Update 5/11: As noted in the comments, I think the obvious problem here is that the rebels and traitors are seeing a lot more Buchanan (if not more Jeff Davis...) than Sherman in the federal government's responses and they are thereby emboldened:
“We need a good old fashioned lynch mob to storm the Capitol, drag her tyrannical ass out onto the street and string her up as our forefathers would have,” John Campbell Sr. wrote in a group called “People of Michigan vs. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer,” which had nearly 9,000 members as of Monday morning.With these knuckleheads I'm not sure that even fear would be the beginning of wisdom. These are deeply,aggressively stupid people.
Steve Doxsie had the same idea: “Drag that tyrant governor out to the front lawn. Fit her for a noose.”
“Either President Trump sends in the troops or there is going to be a midnight lynching in Lansing soon,” Michael Smith chimed in.
Others suggested she be shot, beaten, or beheaded.
“Plain and simple she needs to eat lead and send a statement to the rest of the democrats that they are next,” James Greena, of Fennville, wrote.
Chris Rozman said, “She needs her ass beat. Most of these politicians need a good ass whooping. Just. Punch there lights out.”
When someone suggested the guillotine, Thomas Michael Lamphere responded, “Good ol’ fashioned bullets work better, but I like the enthusiasm.”
“Wonder how long till she’s hit with a shotgun blast,” Chris Parrish wrote.
Matthew Woodruff had another idea: “Can we please just take up a collection for an assassin to put that woman from Michigan down,” he asked.
But the prospect of giving it a try sure seems increasingly attractive.
President Bone Spurs suspects that Governor Whitmer may be on Biden's shortlist for VP. Which is why he is lashing out against her in particular. But why does he embrace these scumbags? They will turn against him in a heartbeat, and he would do the same to them if he thought it politically expedient.
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering how many of these asswipes are from out of state? This current fashion of protest is what these cucks for the NRA consider politically correct ever since the Malheur Morons. Or before that to the Bundy Standoff. And now they have a cheerleader in the White House.
God bless Justin Trudeau. I've been a gun owner and hunter all my adult life. Still have an elk rifle and a shotgun. But I would never own one of those black plastic pieces of scheisse that are openly carried by these dupes.
These sort of oxygen-thieves have been a part of human history...well, since there's BEEN human history. Industrial technology has armed them more heavily than they've ever been...but that's the only thing new about them.
ReplyDeleteWhich is what's so infuriating about the shriveled little limp "eeee...give a little...make a deeeeeal..." tweet from Commander Codpiece II, Electric Boogaloo. As Bill Sherman noted, fear is the beginning of wisdom for these tools. They won't ever grow another brain cell, they have no hope of independent sentience, so our only defense against them is to rule them with a rod of iron, to teach them through fear.
George Washington had the right idea with the Whisky Rebels, and Sherman with the original Traitors In Favor Of White Power. And yet, here we have this bloated orange skinsack who thinks that the earlier leaders were wrong.
Not just diminished, but degraded, times, indeed.
White privilege has a bit to do with the lack of response:
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/notmackED/status/1255958286110806019
Y'think?
DeleteMike has a point. The response to white action tends to be more muted than that to non-white action. Should a group of hard-right Black or Hispanic or Native or Asian gun-totting radicals try to pull a similar stunt, I doubt they'd be labelled "very good people."
ReplyDeleteFrom a broader perspective, though, this isn't a new phenomena in the USA. There have been plenty of home-grown armed radical groups prepared to carry arms and do violence in the name of their cause. But there are additional recurring trends:
1. There's way more police effort to shut down groups with left wing or environmental agendas (Weathermen, United Freedom Front, Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army, Earth Liberation Front, Animal Liberation Front etc) than groups with right wing or white supremacy or anti-abortion agendas.
2. Public reaction generally involves greater outrage at the destruction of property than the loss of life. Perhaps Sherman understood that earlier than many.
Still, I don't think Sherman had the model response. Destruction and oppression simply alienates people further. People have grievances, some of which are legitimate. Corporate interests take precedence over human interests. Wages are driven down to the point that people can't live off them. Public health funding hasn't addressed the epidemic of "deaths of despair." Inequality is increasing to the point that social mobility only works in the "down" direction.
