he massacres are trump’s fault, and everybody knows it
No, he didn’t pull the trigger. He just gave permission to the guy who did.
Look: For decades it’s been the lie of NRA-obsessed republicans that “guns don’t kill people, people do.” Because no gun ever pulled its own trigger, republicans thought they could fool people into being against gun-control laws.
And you know what? The argument worked, despite its patent absurdity. That’s why we have so few national laws limiting gun and ammunition use, which in turn is why we have so many mass murders. The NRA and its republican bootlickers hornswaggled the American people, particularly the lower-educated gun freaks who vote republican.
A similar argument was made by Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg Trials. Senior military commanders and top members of Hitler’s government claimed they couldn’t possibly be held responsible for the Deaths because they never personally killed anyone. The Generals didn’t personally load Jews into the gas chambers. The top political leaders didn’t personally strip the bodies of gold teeth and jewelry and then stuff them into the ovens. So how could they be accused or convicted of mass murder?
Of course, that’s not how the Tribunal’s judges saw things. They did convict the Generals and politicians of crimes against humanity and other war crimes, and they did hang dozens of them. A handful escaped the hangman’s noose by committing suicide, but otherwise, History has recorded that the Third Reich received its just desserts on the gallows.
So much for the republican argument! trump and virtually all of the rest of the republican cult actually seem to think they’re getting away with this stuff. They think that all they have to do is call for better mental health treatment (whatever the hell that means), and people won’t blame them for the massacres. They have the chutzpah (or self-delusion) to believe that they can peddle this crap to a public that’s credulous enough to buy it.
Well, maybe they can to the 30% who are so stupid they still think trump had the biggest inaugural crowd in history. As for the rest of us, fugeddaboutit. That’s the lesson of Nuremberg. In order to be guilty, you don’t just have to be the maniac that pulled the trigger. You’re equally guilty if you incited the violence, if you aided and abetted it through your words and deeds, if you gave dog whistles to the murderers and wink-wink-nod-nod “apologies” you didn’t really mean, and if you support propaganda outlets, like fox “news,” that peddle race hatred 24/7. If you do these things, you’re guilty. And you deserve the same penalty as those who pulled the triggers.
America is going to have Nuremberg-style trials for republicans. I imagine they’ll be held in Washington, D.C., perhaps in the U.S. Supreme Court building. A list of those who will be indicted and tried begins, obviously, with Donald J. Trump, but it will include his senior political allies: Stephen Miller, Mitch McConnell, Devin Nunes, Kevin McCarthy, Kellyanne Conway, Michael Pence, Clarence Thomas and dozens of others. It also will include trump’s military leadership: Joseph Dunford and Patrick Shanahan, for starters. And lest we forget that at Nuremberg the Justices also convicted Hitler’s chief propagandists, so too will the Washington trials charge Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson and the rest of the white nationalists in the media with inciting and being accessories to mass murder. They, too, along with their cohorts, will face the choice of being executed or facing long imprisonment, or of committing suicide.
Sound harsh? Yes. Harsh times call for harsh words. But we are in harsh times, brought on by decades of a republican party stoking hatred, resentment and violence, and now led by the worst president ever, an unstable narcissist and pathological liar interested only in sexual gratification, power and money. The tea party—incorrigible deplorables—started this. We Democrats will settle it, starting right now.
