Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Happened across this item:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/31/MN2UU7JA4.DTL

Sara Jane Moore, the self-styled radical who earned an infamous role in the parlous politics of 1970s America by trying to assassinate President Gerald Ford in San Francisco, was paroled Monday from a Bay Area federal prison after serving more than 30 years, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Prisons said.

The rather sad Sara Jane and the rather sad Gerald Ford would seem to have been made for each other, but their karmic mutual consummation was frustrated -- does anybody remember this? -- by a chap named Oliver Sipple, who had, I think, a more interesting and evocative story than either the President or the quasi-assassin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Sipple

Sipple was born in Detroit, Michigan. He served in the United States Marines and saw action in Vietnam. Shrapnel wounds suffered in December 1968 caused him to finish out his tour of duty in a Philadelphia veterans hospital....

Listed as being totally disabled on psychological grounds.... he lived, with a merchant seaman roommate, in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment located in San Francisco's Mission District...

Sipple was part of a crowd of about 3,000 people who had gathered outside San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel to see President Ford on September 22, 1975.

... Sipple noticed a woman next to him had pulled and levelled a .38-caliber pistol as Ford headed to his limousine.... Sipple lunged at the woman, Sara Jane Moore, just as her finger squeezed the trigger....

Despite [Sipple's] wishes, gay activist and politician Harvey Milk publicly proclaimed Sipple a "gay hero" ... Then columnist Herb Caen published the private side of the former Marine's story in the San Francisco Chronicle.... Sipple's mother reacted to the knowledge of her son's sexual orientation by cutting off contact with him.

... Sipple's mental and physical health sharply declined over the years. He drank heavily, gained weight to 300 lbs, was fitted with a pacemaker, became paranoid and suicidal. On February 2, 1989, he was found dead in his bed, at the age of forty-seven.

I don't usually like stories that have morals, but this one is hard to escape: Next time you see somebody about to shoot a President -- mind your own business.