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| Murphy |
Dick Blumenthal, Chris Murphy and Rand Paul are all US Senators. There has been a long-lived tradition in Congress that, though senators may hail from different parties, they are not to be treated as mortal enemies, and this tradition produces a sort of social camaraderie. Some forms of affection – one thinks of C.S. Lewis’ Four Loves, affection, friendship, erotic love, and the love of God -- simply MUST be larger than politics.
Maintaining what national politicians might call the concord
of the Senate has, in our modern period of intense bifurcation, been
challenging, largely because politics, like all fierce overarching pursuits, is
a sword of sundering.
It is awkward if not impossible to maintain a cordial
political relationship with someone who persistently describes you, directly or
indirectly, as an enemy of the Republic and Right Reason, as happens frequently
in modern national politics. Twitter, a platform that allows bilious people to
string together invectives rather than rational arguments, does not help
preserve comity. But twitter is simply a platform. The real difficulty is more sundering and difficult to settle.
Wending his way back to his hotel on the last day of the
Republican National Convention – like its Democrat counterpart, neither “national”
nor a recognizable “convention” of delegates – Paul was set upon by scores of
people who were far less well-mannered than members of Congress. The police protectively
surrounding the Pauls, Rand and his wife, evidently did not know who they were
escorting. At one point, a policeman was shoved nearly to the ground by someone
in the shouting, threatening crowd. Before the policeman tumbled to the ground,
Paul up-righted him and said through his facemask, “They know who I am.”
Paul told Fox News that the besieged police
were “our defense. If he's down, the mob's loose on us." Paul
lost part of his lung to a previous attack; he did not wish, following the
Republican National Convention, to lose his life at the hands of a ravening mob.
"They were shouting threats to us, to kill
us, to hurt us,” Paul said, “but also threats saying shout, shouting 'say
her name,' Breonna Taylor, and it's like you couldn't reason with
this mob, but I'm actually the author of the Breonna Taylor law
to end no-knock raids, so the irony is lost on these idiots that they're
trying to kill the person who's actually trying to get rid of no-knock raids.”
Paul said he's authored 22 criminal justice reforms with
President Trump and former President Barack Obama, but the demonstrators
were still yelling: "We're not going to let you go alive unless
you'll say you're for criminal justice reform."
Politicians nearly always, but especially during elections, tailor
their remarks to the audience they are addressing. Who was Murphy, up for re-election
in 2024, addressing when he wrote on twitter during the final night of the
Republican National Convention, “These guys [the crowd attending Trump’s
speech] are stone cold killers. The next 50,000 people who die are their
responsibility. They sat right next to each other and didn't wear masks
intentionally. They knew they were setting an example that would be followed
and they reveled in it. STONE. COLD. KILLERS.”
The crowd that greeted Paul and others as they moved from
the convention setting to their hotel rooms would have, Paul said, happily adopted
Murphy’s characterization of Republican convention goers
"I truly believe this with every fiber of my
being,” Paul said, “ had they gotten at us they would have gotten us to
the ground, we might not have been killed, might just have been
injured by being kicked in the head, or kicked in the stomach until
we were senseless. You've seen the pictures of what they do to you. If
the police are not there, if you defund the police, if we become
Portland, if America becomes Portland, what's going to happen is
people are going to be pummeled and kicked in the head and left senseless
on the curb. That would have happened to us, I promise you, had we
not had the D.C. Police to support us, we are thankful we have
police, and we've got to wake up.”
Indeed, Paul’s Democrat colleagues in the US Senate are not
yet woked. The Lincoln monument, where Martin Luther King delivered his
historic “I have a dream speech”, has been defaced. A fire has been set to an historic
black church in Washington DC, now the epicenter of the ANTIFA movement to rid
the nation of such African American oppressors as Ulysses Grant, who prosecuted
a bloody war to set free black slaves. Arsonists burn buildings, while the
legacy media seems incapable of making necessary distinctions between domestic
terrorism and legitimate protests.
Twittering U.S. Senators keep twittering and Paul, THE STONE COLD KILLER wearing a face mask when attacked, is waiting patiently for his “colleagues across the aisle” to mount
their usual platforms and denounce 1) ANTIFA, and 2) the Marxist organizers –
certainly not their slogan or peaceful protests -- of the Black Lives Matter
movement.
Sometime before Election Day might be useful.
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