This is what passes for trying to be responsible in Republican circles:
Hours after Pennsylvania State Police arrested a 21-year-old Idaho man for allegedly firing a semi-automatic rifle at the White House, the top student official for the College Republicans at the University of Texas tweeted that the idea of assassinating President Obama was “tempting.”
At 2:29 p.m. ET, UT’s Lauren E. Pierce wrote: “Y’all as tempting as it may be, don’t shoot Obama. We need him to go down in history as the WORST president we’ve EVER had! #2012.”
Pierce, the president of the College Republicans at UT Austin, told ABC News the comment was a “joke” and that the “whole [shooting incident] was stupid.” Giggling, she said that an attempted assassination would “only make the situation worse.”
She said this in late November of Obama’s third year in office. She said it from Texas. She said it after a bullet blew out an ornamental window in the White House residence and was stopped by a backup bullet-proof window behind it. Her vice-president tried to put it in context.
“Insofar as she’s a representative [of the College Republicans], maybe it shouldn’t be said, but she’s made a positive statement in a way,” said Cassie Wright, the group’s vice president.
“I don’t really see anything wrong with it,” Wright added. “It’s just a personal comment, not representative of any group. Just freedom of speech, you know?”
To me, the most telling part is that Lauren Pierce seemed to know her audience. She assumed that they would be sympathetic to the idea of shooting the president and wanted to tell them that it wasn’t a good idea. Coming just days before the forty-eighth anniversary of the JFK assassination, it wasn’t a sensitive statement, but what’s really troubling is that it is assumed that most college Republicans in Texas have had their heads filled with so much crap that they have a murderous hatred of a president who hasn’t done anything to deserve it.
It is an interesting commentary on the DNA she shares with her audience (especially made from within the walls of a university) of prejudice outweighing intellectual curiosity.
The peer approval that used to drive a teenager to pick up a cigarette now says it’s cool to joke about killing our President. But as Cain instructs, we all need to get a sense of humor on these things.
What these numbskulls fail to understand about freedom of speech is that when you say something inflammatory in a public forum, you own it. It’s one thing to giggle with your sorority sisters in a private meeting about taking shots at the President, but when you Tweet it, the message is out. Everyone knows you said it.
I’ve read that when Obama became President that the amount of death threats against him tripled those of previous Presidents. I’ll have to go look that up, but the point is that people were pre-engaged in their hatred of him before he even took Office. How do you fight that built-in hatred?
How do you fight that built-in hatred?
Shutdown Clear Channel and News Corp.
By burning everything from Atlanta to Savannah, then back up to Columbia. I’d then go west, all the way to El Paso, but that’s me – I think Sherman was a softie. Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women – that is total warfare and we’ve yet to engage our enemies.
What’s in your wallet?
Ugh, I live in Texas and everything is bigger here, including the stupid.
My job has me interacting with people who are predisposed to conservative opinions in the first place but since I am in Texas, it is on steroids.
I am a outside salesman that calls on bankers and they are convinced there is “no way in hell” Obama gets re-elected. I smile and nod a lot because it is not wise to engage in political arguments with prospective customers but they are all convinced there is no way Obama wins in 2012.
With the field the GOP has, I am mortified at the thought of any of those clowns actually getting elected which I guess with the economy is a possibility.
It could happen. My wife is an apolitical creature who thinks I am an extremist when it comes to politics but she feels Obama has failed as president. I try to explain how Congress has really been the culprit but I am just biased because I am a liberal. She will eventually come home and vote correctly but how many people like her will?
When the dust settles next year after Obama’s reelection, there will be an ugly backlash from the sorts of people you describe. They are Fox watchers who won’t be able to wrap their minds around the changes that have happened all around them.
Be ready for a really nasty spike in rhetoric from these deniers, along with accompanying violence. It is going to get worse before it gets better. Ironically, the crazy and the stupid are part of our hope–these morans could still eff-up several Senate races that are winnable for Republicans.
I agree that Obama is a failed President, but I have to admit that replacing him with an Australopithecine is not the answer. Likewise, I would agree that there is “no way in Hell” that he will be re-elected…in Texas.
On second thought, I have to apologize to Australopithicines. Most of the R candidates do not even have that much intelligence. This will be apparent to a majority in the North and West coast and Obama will be re-elected, unless an opponent with a brain and a heart emerges. I place the chance of that happening within today’s Republican Party as zero. I don’t often say chances are zero, but these chances are. So the Great Recession will continue to ravage the 99% until at least 2016.
The stupid fucking bitch was a “wink-and-nodder,” who ought to be hauled in front of a federal judge over such incendary remarks. This is no different than racists speaking in dog whistle coded language while they mug and mum for the camera. They are cowardly acts by those who are not personally brave enough to actually speak their minds and who resort to the acts of snickering adolescent behavior.
I hope someone slaps the teeth right out of her stupid little mouth.
That would be as bad as shooting at the White House.
Slightly OT, but since we are talking about the GOP’s delusions vis a vis Barack Obama, the fear and delusion that this President somehow “provokes” in the GOP is disgustingly racial and really PO’s me!
Perry says Obama ‘grew up in a privileged way’
Really! Really! Is musta been so easy being a bi-racial child to a white teenage mother, who African immigrant father left him and his mother who was at one point receiving food stamps and who was later raised by his maternal grandmother/grandfather in Kansas and finally in a small apartment in Hawaii.
That’s what I’d call “privileged”.
Well, ya know his mom was one of them Welfare Queens for a while. If that ain’t privilege I don’t know what is. I’d take that %147/month anytime over a tax free private plane, wouldn’t you?
Of Tweets and Twits
No one has ever accused College Republicans of being the brightest people in any room (even if that room included David Brooks, the cast of Jersey Shore, and the odd Kardashian or two), but this kid has taken cognitive dissonance to a new, Bizarro-world level.
I found video of Pierce advocating affordable college for students. I guess she does not realize that GOP does not care about this issue. If she plays her GOP victim cards right, this could be the best thing for her political career.
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-politics/texas-political-news/ut-gop-leader-draws-attention-anti-o
bama-tweet/print/
I suspect she still has some little bit in her that hurts at the calls for murder, but she knows that any appeal to morality or even any challenge to psychopathic business-as-usual would only turn her brain-dead minions against her. So she resorts to the pseudo-pragmatic argument, which is not necessarily the worst way to deal with the criminal insane: “But daddy, if you kill Mom, you might only be putting her out of her misery. I think she deserves to suffer longer.”
Is there anything worse than a College Republican? And don’t give me this “it’s not representative of the group with her statement” nonsense. You already admitted that she shouldn’t have said it because she’s the president. She is the figurehead. When someone reporting for the UT college newspaper comes knocking on the college Republicans’ door, they’re going to ask her for what she thinks, and her statements represent the group. That’s how it works. If you didn’t want that job, why did you allow yourself to be nominated, possibly write a speech, and win a majority of votes from your peers?
Anyway, College Republicans are among the worst. They always take the embodiment of the National Party, and expose its filth out in the open. So maybe in a way they’re among the best. They’re too young to get that you shouldn’t hold racist and sexist bake/book sales:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/24/uc-berkeley-racist-bake-sale_n_979184.html
This is like their annual event. How brain dead do you have to be to do this not only at a college, but at Berkeley? Go try this shit at Howard or Morris, assholes. See how far it goes.
College Republicans are the id of the GOP – if you want to know what Republicans truly believe, ask the College Republicans.
Honestly, sounds like something I could have said during the Bush years (although I wouldn’t it in public).
Of course, consider my screen name….
University of what?
There’s something wrong with my computer, so I can’t see that last word. Is it Iowa? Maine?
No?
I know: Oregon. It’s the University of Oregon, isn’t it?
No? Maybe New Mexico? Michigan? Ohio?
Well, I give up. I can’t imagine what state this could have happened in.