Some positions simply can't be reconciled, but rather than living in the spirit of agreeing to disagree, there's increasingly less room for dialogue and compromise, being replaced with entrenched positions that disagreement equals treason. Sadly, that conclusion is driving people to take up arms.
I read a story about how Republicans around Reagan suddenly loved gun control in California once a few Black Panthers decided to get guns and carry them.
Delete"Some positions simply can't be reconciled, but rather than living in the spirit of agreeing to disagree, there's increasingly less room for dialogue and compromise, being replaced with entrenched positions that disagreement equals treason. Sadly, that conclusion is driving people to take up arms."
DeleteAngry Wingnut "Okay! Let's do some (fill in the politically vile positions here: racism, fascism, xenophobia, Gilded Age plutocracy here)!"
The Majority of Americans "Wait! What? No! You can't do ANY racism/fascism/armed rebellion/spreading pandemic disease/plutocracy!"
Now Armed Angry Wingnut "Well...okay...let's do SOME fascism (etc)!"
TMoA "No. WTF? No, you can't do ANY fascism."
F "See...this is why you're driving the wingnuts to take up arms. You won't compromise with them..."
Sounds pretty silly when you put it like that, doesn't it? Yeah, well, that's why it IS silly. This isn't quibbling about whether to cut capital gains by 12% or 15%. This is fucking armed wingnuts demanding that people get sick and die so they can get a fucking haircut.
And - I should note - that this is without any of the sorts of REAL quarantine measures that places like Singapore and Hong Kong took. And this is in the context of the ridiculous degree to which the wingnuts HAVE gotten their way on practically everything. The Trumpkins are bascially throwing their hands in the air and giving up; they're doing just what these nimrods want - they're just gonna stop trying to test and trace and quarantine and let tens of thousands of people die. If it were wingnuts roaming through the nation in packs shooting random people and the federal government did nothing? It'd be Beyond Thunderdome time. But this?
As I said above; these people are lost. If your reaction to having to sit at home and stream Netflix is to grab your bullet launcher and invade the fucking legislature? No amount of "reason" and "dialogue" and "compromise" is gonna reach you. You're a heavily armed toddler; if you don't get exactly what you want, exactly when you want it? You're gonna throw a tantrum waving your black stick around.
If a government does not suppress rebellion - white, brown, or black - it is no longer a government.
Period.
But if your government just gives up and stops trying to defend you from a deadly pandemic?
You got to this situation after decades of failure to compromise.
DeleteUnder, let's say, "normal" circumstances, very very few people wake up in the morning and say "today I think I'll have toast for breakfast and then occupy the legislature," and fewer still actually act on that thought. (Although I suppose that when you have 300 million people, you can expect a 1-in-a-million occurrence almost every day of the year).
But when, for your entire life, you have heard "Reaganomics saved this country / Reaganomics led to the widening of inequality" followed by "Bush is no Republican - he raised taxes" followed by "Impeach lying Clinton" followed by "Bush derangement syndrome" followed by "the birther movement" to "lock her up" . . . well, with each passing year the right and extreme right (there is no left in American politics) pull farther apart in increasingly shrill echo chambers. And the extremists on the far right, who have been raised in one of those echo chambers, along with heavy doses of Ruby Ridge, Waco, Bundy . . . start to think that occupying the legislature is in fact a logical next move.
Doesn't mean it's not completely asinine. But "make them fear and dread us" is probably the wrong response when they already believe that the government is out to get them, and the only thing saving them is their guns.
You clearly believe these people are beyond hope (I disagree), that this administration is incapable of managing this situation (I agree), but that the various levels of US government retain such legitimacy that rebellion is unwarranted (I agree). I would like to think you're wrong that the people (all of them) are beyond hope, as that path leads to a messy civil war. How do you bring these people back into the fold? The space for compromise is certainly not "you can have a little bit of fascism." But perhaps it involves ways to address rust belt unemployment or education/retraining to address the changing economy or something . . . pretty much anything is better than the alternatives of civil war or lacing the nation's drinking water with sedatives.
