Is the Republican Party trying to forment an armed rebellion against the government? I am forced to ask this question because of the fundraising e-mail I received today from the Republican National Committee.<\/p>\n
The e-mail from RNC press secretary Kirsten Kukowski begins:<\/p>\n
In just ONE week, under the tyrannical leadership of President Obama and the Democrats: <\/p>\n
\n
- Obama abused his power by issuing an executive order on immigration.<\/li>\n
- The Obama Administration lied about ObamaCare enrollment numbers.<\/li>\n
- Mary Landrieu failed to get the Keystone Pipeline passed through the Senate.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
All this shows how much things can change in just one week — and how important it is that we win the final races of the 2014 election next week.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’m not going to argue this list, though I have no idea how the third — the Republicans failing a cloture vote on Landrieu’s Keystone XL bill — is “tyrany.”<\/p>\n
What concerns me is the rhetoric — “tyrannical leadership.” There has always been demonization of political opponents in American history — even George Washington was denounced as a monarchal tyrant during his presidency, and there’s an argument to be made that a hostile press drove him from office and was the reason he didn’t run for a third term — yet the character of this feels different. There have been fringe voices arguing for years that Obama is a tyrant, but the important thing is that they were fringe voices. Then, a few days ago, Senator Ted Cruz compared Obama to the Roman senator Catiline<\/a> and said he was “openly desirous to destroy the Constitution and this Republic.” Now, the RNC is pushing the idea that Obama is “tyrannical leadership.”<\/p>\n
They are using the rhetoric to raise money. I get that. The RNC’s donor base is implaccably hostile toward the President. Yet, by their rhetoric, the RNC is also normalizing the idea that Obama is a tyrant. That can’t be by accident; the formative American national myth is that the colonies became a nation by rebelling and throwing off a tyrannical King. If the RNC keeps pushing the idea that Obama is a tyrant, then aren’t they normalizing the idea so that the unthinkable — removal of a tyrant through extra-legal means — becomes thinkable?<\/p>\n
It’s worrying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Is the Republican Party trying to forment an armed rebellion against the government? I am forced to ask this question because of the fundraising e-mail I received today from the Republican National Committee. The e-mail from RNC press secretary Kirsten Kukowski begins: In just ONE week, under the tyrannical leadership of President Obama and theContinue reading “The RNC: Normalizing the Unthinkable”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28722,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119],"tags":[206,120],"class_list":["post-28721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-barack-obama","tag-republican-party","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}