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Tuesday, September 13, 2016
Hillary Clinton's election requiring bloodshed?
This isn't just some random lunatic, this is the Republican governor of Kentucky, Matt Blevin. Yes, he's the current governor of the state, threatening America with terrorism if we elect Hillary Clinton as president.
"If Hillary Clinton were to win the election, do you think it's possible that we'll be able to survive? Would we ever be able to recover, as a nation? And while there are people who've stood on this stage [at the so-called Values Voter Summit of the Family Research Council, where Donald Trump also spoke] and said we would not, I'd beg to differ. ... I do think it would be possible. But at what price?
"At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood. Of who? The tyrants, to be sure. But who else? The patriots."
So, in order to "recover as a nation" from a lost election, we need blood - the blood of "the tyrants" (which is clearly a call for assassinating Hillary Clinton, but is convenient for shooting policemen, government officials, or anyone else you find easier to target, don't you think?), but also the blood of whatever terrorists attempt to carry out that murder.
Have Republicans completely forgotten that this is a democracy, that we vote to settle our differences because bloody violence is the alternative to accepting majority vote? And have they somehow missed the fact that there's going to be another election four years from now - and then four years after that and four years after that (not to mention mid-term elections)?
Of course, remember how Barack Obama was never going to allow another election? Yeah, hysterics is nothing new in the GOP.
One of the strengths of America is that losing an election doesn't mean losing your life. If you lose one election, you just work harder to win the next one. You don't start killing people. You don't even start killing people whom you think are "tyrants." (And note that we have laws which even the President of the United States must obey.)
Matt Blevin is ISIS. Oh, he's probably not going to start killing people himself. I'm sure he's too much of a coward for that. But he has no problem encouraging other people to engage in terrorism. (The leaders of ISIS don't blow themselves up in suicide attacks. They use dumb people for that.)
Indeed, when some of their least stable supporters decide to start killing people (and why wait until after the election?), Matt Blevin - like every other Republican leader - will wash his hands of it. You know that. I know that. Matt Blevin knows that. Oh, he didn't mean like... blood blood, right?
This speech is incredible, isn't it? But not unbelievable, not these days. The Republican Party has gone completely off the rails. Still, I never expected a current Republican governor to so blatantly incite violence like this. Is there no limit to how low the Republican Party can go?
We had a Civil War once, which killed more American soldiers than World Wars I and II combined (620,000 to 750,000 dead, with countless more maimed). Who knows how many civilians died? That Civil War took place because slave-owning Southerners would not accept the results of a presidential election. Does Blevin really want us to go down that road again?
Or does he just want right-wing Christians to engage in ISIS-style terrorism as a more-or-less permanent part of American life, just random killings by disgruntled Republicans?
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PS. Here's more about Blevin's speech from Right-Wing Watch, a project of the People for the American Way (an organization I highly recommend).
And FYI, here's the complete text of Thomas Jefferson's letter (written in France in 1987, before we even had a U.S. Constitution) about watering the 'tree of liberty' with blood. (Right-wing loons are very fond of a single sentence there. Note that Jefferson is talking about Shays' Rebellion, and given the current hysterics of the right-wing in America, I find it interesting that he also says, "The people cannot be all, & always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.")
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