Not surprisingly, Conway’s default position on the horrible violent tragedy this week — while one member of Congress remains still in critical condition after three surgeries — isn’t to push for unity, or solidarity, or humility. It’s to attack and demonize Democrats because that’s just how the Trump gang rolls.
Video, details and rebuttal over the flip.
From Thinkprogress.
Asked about the vibe at the congressional baseball game on Thursday night, Conway said “there was a feeling of unity and healing, and I think that was brought about by our leader — President Donald Trump. He’s being a healer in chief, he’s being remarkably wonderful to the entire country, calling for unity, praying for those who have been injured.”
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Conway went on to suggest that vocal opposition to the Republican agenda played a role in creating the toxic political climate that inspired James Hodgkinson to go on a shooting rampage that injured Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) and three others.
“You can oppose policies, but it’s done with such hateful, charged rhetoric that active resistance becomes armed resistance in the case of this lone gunman,” she said.
Guest host Pete Hegseth — who is arguably best known for fear-mongering about American Muslims — then asked Conway, “Do you feel like… amongst [sic] Democrats — Democratic leaders in this country — enough is being done to say, ‘tone is down, stop it, we can’t bring this to the brink?’”
Conway’s answer, unsurprisingly, was no. She cited House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) comments on Thursday about Republican efforts to blame Democrats for the shooting the day before as “outrageous, beneath the dignity of the job that they hold, beneath the dignity of the respect that we would like Congress to command.”
“Hateful, charged rhetoric” and “Beneath the dignity of the job”? Uh huh.
Just to be specific this is what Pelosi said about “dignity” in response to whether this incident could be used against the left:
Pelosi: Even as we sit here they’re running caricatures against me in Georgia once again, over $100 mIllion, which result in calls to my home constantly, threats to my grand children, predicated on their comments and their paid adds. What this individual did was horrible, but for them to be so sanctimonious… How dare they say such a thing? First of all the timing of it all, everybody is so sad, so concerned, so coming together.
I was hacked while I was in Florida, I got on a plane — so you turn off your phone — and when I got back to California I had scores of horrible, disgusting, yucky messages, a lot of them against me, some against Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. And using language, some of it, that is from the messages they have put out.
So there’s that.
And yeah, it’s not like there was this candidate who once said “Mexicans are Rapists, they bring crime and drugs.” Who claimed that “thousands of Muslim in New Jersey celebrated” the fall of the twin towers. Who said that Gold Star father Khazir Khan was secretly allied with ISIS. Who said that if you see someone throw a tomato, “Knock the Crap out of them” and who was investigated for inciting violence at his rallies.
Who this very morning attacking members of the Special Prosecution team investigating Russia and him as “very bad and conflicted people”, repeatedly said Hillary Clinton was “crooked” said that if she won the only thing that could be done was for “Second Amendment People to stop Clinton” and chanted “Lock Her Up” even after she was completely cleared of all charges and allegations, then later his own transition staff had their email on a private RNC Server — the same type of server that the Bush White House was illegally using and “lost” 22 Million emails that were under subpoena during the Plame investigation — while he himself still uses his outdated, unsecured Galaxy S3 phone to tweet with, whose various properties including Mar-A-Lago still have open network connections without passwords.
People in Covfefe houses, shouldn’t be throwing Covfefe.
Blaming “Democrats” for the actions of this one lone shooter doesn’t really work simply because he was — for a time — a supporter of Bernie Sanders, who technically is not a Democrat. Once Bernie was defeated he didn’t support the Democratic nominee, he supported Green Party candidate Jill Stein and began retweeting and Liking anti-Hillary posts some generated by Sputnik News.
- In another from 2015, he wrote: “I Hate Republicans & everything they stand for. Which is Lie, Cheat, Steal, Lower Taxes on the richest people in the World, & Now Take Our National Forests so they Can Mine them & Deface them...Republicans Should go back to where they came from. I think that would be Underneath a Rock..”
- Last year, the Facebook page offered messages of opposition to “Lying, Cheating Hillary” who he says “stole” the Democratic primary from Sen. Bernie Sanders. His Facebook page encouraged followers to either vote for third-party candidate Jill Stein or to write in Sanders in the 2016 election.
- In recent months, Hodgkinson’s Facebook page’s stance towards Clinton seems to have softened as he focused his ire on President Donald Trump. “Hillary didn't Do Anything Wrong. Here is the Crook. Lock Him Up!” he wrote in one message about Trump.
A lot of what he was saying various Democrats agree with, even if it is somewhat extreme, but then again so did a lot of people who supported and continue to support Trump when it comes to the “Lying, Cheating Hillary” stuff. I do agree that people can be incited, some people moreso than others, but certainly Bernie wasn’t the source of his ultimate violence. I would even say it wasn’t Jill Stein either, IMO 99.95% of this man’s decision to use violence came largely — FROM HIM.
The fact that he chose Republicans as a target was merely a convenience driven by his own internal demons as shown by multiple cases of violence against women, not part of some deep seated plan to dehumanize the opposition by Democrats. IMO Republicans have done that themselves by their own words, and their own actions.
I will be getting into this in more detail during my Sunday FP diary, but without completely foreshadowing that article I want to say that there is a huge difference in relative impact between what a candidate and President says compared to what a private citizen says. There is also a big difference between idle words and deliberate violent actions.
This man took actions that almost no other person coming from the same perspective, supporting Bernie Sanders who is distinctly anti-violence and anti-war, would do. He’s not typical by a long shot, but there is a characatures of those on the left as being on the edge of becoming Squeaky Frome. We saw this when a Move On supporter trying to give Rand Paul a sticker was boot stomped into the pavement.
We saw that when this Trump supporter sucker punched a protestor.
And we’ve also seen it as ANTIFA and Alt-RIght Neo-Nazis Nationalist have gotten into public knife fights. [Yes, this footage is from RT, because of course they want to highlight the worst of us.]
As a result of all that — which went completely ignored, or rationalized, or justified by Tump and his ilk — before I begin to accept Kellyanne Conway’s framing of Trump as the “Unifier-in-Chief” because he read one nice speech from a teleprompter in between squalls in his latest hateful tweet storm it has to be admitted that there’s a lot of “hateful rhetoric” which has already turned into hateful actions, coming from Conservatives and Trump’s side that’s needs to be accounted for. Yes, some Liberals and Democrats have been violent too — as shown above — but the relative scales of injustice are no where near balanced.
Congress, at least at this moment, appears to be willing to play nice — for now. That’s fine.
None of us who are rational, even those of us who have relatively strident and extreme, want to see people hurt. However it seems absolutely clear that Trump — and his people — have not, are not, and will not play nice. Not rhetorically, and not physically either. They’re actually only willing to play victim in order to politically capitalize on this situation.
So at least rhetorically, exactly why should anyone else play nice?