A Chip Off the Old Blockhead

It really is a noteworthy achievement for someone when they can do something so reprehensible that Louie Gohmert (R-TX) isn't the most offensive Congressman from Texas that week.  But Chip Roy (R-TX) managed to accomplished that with his explanation that Texans believe so strongly in justice because they support lynching.

And yes, of course Chip Roy doubled down on what he said and didn't apologize.  It would have been really easy to apologize, mind you, just explain you weren't talking about lynching, but Republicans today rarely apologize.  Doubling-down is the standard.  And Chip Roy isn't someone to apologize because he made it clear who he was, someone who thinks lynching is okay, a form of justice.

For the record, lynching has nothing to do with justice.  It's illegal, making it a criminal act, which is the very opposite of justice.  Stringing someone up until their dead before they've had a chance to be arrested and had a trial defended by a lawyer before jurors and a judge is not justice.

It's somewhat hard to tell why Roy's lynching love hasn’t had any call for a censure.  Among my guesses is that there are far worse Republican abuses these days, and the bar is so low that this wasn’t low enough.  But mostly, I think, it would probably be hard to censure him for using a general expression that he could claim, “Oh, for God’s sake, no, I didn’t say anyone should be lynched.  I didn’t even mean people should be lynched, it’s just a good ol’ Texas expression, 'to find a rope,' not a lynching rope, oh, no, it just means we believe in catching the bad guys, because we believe justice.”

Of course he meant lynching, but since he didn’t actually say that precise word, I suspect it probably would be hard to censure him for an inexact expression.

I’m very glad that Chip Roy has gotten a loud, scathing response.  More to the point, what disturbs me is not Chip Roy, but that his words have been met with silence by, as far as I can tell, every Republican in Congress.

That's the problem.  If you censured Chip Roy for that, you’d probably have to go after 99% of the caucus.  Alex Wagner was on MSNBC on Friday talking about an article she wrote that day basically about hate speech, and she made the point that it isn’t that these Republican politicians are saying all these bad things and doubling-down on them, but that they actually look at it as a badge of honor to say them.  They see saying these awful things as something good.  And as ghastly as that is, I think she makes a good point.

Today's Republican Party in Congress have long shown themselves for they are.  And insurrectionist, racist fascist is not a good look -- made all the worse when they are now are siding with Vladmir Putin for attacking the American President.  So, anyone who things my description is hyperbolic, it's sadly grounded in reality.

As I've long said, the past four years were not about Trump, we always knew who he was -- this is about the Republican Party in Congress who enabled him and supported his actions, and continue to do so to this day.