2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumWhy Are So Many Conservative Politicians Brandishing Guns?
OK, so John Kerry pandered too in 2004, with his whole hunter shtick, but McConnell did something very different at CPAC this past week. He brought a gun to an explicitly political gathering (he then handed it to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), as part of presenting Coburn with an NRA lifetime achievement award). Now, it's not like taking out your Colt .45 and laying it upon your desk on the Senate floor, but it's one more example of the mixing of politics and implicit violence that conservatives are deploying more and more often.
Among countless other examples, last month we saw Todd Staples, a candidate for lieutenant governor in Texas, run the following TV ad:
"You're not a king, and Texans bow to no one," Mr. Staples says, looking directly into the camera and addressing the president, before he is shown picking up a gun at a store, aiming it over a counter and vowing to "fight Obama's liberal agenda." snip) [Staples] ends on an equally aggressive note: "So, Mr. President, if you still want to mess with Texas, we've got a saying for you: Come and take it."
In response, Kathleen Hall Jamison, the head of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, asked: "Why would [sic] need a gun to fight an agenda? You don't shoot a policy or shoot an agenda--you fight an agenda with words." Great question.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-reifowitz/why-are-so-many-conservat_b_4929978.html
irisblue
(32,829 posts)for lack of brains, heart, intelligence, ability and politics and so on. They remind me of the ape in 2001, A Space Odyssey, waving a femur bone and they look twice as foolish.
blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)kairos12
(12,817 posts)pipoman
(16,038 posts)Was a presentation musket, not exactly an assault weapon...
Paladin
(28,202 posts)And most of us don't give a fuck about affording McConnell any "fairness."
pipoman
(16,038 posts)it is about not looking like an imbecile, destroying the point one is trying to convey, by fallacious anecdote.
canoeist52
(2,282 posts)They lose on every nuanced issue with most voters, and guns are a simple symbol to play to their shrinking base.
hollowdweller
(4,229 posts)The GOP wins on fear.
Convincing gun owners despite 30 years of loosening of the laws that they are under attack and unless the vote republican they won't have their guns.
With their inequality agenda the dems are reaching out to a lot of these voters because most are poor or middle class and only vote GOP due to their guns. So the GOP needs to double down.
Aristus
(66,093 posts)anyway.
They need some kind of phallic symbol to flaunt to the other micro-penises out there.
I tell you, the pathetic Rambo fantasies these limp-dick, soft, fat, white, ineffectual shitheads dream...