A few posts back, while trying to articulate a warning that Rick Perry had implicitly endorsed an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear installations, I wondered if this veiled threat might be written off as campaign bluster. A story about Andrew Jackson, which I had read in Robert Remini's biography, popped into my head at that point.
When Jackson was sitting as a Superior Court judge in Tennessee, "a great, hulking fellow named Russell Bean, who had been indicted for cutting off the ears of his infant child in a 'drunken frolic,' paraded before the court, cursed judge, jury and all assembled, and then marched out the door." Jackson ordered his arrest, but no one dared do it, as Bean threatened to shoot "'the first skunk who came within ten feet of him'." Jackson called a ten-minute recess and took matters into his own hands: