It’s likely that there are examples from the past—probably in those funny, funny days when candidates were being called hermaphrodites and half-breeds. But it’s difficult to find more a recent instance in which a night of a political convention was dedicated to imprisoning the opposition.
Gen. Flynn was serenaded with chants of “lock her up” — and he diverted from his prepared remarks to agree with those delegates.
“That’s right, lock her up,” he said.
And that was just one instance of the calls not for defeating a political opponent, but for putting her behind bars.
Patricia Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, one of the four Americans who were killed at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, said, “I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son,” … Responding to someone in the crowd, she added, “That’s right—Hillary for prison. She deserves to be in stripes.”
And that was just another.
“We know she enjoys her pantsuits, but we should send her an email telling her what she deserves is a bright orange jumpsuit,” he said.
The Republicans aren’t campaigning to win in November—at least not in the normal way of American politics. They’re campaigning to win in the way often seen in the Middle East, where the victorious party finds reason to declare their opponents as traitors. Rudy Giuliani, another member of last night’s screaming chorus, has already proposed that just because Hillary was exonerated doesn’t mean she can't still be indicted. And Trump himself has already made it clear that if he wins, all bets are off.
Donald Trump on Wednesday said that as president he would examine indicting Hillary Clinton over her private email server.
“Certainly that is something you would look at,” he told host Bill O’Reilly on Fox News’s “The O’Reilly Factor."
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There were, and are, many on the Democratic side of the aisle who believed members of the George W. Bush administration deserved to be investigated for their role in events leading up to the war in Iraq, but you didn’t find either John Kerry or Barack Obama running on such ideas. Neither did President Obama seek to use his office for personal vengeance, despite a solid mandate from voters. You certainly never heard President Obama dreaming up ways in which John McCain deserved to be in jail.
You certainly didn’t see speaker after speaker lining up on the stage at the Democratic National Convention to cheer the idea of putting the opposition candidate “in stripes.”
And one more thing: Whoever booked Patricia Smith for that stage—and it’s a safe assumption that was Trump—should be deeply, deeply ashamed. Regardless of whether Ms. Smith asked to be there or volunteered, putting her on that stage was an act of immense thoughtlessness and cruelty—almost an act of torture in itself.