Mississippi Republican Wants To Lynch Confederate Statue Removers (UPDATED)

Mississippi Republican State Representative "KK"Karl Oliver wants anyone fixin' to remove statues of treasonous Confederates to get fitted for a rope necktie:

A Republican member of the Mississippi House of Representatives has called for lynching anyone who removes a Confederate monument, including lawmakers in a neighboring state.  

On Saturday, state Rep. Karl Oliver (R) described the “destruction” of Confederate monuments in Louisiana as “heinous and horrific” and compared leaders in that state to Nazis.  

“They should be LYNCHED!” Oliver wrote in comments posted on his Facebook page.

Obviously, given the sordid history of lynchings of blacks in the South over the past 150 years, Oliver's comments were immediately denounced by his fellow Republicans ...Democrats. (In fact, two other Republican representatives "liked" his lynching comment -- Reps. John Read and Doug McLeod.) It should also be noted that Oliver considers himself a "Christian" because of course he does.

In the end, Oliver might just be looking to direct some bidness his way; he's an undertaker by profession.

UPDATE:  Oliver represents a district that includes the town in which Emmett Till was lynched in 1955; also some Republican office holders have belatedly come out with their denunciations.

(Photo: What the hell is that "hair" beanie thing on top of your head? Someone call animal control!)

Trump Rallies The (Storm) Troops In Alabama (Updated)

No, we're not exaggerating.  Here are some snippets describing some of the estimated 20,000 (!) low-brows (some shouting "White Power!") who showed up for Republican front-runner and America's answer to Juan Peron, Donald "Rump" Trump's rally in the armpit of American sedition, Mobile, AL, yesterday:

On the street, Olaf Childress, a neo-Confederate activist, gave out copies of “The First Freedom” newspaper, which had headlines about “Black-on-white crime,” “occupied media” and “censored details of the Holocaust.”  [snip]

Cheryl Burns, 60, was on a road trip from California when she heard that Trump would be in Alabama. She turned her car around and got in line, warning people of what happened to states when liberals took them over.

“There is no more California,” Burns said. “It’s now international, lawless territory. Everything is up for grabs. Illegal aliens are murdering people there. People are being raped. Trump isn’t lying about anything — the rest of the country just hasn’t found out yet.”

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog has more on Olaf Childress here.  Suffice it to say, he's a piece of shit work.

But wait, there's more:

“When he gets in there, he’ll figure it out,” said Amanda Mancini, who said she had traveled from California to see Mr. Trump. “So we do have to trust him, but he has something that we can trust in. We can look at the Trump brand, we can look at what he’s done, and we can say that’s how he’s done everything.”

Still, others said they had plenty of advice for the man they regularly identified in conversation as “Mr. Trump.”

“Hopefully, he’s going to sit there and say, ‘When I become elected president, what we’re going to do is we’re going to make the border a vacation spot, it’s going to cost you $25 for a permit, and then you get $50 for every confirmed kill,’ ” said Jim Sherota, 53, who works for a landscaping company. “That’d be one nice thing.”

So, when Rump's fans aren't actually beating up people, they're merely fantasizing about killing them.

We're not finished:

 "Donald Trump is telling the truth and people don't always like that," said Donald Kidd, a 73-year-old retired pipe welder from Mobile. "He is like George Wallace, he told the truth. It is the same thing.

Hmmm. Yeah, George Wallace.

Right-wingers in this country are overly fond of laughably, nonsensically ascribing Nazi tendencies to the Kenyan Socialist Usurper President, but if these Republican Trumpistas aren't brownshirts in the flesh, we're Tsar of All the Russias.

UPDATE:  Matt Taibbi nails it:

Trump isn't really a politician, of course. He's a strongman act, a ridiculous parody of a Nietzschean superman. His followers get off on watching this guy with (allegedly) $10 billion and a busty mute broad on his arm defy every political and social convention and get away with it.

People are tired of rules and tired of having to pay lip service to decorum. They want to stop having to watch what they say and think and just get "crazy," as Thomas Friedman would put it.  [snip]

Those of us who think polls and primaries and debates are any match for that are pretty naive. America has been trending stupid for a long time. Now the stupid wants out of its cage, and Trump is urging it on. There are a lot of ways this can go wrong, no matter who wins in 2016.  (our emphasis)

UPDATE II:  Andy Borowitz adds a bit of dark humor as well:

A rally featuring a racist speaker Friday night in Mobile attracted a crowd of just twenty thousand people, widely considered a disappointing turnout for a racist event in Alabama.

According to racist event planners in the state, a crowd of twenty thousand would rank the event as one of the smaller racist rallies in Alabama this year.

Morning Read - Power Struggle

If you read this post,  Charles Blow's observation won't come as a surprise:

Don’t let yourself get lost in the weeds. Don’t allow yourself to believe that opposition to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration is only about that issue, the president’s tactics, or his lack of obsequiousness to his detractors. 

This hostility and animosity toward this president is, in fact, larger than this president. This is about systems of power and the power of symbols. Particularly, it is about preserving traditional power and destroying emerging symbols that threaten that power. This president is simply the embodiment of the threat, as far as his detractors are concerned, whether they are willing or able to articulate it as such.  [snip]

Make no mistake: This debate is not just about this president, this executive order or immigration. This is about the fear that makes the face flush when people stare into a future in which traditional power — their power — is eroded, and about their desperate, by-any-means determination to deny that future. 

This applies not only to the extremist Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid/ White Man Party, but to their enablers in corporate media =cough= once great Washington Post =cough=.   That's why we continue to say to President Obama and Democrats:  ignore the frightened, vicious chatter and do the right thing.  They're going to hate you and fight you whatever you do anyway.

Saturday Read - Today's Confederate Party

Doug Muder at The Weekly Sift has an interesting article that draws the connection between the un-reconstructed Confederates of the 19th Century and today's tea bagger Republican Party (h/t Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly). Great read. Here's a small sample:

... [T]he enduring Confederate influence on American politics goes far beyond a few rhetorical tropes. The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries. 

That worldview is alive and well. During last fall’s government shutdown and threatened debt-ceiling crisis, historian Garry Wills wrote about our present-day Tea Partiers: “The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule.” 

The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change. 

When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.

This is the same dangerous slice of the American demographic that existed before, during and after the Civil War.  They call themselves constitutionalists, conservatives, tea partiers, Republicans.  But what they really are, based on their worldview DNA, is  Confederates.  Violent, traitorous, nullifying, un-democratic, un-American Confederates.

How's That Republican Rebranding Coming Along?

A participant in last weekend's million couple hundred vets low-information voter march (h/t LGF):

If you think for an instant that this dimbulb doesn't represent the core zeitgeist of the New Confederate/Rethuglican base, and that the treason flag he's got in his left paw is "heritage, not hate," you should go pick up Tony Horwitz' excellent book (published in 1998!) "Confederates in the Attic."  (Also:  "Impeach Obama." Yeah, in your fever-dreams.)

(h/t P.E.C. for the book!)

Save Your Confederate Money, Boys....

"GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s big rally Monday in Denver turned out thousands of cheering, pumped up fans at the Wings over the Rockies Air and Space Museum — an event that provided a last very dramatic public stand before Wednesday’s debate at the University of Denver. There was a 'huh?' moment: country singer Laurie Morgan serenading the crowd with 'Dixie' — those “I wish I were in the land of cotton” lyrics not too often heard at modern day presidential campaign events." -- Carla Marinucci, San Francisco Chronicle. True.

That's one of the reasons we call it the Rethuglican / New Confederate Party, complete with "Dixie" as their official song. It didn't stop with Nixon's "Southern strategy," it's in full flower now.