“The president of the United States, that’s who you should be concerned about. Because he’s acting like a little Hitler,” said Tom Eisenhower, a World War II veteran. “I’d take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me.”
As Think Progress reports, a concerned voter at a Town Hall meeting in Iowa with Senator Chuck Grassley speaks his mind on trying to kill the President. Just imagine the outrage if someone had said this about Bush.
No word is given on Grassley’s response.
Woman Yells Heil Hitler To Jewish Man at Las Vegas Town Hall
Involves yelling “Heil Hitler” at an Israeli man praising his country’s healthcare system, then making crying baby noises when he becomes outraged.
Even people who haven’t read the play can recite lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Et tu, Brute;” “I come not to praise Caesar but to bury him.” But the well-worn quotations produce a simplified sense of the plot, evoking an atmosphere of tyranny and retribution instead of the quickly shifting political landscape that makes up the drama’s core.
Shakespeare’s presentation of the political backstory is a model of economy, as he skillfully sums up the players, their alliances and their differing motivations. The nobility of Brutus is well-captured, as is the jealousy of Cassius and the fluid adaptability of Mark Antony.
But even as these iconic characters drive the action, they are also driven by the fickleness and easily kindled rage of the Roman mob. Citizens throng the streets, burn buildings and commit murder. Their allegiances flit back and forth on the basis of the latest soliloquy. To Shakespeare’s credit that these shifting loyalties never descend into deus ex machina. Instead, they seem to reflect the bloodsport of Roman politics, where leaders attempt to direct the mob even as they’re surrounded by it.
Shakespeare also adds his trademark psychological torment to the mix. As Brutus plans to strike down Caesar, he reflects:
“Between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The genius and the mortal instruments are then in council; and the state of man, like to a little kingdom, suffers then the nature of an insurrection.”
The language throughout is choice and fluid, and it’s funny that Shakespeare’s phrasings have come to define our view of Roman culture. (See how many period films have characters speaking in English accents; the HBO miniseries Rome, which we just began watching, is one of them.) Even as Shakespeare evokes the era, he remains faithful to the larger movements of history, making Julius Caesar a fine summation of its time as well as an excellent work of drama.
Carrying a gun to a political meeting is an obscenity. Anyone who does it, even if they are within their legal rights, should be ashamed. Our founders fought a revolution (and, yes, took up arms) to build a society where political disputes are not settled through force or intimidation–and that’s the only purpose of bringing a weapon to a political discussion: to intimidate.
Rick Perlstein has a Washington Post Q&A in which he does an excellent job explaining (and contextualizing) the recent wave of rightwing anger and misconduct. Perlstein is a notable political author, known for his books “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” and “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.”
One thing to note: there’s a marked coherence gap between the left-wing and right-wing questions, and it does not favor the latter.
Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror — powerful elites — find reason to stoke and exploit that fear.
Historian Rick Perlstein has a great op/ed in Washington Post on the long, illucid history of right-wing nuttiness. A political historian, Perlstein has written comprehensively about the formation of the modern conservative movement. His newest book, “Nixonland,” is supposed to be great.