About Me

My photo
Jack is a graduate of Rutgers University where he majored in history. His career in the life and health insurance industry involved medical risk selection and brokerage management. Retired in Florida for over two decades after many years in NJ and NY, he occasionally writes, paints, plays poker, participates in play readings and is catching up on Shakespeare, Melville and Joyce, etc.

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Radical Right Craziness Going Too Far


The following concerning the President’s tweets appeared on a recent posting by Heather Cox Richardson, the Boston College professor I quote so often:

“Most dramatically, though, he went on a Twitter crusade against television show host Joe Scarborough, tweeting inaccurately, and with no evidence, that Scarborough murdered a young woman in 2001. The 28-year-old woman to whom he was referring was working in a local office of then-Florida Representative Scarborough, with whom she had virtually no contact, when a heart condition caused her to fall and hit her head. There was no sign of a struggle or anyone else with her; the medical examiner concluded that she died of natural causes.
It all just looked mean and self-serving and small, and as if he had given up on appealing to any but the radical conspiracy theorists who make up his base. Some of them are listening: although at the end of April, 81% of Kentucky residents approved of Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis, on Sunday protestors in Kentucky hung an effigy of Beshear from a tree limb at a mock lynching at the state capitol. They attached to the effigy's shirt a piece of paper that said *“Sic Semper Tyrannis,” the same motto John Wilkes Booth shouted in 1865 when he murdered President Abraham Lincoln, and the same words that were on the t-shirt Timothy McVeigh wore in 1995 when he set the bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City that killed at least 168 people and injured more than 680 others.”
Booth Assassinating Linclon - 1865
Kentucky Rightist hanging
Governor Beshear in Efficy - 2020

Oklahoma Federal Building Bombing - 1995

In my blog postings I have assiduously avoided going in the direction suggested by the words of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, but when Kentucky right wing protesters use it against their Democratic governor, I begin to worry.  “Sic Semper Tyrannis” is a *death threat and Professor Cox explained how it was used in the Lincoln assassination and the Oklahoma City bombing 25 years ago.   Any suggestion that the act of assassination can be legitimatized in any way in this country is wrong and should not be made.
*Sic semper tyrannis is a Latin phrase attributed to Marcus Iunius Brutus, one of the Senators who assassinated Julius Caesar. It can be translated as "Thus always to tyrants". It is a shortened version of the phrase "Sic semper evello mortem tyrannis" ("Thus always I bring death to tyrants").
Senators Assassinating Julius Caesar - 44 B.C.


JL


No comments: