Monday, August 15, 2016

Ready. Aim. You're fired!


When things got hot for Trump and his surrogates after his threatening second amendment statements, Trump and his minions tried to lie their way out of his words. It appears that the Trump campaign and Trump himself were spoken to by the Secret Service who also viewed Trump's words as a threat against Candidate Clinton, should she win (as increasingly it appears she is likely to do.)  

It was clear. There was little ambiguity. It wasn't a joke. It was an unabashed dog whistle to an ugly group he wants to support his candidacy. So far the NRA has been his biggest supporter, and these comments are certainly consistent with some of the worst verbiage spewed by NRA board member Ted Nugent; but he wants the much less acceptable extreme fringe voters, if he can get them, as he loses so many other voters.  

Trump meant for the gun hugger extremists to use violence against the legitimately elected government of the United States. It is an extremist belief, now becoming more mainstream as the radical right has hijacked the GOP and increasingly driven out the moderates and saner factions.

In many ways that will define this election.   It would not surprise me to find that as he continues to lose, he resorts to it again and again. I believe Trump is hoping to win by encouraging someone to shoot Hillary Clinton, as his only path to the presidency -- and that he has support from a certain section of the right, a disturbingly LARGE section of the right.  

As with his dishonest claims calling the sitting president and Hillary Clinton the founders of ISIS, and then claiming those words were satire, Trump was also clear that he did in fact mean every word even though he quite clearly knew it was not true.   And now after pretending he did not REALLY mean those words, he is making he same ISIS founder statements again.   We can expect him to make the same statements threatening Hillary Clinton again.

Neither planning nor creativity or variety are strong points on the right; they don't have a lot of themes or ideas. It is one of their greatest failings. They are not good at governance, and least of all at solutions when they encounter problems. This is just one more way they are one-trick-ponies.   It is just one reason, but arguably the best reason, not to elect or re-elect anyone on the right, least of all nasty, ignorant, arrogant, epic failure Donnie Drumpf.  

Some of Trump's "2A people" have in the past for example, called for the execution of John McCain, whom a militia of crack pots and crazies want executed. Others want Senator Chuck Shumer killed. A good many of them want Obama and Hillary Clinton killed.

Donald Trump's invited Republican convention speaker Sheriff David Clark has called for insurrection a number of times in the past, and has repeatedly claimed the 2A is for the purposes of terrifying our elected representatives. Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America made almost identical statements to those of Trump regarding the killing of the president - in his case, Obama - back in May of this year, regarding the selection of Supreme Court justices. The recently deceased Mike Vanderoegh was another fan of this interpretation -- an unacceptable and unconstitutional interpretation, as established by George Washington and our other early presidents and founding fathers who stamped out such attempts at insurrection. And we see it in a wide range of sovereign citizen, and pseudo-patriot groups. Sharron Angle when running for the US Senate back in 2010 made similar statements about how should she lose at the ballot box, that the 2A crowd would resort to the bullet box.   It's a cowardly threat, an attempt at intimidation that the right makes when they know they are losing. It is so damn common it is a conservative 'thing'.  

As noted by Right Wing Watch:  
Pratt has a history of saying that the Second Amendment is meant to give people the right to assassinate or intimidate leaders they don’t like. In Pratt’s view, the Second Amendment was created in order to instill in politicians “a healthy fear” in “the back of their minds” that they will be assassinated so “they’ll behave.” He explicitly told Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., that she “should do her job in constant trepidation,” knowing that if she tries “to disarm Americans the way the British crown tried 240 years ago, the same sovereign people who constituted this government using the cartridge box someday may need to reconstitute it, as clearly anticipated by the Declaration of Independence.” When Alan Colmes asked him if he really does believe that politicians “should have a healthy fear of being shot,” Pratt replied: “Sure, that’s what the Second Amendment is all about. ”
While some on the right are taking issue with Trump over his summons of the wackobirds to do violence, not nearly enough of them are, and it won't be acceptable so long as Trump is the candidate and the RNC gives him even the thinnest cover of support and endorsement.

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