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:
Post a Comment