Don't Even Think About Killing All the Democrats

Looks like the exterminationists are all coming out of the woodwork:

Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged.
— President Abraham Lincoln

It is, of course, unimaginable that the penalties proposed by one of our most admired presidents for the crime of dividing America in the face of the enemy would be contemplated — let alone applied — today.

Still, as the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate engage in interminable debate about resolutions whose effects can only be to "damage morale and undermine the military" while emboldening our enemies, it is time to reflect on what constitutes inappropriate behavior in time of war.

That's Frank Gaffney, in the Washington Times. It's the classic gutless move of quoting somebody else who once said (in a completely different context) a bunch of people deserve death, then saying 'but of course I'm not advocating that myself.'

Obviously, his first sentence is a lie: it isn't 'unimaginable that the penalties proposed...would be contemplated' because he just imagined contemplating them. It's like those signs that say 'don't even think about parking here'. The whole point of something as aggressively stupid as this is to make people contemplate it. The point is to normalize exterminationist sentiments in order to intimidate people into shutting up.

And by the way--Lincoln? I'm no historian, but the way I recall the story there was a significant faction in Congress who actively sympathized with the Secessionist scum. And wartime? Well, there's wartime and there's "wartime", and I think it's pretty obvious that this is the latter. That never stops them from pretending it's the former in order to use "wartime" as a bludgeon against people who disagree with them.

And here's the thing: it's going to get even uglier. Put money on that if you're inclined to gamble, because it's a guaranteed payoff. They lost Congress; that makes them just so much angrier and more desperate, more eager to entertain their violent exterminationist fantasies.

And all I can say is we'll be damn lucky if they remain nothing more than fantasies.

Update: In comments, Attaturk points out that the quote is bogus to begin with. FactCheck has the story. Apparently it first appeared in a column in (Moonie-owned) Insight Magazine by a guy named J. Michael Waller. Contacted by FactCheck last year, Waller wrote:

The supposed quote in question is not a quote at all, and I never intended it to be construed as one. It was my lead sentence in the article that a copy editor mistakenly turned into a quote by incorrectly inserting quotation marks.

[That's all, folks]