I’m sure I don’t need to bring cites. Hannity ran the pole. Glenn Beck dedicated an episode to the idea. Rick Perry slips in secession talk into his interviews and speeches. Signs at the “tea bag parties” reinforced the theme. A leaked (or “leaked”) memo is read (incorrectly) as fictitiously projecting a revolutionary message onto the right wing.
I don’t believe for a second that any republican leader or thinke thinks for a second that civil war would be a good idea, or is at all likely.
But it seems there’s some coordination going on around the message that something like this could be on the horizon. And I’d like to know why that message is being put out there. Who gains what?
During the Bush years the 'Pubs dabbled in what I like to term “totalitarianism-lite”. That is, trying to evoke the ideological absolutism of a revolutionary one-party state without the actual martial law, secret police and mass executions. Now that the Dems are in the White House, the Pubs are posturing. It’s about as credible as the left circa 1968 crying “Revolution Now!” because Nixon won the election.
They are speaking their truth and showing us who they really are and what they are really like. I can only hope that this will put them forever out of the mainstream of politics and that they will be shunned.
Didn’t a lot of leftists in the Sixties do the same thing? I mean, Abbie Hoffman had an entire chapter in Steal This Book devoted to talking about different kinds of rifles and pistols and how to use them, etc. There’s even a paragraph where he’s like, “the Springfield, Mauser, Enfield, and Russian 7.62 rifles are all good buys at about 20 dollars.” HA! That line makes me chuckle to myself. But he pretty much spelled out explicitly that there should be a massive (and violent) overthrow of “the pig,” “the man,” “Amerika,” etc, and his philosophy was very, very popular.
Enh. Abbie Hoffman didn’t have multiple shows, and wasn’t a (fairly) powerful elected official either (my point being that Hoffman didn’t have the same stature or influence). I think what Beck and Perry and many others are doing is a bit different.
Invoking the prospect of civil war implies that current issues are incredibly important. It implies that the Democrats are so horribly wrong that it’s worth destroying the country to oppose them. So vote for Republicans in the mid-term elections next year.
What else are the Republicans going to say? “Well, let’s give the Democrats a shot at running the country for a while and see how things go. If it doesn’t work out, you can vote us back in and we’ll take another shot at running things.” Not really inspiring.
The leftists in general and especially the extremists were never as powerful as the Right is. And more importantly, the 60s were a long, long time ago.
I know that as a lefter, I would have no problem with the red states going on their own way, as long as some kind of reasonable deal could be made allowing freedom to travel between the two nations. I’d embrace the idea of oldschool Republicans getting (mostly) out of my government.
The righties don’t really want to secede, though. Their states depend too much on blue states, and they know we would still be doing pretty well without them.
Tom Delay, former House Majority Leader, outlines a scenario whereupon Texas could secede. This followed the remarks of Governor Perry of Texas who observed that while, “There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it, …But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that.”
So the Texas GOP position is that maybe we’ll have a civil war and maybe we won’t, depending upon whether the Feds rub them the wrong way. Who knows? Cite.
Perhaps, but it’s been all of 4 months since they relinquished the power they had for 8 years.
It’s really just a mix of Revtim and Bryan Eckers observations. They’re a bunch of whiny losers who want to feel big and tough by threatening something that will never be allowed to happen. They’ve spent 8 years marginalizing their opposition, they can’t imagine a world where the next 4 isn’t spent with them completely powerless.
I’m of a mind similar to Mosiers - don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. There needn’t be a civil war, because those states aren’t worth fighting for.
Someone (a guest being interviewed by Ed from The Ed Show?) suggested that he be charged. Chris Matthews suggested Perry is “all hat and no head” and that it’s cuckoo talk. However, Tom DeLay said that there is a provision that allows for them splitting into multiple states: Can Texas Divide Itself into Five Separate States? | Snopes.com
It also cites additional language that forbids an existing state from splitting into multiples, so I agree with Chris Matthews – it’s Cuckoo Talk.
At the end of the Snopes article, I see the opposite–a citation of language in the Constitution that says all states can split with consent of Congress.
Yeah, but he didn’t call for secession, he just mentioned the notion of secession. Paraphrasing: “I’m not saying we should secede. But who knows what these crazy mofos in my constituency might do if they get mad enough.”