Oh, horseshit.
Delete"These people" have won 95% of everything they've wanted. "Decades of failure to compromise"...which is why we're living in the single-payer, heavily unionized, 90%-top-marginal-rate, affirmative-actioned, low-defense-budget, gun-controlled-and-church-taxed United States that all that liberal failure to compromise with the wingnuts has won, right?
So, no. It IS completely asinine for the real whackadoodle Right to think the government is out to get them. They've OWNED the government since the Reagan years, and, as the velvet-glove treatment of these terrorists shows, are practically immune to any sort of repercussions - much less being feared up - from their treasonous actions.
Instead, the fawning coverage they get from the wingnut press continually pushes the Overton Window to the right. Your reply is a perfect example; what passes for "Left" in this country has constantly pushed for things that would help Rust Belt unemployment and trying to deal with the changing economy. It's the GOP whose response to offshoring and capital flight is "Yay! Let's do more!" and whose response to this pandemic is "Let's ensure that people HAVE to go to work and get sick and die!" There's no reason to assume that "these people" are going to fare any better in the New Gilded Age. But the GP gives them hope that the people they hate - the browns, the lib'ruls, the feminazis, the eggheads - will do worse...and that seems to be good enough for them.
So we ARE in a cold Civil War...and, as your responses indicate, the Confederates are winning. Maybe it's time for a little less Buchanan and a little more Sherman.
Well, the last time the American public actually got worked up about something, somewhere between 30-100K of the most left-leaning Americans moved to Canada, Sweden, Mexico and (in an interesting footnote of the civil rights movement) Ghana.
DeleteIf your cold civil war heats up it's almost certain that your loony fringe right will be crushed. But, if history echoes, then demographically America may slide even farther to the right as you will likely lose the segment of society actually prepared to take to the streets to oppose the Confederates.
But hey - if it's going to be Sherman, so be it. Just, please keep the coming violence within your borders.
Let us hope that we are more successful than Spartacus or the Forty-Eighters in any fight against right wing extremism.
DeleteIf it comes to Sherman, then perhaps this time the wingnut militias will emigrate north? Best to beef up the borders of your beautiful country and keep them out before they turn Canada into Trumptown.
PS - Regarding those 30-100K draft dodgers you mentioned, too bad Commander Bonespurs was not one of them. But I think many returned.
PS - I reject your statement that the 30-100K who fled to Canada were left-leaning. Dodging the draft or desertion does not respect political allegiances. Perhaps most or many were inclined politically left. But many others of that group were not.
DeleteAbout the Coronavirus depression thing.
ReplyDeleteThe U.S. had a linear growth of confirmed cases for six weeks. Six weeks without any progress in the fight. Numerous countries have bent the curve, the U.S. hasn't.
About 1,700 dead per day without improvement in sight must be unsatisfactory (even though this is normal in regard to tobacco consumption).
Maybe it would serve Americans well to ask why they fail at this when many other OECD countries did not fail to bend the curve.
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
This is separate from the anti-lockdown discussion. I do now consider it a possibility that shutting down factories and so on may be unnecessary if other measures (distance learning, teleconferences, marginal air travel, masks (!), case trackdown, quarantining of probable and known cases, washing hands and so on) become or stay implemented properly.
The French sure went too far. I don't understand why such a strike-happy, proud-of-revolutions nation does endure anti terrorism state of emergency rules and draconic anti-corona rules without overthrowing its government.
There are ways to deal with this that don't involve freezing the economy in place (and that's ALSO a possibility - the U.S. basically invented a whole bunch of the WW2 economy and paid for it out of made-up money; we could do that now, if we weren't run by people who don't think that government should do stuff. It would be like FDR standing up in front of the Congress on 12/8/41 and saying "Well, that was a fucking day that will live in infamy, but we can't possibly raise taxes, so whatcha gonna do, eh?") but they ALSO involve things like testing and contact tracing and PPE on a massive scale...and the White House and Senate are run by people who have zero interest in that.
DeleteSo we're just gonna let people die.