Obama listens to a question during a meeting with leading CEOs to discuss ways to promote the economy and create jobs, at the Business Roundtable Headquarters in Washington. President Barack Obama's push for trade deals with Asia and Europe has angered organized labor, setting up a tense fight with a key element of his voting coalition. But Obama wants to keep the anger to a simmer by pitching economic initiatives straight out of labor's working class agenda. The result is a complicated alliance that has never had a strong bond. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File) MORE LESS
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A Pennsylvania newspaper apologized Thursday for running a letter to the editor that colorfully called for President Barack Obama’s execution.

The Daily Item, a newspaper based in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, ran a letter on Memorial Day titled “What is a Ramadi?” in which a local man criticized Obama’s approach to the Islamic State terror group.

“To the families of those fallen heros whose blood lies on the sands of Iraq; don’t you think it might be time to rise up against an administration who has adequately demonstrated their gross incompetence?,” Lewisburg, Pennsylvania resident W. Richard Stover wrote. “I think the appropriate, and politically correct, term is regime change. Forgive me for being blunt, but throughout history this has previously been accompanied by execution by guillotine, firing squad, public hanging.”

The Daily Item’s editorial board wrote Thursday that while “no bells went off” when the editor who placed Stover’s letter in the opinion pages first read it, the reference to execution should have been removed.

“Nearly a decade of provocative and divisive rhetoric may have inured us to language that calls the president of the United States ‘the coward-in-chief’ and the disrespectful use of the president’s first name…But we should have recognized that the final two metaphorical paragraphs of the Ramadi letter were inescapably an incitement to have the chief executive of our government executed. They should have been deleted,” the editorial read.

The editorial board added that publishing the letter as is wrongly implied the newspaper found Stover’s call for the President’s execution to be acceptable.

“The Daily Item apologizes for our failure to catch and remove the inappropriate paragraphs in the letter directed at President Obama,” the editorial read. “We will strive to do better in the future.”

h/t Politico

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